Professional development relationships for counselor educators: The relationship between ethnic identity, advocacy, empowerment, and cultural empathy on faculty mentoring alliances

Mentoring programs are viewed as effective recruiting and retention tools that orient faculty members into the professoriate and provide opportunities to integrate cultural diversity into university ideology. However, empirical research about faculty mentoring is sparse, and disparate findings exist regarding the benefits and barriers of cross-cultural and homogenous mentoring relationships. This study describes mentoring relationships among a national sample of 226 counselor education faculty. Multiple regression and multivariate analysis of variance were employed to examine the relationships between working alliance and ethnic identity, advocacy, empowerment, and cultural empathy among cross-cultural and homogenous mentoring relationships. Strong positive relationships were found between the predictor variables of advocacy, empowerment, and cultural empathy and the outcome variable of working alliance, accounting for over half of the variance. Ethnic identity predicted the working alliance accounting for an additional 1% of variance. Significant differences were found between cross-cultural and homogenous mentor types. Ethnic identity was significantly higher among cross-cultural mentor relationships than for homogenous mentor relationships; however, the variance accounted for was slight. This paper describes the background for the study, methodology, and results. Implications are discussed along with future research directions

An Innovative Partnership between National and Regional Partnerships: STARS Meets McPIE

The Students & Technology in Academia, Research, and Service (STARS) Computing Corps is a nationally-connected system of regional partnerships among higher education, K-12 schools, industry and the community, with a mission to broaden the participation of women, under-represented minorities and persons with disabilities in computing (BPC). With support from National Science Foundation funding, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte founded the STARS Alliance (now the STARS Computing Corps) which includes 44 universities, each with its own “constellation” of local and regional partnerships. McClintock Partners in Education (McPIE) is a partnership between a middle school, a church, and their surrounding community. This paper describes how a STARS-McPIE “partnership between partnerships” has impacted both the middle school students and their college student mentors

Faculty Workshops for Teaching Information Assurance through Hands-On Exercises and Case Studies

Though many Information Assurance (IA) educators agree that hands-on exercises and case studies improve student learning, hands-on exercises and case studies are not widely adopted due to the time needed to develop them and integrate them into curriculum. Under the support of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Scholarship for Service program, we organized two faculty development workshops to disseminate effective hands-on exercises and case studies developed through multiple previous and ongoing grants. To develop faculty expertise in IA, the workshop covered a wide range of IA topics. This paper describes the hands-on exercises and case studies we disseminated through the workshops and reports our experiences of holding the faculty summer workshops. The evaluation results show that workshop participants demonstrated high levels of satisfaction with knowledge and skills gained in both the 2012 and 2013 workshops. Workshop participants also reported use of hands-on lab and case study materials in our follow-up survey and interviews. The workshops provided a valuable opportunity for IA educators to communicate and form collaborations in teaching and research in IA

PAtENT: a student-centered entrepreneurial pathway to the engineering doctorate

AbstractCurrent structures of STEM graduate programs raise questions about addressing graduates’ interest in multiple career paths, and how programs prepare graduates for positions increasingly available in varied occupations. This problem is addressed through an innovative doctoral program in engineering, Pathways to Entrepreneurship (PAtENT), which works to develop a scalable alternative student-centered framework. This research explores how this program responds to calls for graduate STEM education to address changes in science and engineering, the nature of the workforce, career goals, and how program components build an entrepreneurial mindset. A mixed-methods design includes a curriculum analysis showing alignment of program components to recommendations for Ph.D. STEM programs from the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Direct measures include surveys and interviews developed for current doctoral students and faculty to describe students’ and faculty perspectives about program components, particularly entrepreneurship and the patent process. The curriculum analysis shows strong alignment of the PAtENT program components and activities to the ten elements of the National Academies’ recommendations. A survey of graduate students in engineering, computing, and business show strong measures in engineering and entrepreneurial self-efficacy. Interviews of program participants and faculty demonstrate strong interest in patents and developing entrepreneurship. This innovative program in engineering focusing on obtaining a patent as a capstone shows potential to reform doctoral studies, so candidates are prepared not only for academic careers but a range of industry and government work environments. This work will lead to development of a model for other graduate STEM programs