Dear faculty,
During this semester Faculty Development embarked on important conversations about what faculty mentorship can look like at its best.
I am proud that Faculty Development offers mentorship programs for both tenure track and lecturer faculty, and we look forward to continue expanding the resources we provide.
Mentorship of course can happen in different forms, more or less officially, but at the core of mentorship should always be some form of trust and the feeling that the learning experience is mutual, and not one directional. Tomorrow, the equity fellows and I will discuss an article by Rachel Endo, “Retaining and Supporting Faculty Who Are Black, Indigenous, and People of Color: The Promise of a Multi-Leveled Mentoring-Partnership Model” (2020).
Endo proposes a “mentoring-partnership” model that promotes “alternative paradigms for conceptualizing mentoring as dynamic partnerships with differentiated, equity-focused, and multi-leveled systems of support that explicitly center anti-racist and anti-deficit frameworks as core values” (170). I hope that all faculty will join us in exploring these concepts, whether you identify as a mentor or a mentee, and that as a university we will spend some time considering what mentorship-partnership models at Chico State can look like.
Following Endo’s model and as we prepare to launch the READI hub in the Fall, I look forward to exploring ways in which Faculty Development can embrace non-dominant mentorship frameworks, in order to be able to support and retain all our faculty.
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