Mentors as Fellow Travelers

Abstract

A junior faculty member arrives an unfamiliar university for a new teaching assignment. She is poised for the adventure, but feels like a traveler at the edge of long, unknown road. She does not know what obstacles or vistas may appear on the road, and wants to avoid major potholes. She takes a nervous look around and finds an experienced traveler nearby at the beginning of the road. The fellow traveler is a more senior faculty member who has gone farther up the road already and come back to share valuable experience with newcomers. Together the junior and senior travelers set off on their adventure. Their journey illustrates how faculty developers at one state university acted as travel guides in a mentoring program that increased the likelihood of successful travels toward university careers. Faculty development professionals at California State University, Dominguez Hills (CSUDH), play active roles in enabling mentoring relationships such as this. At CSUDH, faculty developers host orientation activities for new faculty members. Orientation is an ideal time for fellow travelers to meet. Although it looks different on every campus, the intent is the same--to provide early career faculty with an introduction to the university and foster a high level of success. Junior and senior faculty members are guided by faculty developers to form mentoring pairs. Arrangements made by faculty developers enabled junior and senior faculty members to meet and become fellow travelers. Faculty Developers as Travel Guides Just as travel agents organize the trip and make arrangements for travelers, faculty developers at CSUDH facilitated a mentoring program. There are a number of reasons why faculty developers instituted faculty-mentoring-faculty programs. For example, mentoring has been demonstrated to help faculty members gain perspective and clarity about their own career paths (Hobson, Ashby, Malderez & Tomlinson, 2009). A primary motivation was an interest in the development and retention of human assets contributing to the performance of the university. The benefits to the university include: 1. Increased productivity and organizational stability 2. Increased socialization and communication 3. The retention of valued employees 4. The preservation of intellectual capital and institutional memory 5. The support of cultural diversity 6. Improved leadership capacity and succession planning 7. Cost-effectiveness (Zellers, Howard, & Barcic, 2008, p. 4). In many ways, the success of the university depends on a healthy working environment and the satisfaction of the faculty members who work there. Successful mentoring programs are those that faculty developers integrate into existing initiatives like human resource management, personnel practices, professional development training programs, performance appraisals, and systems of rewards and recognition (Zellers et al., 2008). Faculty developers often organize the mentoring journey by stimulating partnerships throughout the campus. At CSUDH, faculty developers forged a multi-level collaboration to support mentoring. The Human Resources department handled the formal paperwork and passed the roster of new faculty along to the faculty developers. Faculty Affairs reinforced the importance of the mentoring program and dealt with personnel systems. Academic Affairs and academic deans financially and institutionally supported the mentoring program. The deans also promoted the strength of the mentoring program when they touted the program as a faculty recruitment strategy. Further, a campus-wide mandate encouraged promotion and tenure committees to recognize the work of mentors as a service to the university. This super-highway network of collaboration helps to sustain the mentoring program and gives our faculty developers a concrete footing upon which to build. Junior Travelers as Adult Learners Early career faculty members face dual expectations of being knowledgeable in their fields and having quality teaching skills. …