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…

Making College “Worth It” – Season 2, Episode 1 Dawn Whitehead and Maureen Vandermaas-Peeler, two of the co-editors of Mentored Undergraduate Research in Global Contexts: Integrated High-Impact Practices for Student Success, join our podcast to talk about the intersection of…

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…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

The Center for Engaged Learning periodically conducts surveys on students’ experiences in higher education and their application to students’ post-graduation lives. Our latest iteration surveyed 956 U.S. residents who were 18-34 years old and graduates of two- or four-year higher…

Since 2019, I’ve been working with my colleague Paul Miller to create an institutional toolkit for fostering both students’ self-reflection and their mentoring conversations with peers, staff, and faculty in order to deepen students’ educational experiences. Our institution, Elon University,…

Making College “Worth It” – Season 1, Episode 11 In this episode, we focus on student-faculty partnerships in higher education. We talk to Sophia Abbot, a doctoral candidate in the Higher Education Program at George Mason University and a long-time…