8. New Faculty Perceptions of Supervision and Mentoring: The Influence of Graduate School Experiences

Abstract

This study examined new faculty members’ perceptions and approaches to student supervision and mentoring as related to their own experiences as doctoral students. Previous research has examined the graduate student-supervisor/mentor relationship but has yet to examine its impact on subsequent graduate student practices when they enter academic positions. Fourteen Canadian faculty members participated in a study on the experiences and expectations of doctoral candidates and early career academics. As a group, these new faculty members perceived that ideally a supervisor would also be a mentor. They perceived that a mentor shares professional and personal experience, functions as a ‘sounding board,’ provides guidance and advice, and helps prepare students for the work they are currently doing and for their career responsibilities in the future. A majority of these new faculty members reported that their graduate supervisors were not their only mentor or did not function as a mentor. Furthermore, all participants reported that they consciously made an effort to include mentorship as part of their supervisory role. These findings indicated that graduate students’ own experiences of being supervised and/or mentored informed approaches with their own students. This research shows the apparent value in studying the influences of these important graduate school relationships and demonstrates the way in which our perspectives on supervisory relationships may influence subsequent practice.

Mentoring Graduate Students in Music Education: A Mixed-Methods Phenomenological Study

“…The ways that mentors developed their mentoring practice was also found only in the PHEN data. MTEs were influenced by the ways in which they were mentored as graduate students, similar to findings from Gadbois and Graham (2012). Participants in this study frequently emulated mentoring practices they had experienced as graduate students, and they occasionally were taught how to mentor through a formal course or informally through conversations with mentors.…”

“…Extended mentoring relationships included multiple mentors, intergenerational mentors, and lifelong mentorship. Participants described how mentoring involved support from multiple individuals, similar to findings from other studies (e.g., Bond & Koops, 2014;Gadbois & Graham, 2012;Johnson & Ridley, 2018), and participants frequently encouraged students to form networks with others in the field. In some cases, mentors encouraged intergenerational mentoring because they connected mentees to alumni and frequently provided a lifetime of mentorship long after the mentee had graduated (e.g., Bond & Koops, 2014;Kuebel et al, 2018).…”

“…Our questionnaire consisted of items related to mentoring graduate music education students, and we built this survey instrument based on the work of previous researchers' investigations of mentoring (e.g., Clark et al, 2000) and being mentored (e.g., Rose, 2003). We used items and findings from the general education corpus to create an inventory of mentoring functions and characteristics (e.g., Bell-Ellison & Dedrick, 2008;Busch, 1985;Clark et al, 2000;Gadbois & Graham, 2012;Noy & Ray, 2012;Rose, 2003). We created additional questionnaire items (e.g., when is the mentoring relationship initiated) based on our research questions that had yet to be explored by music education researchers.…”

CMO No. 15, S. 2019: Graduate Students, Are You Ready for This?

“…One may ask "Has the mentor tried presenting his/her paper in a conference, or has the mentor, at least, tried being a paper evaluator in a conference?" After all, Gadbois and Graham (2012) perceived that a mentor shares professional and personal experience, functions as a 'sounding board,' provides guidance and advice, and helps prepare students for the work they are currently doing and for their career responsibilities in the future.…”

Mentoring Millennial Women in Academia

“…Neuroscience in mentoring often corrects erroneous assumptions and conventional wisdom, or confronts uninformed practices regarding effective mentoring strategies. For example, in the absence of adequate information or institutional training, mentors are likely to rely on methods that they experienced as mentees or take a reactive approach and transform negative mentoring experiences into reverse strategies (Ambrosetti, 2014;Gadbois & Graham, 2012). Although well intentioned, mentors may be overly quick to judge and attempt to correct mentee perceptions and behaviors, propose tasks that are misaligned with mentee aspirations or goals, impose their own goals on the mentee, or attempt to fix problems by proposing solution strategies.…”