Mentorship

Mentoring is central to writing pedagogy, and one-on-one support culture is shaped by the fact our discipline has responded to historic shifts in student demographics, from post-War expansion of recruitment to the inclusion of women, students of color, immigrants, and international students in tertiary education. Writing pedagogy has been on the frontlines of helping formerly excluded and currently marginalized students acclimate to and succeed in college from decade to decade, as our profession itself took shape and became independent in response to social changes in this regard. Here we describe some of the mentoring practices that our faculty use to support our diverse students and foster equity and inclusion.

• Individualized Support: Most of us “flip” the class to meet with students one-on-one, as well as having our office hours fully occupied for required or recommended personal appointments throughout the semester. This signature pedagogy of our field allows us to reach out, pay attention to, and adapt our teaching to marginalized students. We strive to know each of our students, notice their struggles related to language and other backgrounds, individualize support, refer/connect to relevant support services, and write highly individualized recommendation letters for many students. 
  
  
• Independent Study:  Every semester students reach out to PWR faculty to sponsor their independent study projects. Representative projects  include working with Dr. Peg Spitzer on her research with South Asian women farmers, and Dr. Robert Kaplan’s mentoring of research into the history of campus safe spaces and the evaluation of Stony Brook’s policy from the perspective of a public university’s efforts to balance the speech and viewpoint protections provided by the First Amendment with the desire to create a campus culture of respect and inclusion for students from traditionally underrepresented groups. PWR instructors have also guided projects such as rhetorical analysis of medical documents across history, tracking the emergence of patient- and women-centered medicine through language.
  
  
• Internship: PWR faculty serve as sponsors for internships as well, mentoring students with diverse literacies in writing and research skills for future workplaces. 
  
  
• Compassion and Care:  Providing a statement of compassion and care and enacting those qualities through interactions and assessment practices. It helps to create a class environment where we have seen a tendency for students to choose current social justice issues for their research topics, to take peer response seriously and to honor their colleagues’ language differences.
  
  
• Mindfulness: Whenever we sense a relative lack of engagement or personal struggles, we are able to reach out to students and offer additional support. Many instructors are mindful about whether any personal challenges are magnified for students from marginalized communities, such as students of color, LGBTQ+ students, female students, first-generation college students, etc. This attention and individualized support helps to develop closer working relationships, which research shows can make a bigger difference for minority/marginalized students.