Undergraduate Research and Implications for Life Development

Making College “Worth It” – Season 2, Episode 4 In this episode, we consider how undergraduate research impacts a student’s inquiry, sense of belonging, and long-term career. Drawing from in-depth interviews with alumni across the disciplines, Kristine Johnson and Michael…

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Exploring the Value of Work-Integrated Learning 

Making College “Worth It”- Season 2, Episode 3 This episode covers the complexities of a work-integrated learning experience, including both the benefits and the challenges. With guests, Dr. CJ Fleming, an associate professor of psychology, and Annelise Weaver, a senior…

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Mentoring Constellations in Global Contexts

Recent scholarship emphasizes the essential role of mentoring to support student engagement in undergraduate research (UR) and global learning and highlights the potential of blending these high-impact practices (HIPs) for enhanced learning and relationship-building (Allocco et al. 2022; Whitehead et…

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Mapping Mentoring Relationships and Constellations

As we explored in a previous post, if we take mentoring relationships seriously, as recent mentoring scholarship compels us to, our orientation shifts. It calls on us to understand mentors and mentoring – those sets of meaningful relationships – within…

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Taking (Mentoring) Relationships Seriously

As we have earlier explored, recent mentoring scholarship argues that our definitions of mentoring should move away from role-based orientations towards a relational-orientation that defines mentoring “in terms of the character and quality of the relationship and in terms of…

Three people sit at a table, talking while looking over documents by a computer. An overlay reads, "Elon University Center for Engaged Learning. Mentoring Matters. Defining Mentoring Relationships."

Defining Mentoring: Towards Mentoring Constellations

As scholarship on mentoring moved away from roles and actions towards processes and relationship development, definitions of mentoring have developed greater commonality not only around a shared focus on relationships, but also a shared focus on the general functions and…

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Student-Faculty Partnerships for Co-Constructing Learning

Making College “Worth It” – Season 1, Episode 12 In this episode of “Making College Worth It,” hosts Nolan Schultheis and Jessie Moore delve into student-faculty partnerships in higher education. They interview Olivia Choplin, an associate professor at Elon University,…

Three people sit at a table, talking while looking over documents by a computer. An overlay reads, "Elon University Center for Engaged Learning. Mentoring Matters. Defining Mentoring Relationships."

Defining Mentoring and/as Mentoring Relationships

If mentoring matters, what is meant by mentoring, and what does high-quality mentoring entail? Despite over four decades of research on mentoring, there is no universally accepted definition (Mullen and Klimaitis 2021). Ubiquitous use of the term has not only…