Abstract
This chapter introduces a multifaceted approach to doctoral student mentoring, which emphasizes building learning communities, enabling practitioner-scholar identity formation, and disrupting conventional power structures and the binaries of faculty-vs-student, scholar-vs-practitioner, and knowledge production-vs-execution. The authors first briefly describe their educational leadership programs. Next, the community of practice (CoP), the theory-in-action, is discussed. The authors, then, showcase the key elements of the mentoring programming that have allowed the synergistic usage of resources within and across departments/units, the attentiveness to student needs and connected to what happens in the schools, and the strengthening of advocacy of students in scholarship and practice for equity and justice. The chapter concludes with key recommendations for establishing and sustaining mentoring programming in educational leadership preparation programs, particularly in a predominantly white institution (PWI).
TopContext: Educational Leadership Programs In A Pwi At A Midwestern State
Given the state’s demographic composition, it is not surprising that most of the students enrolled in our program (and the college of education as well) are white. Historically males were the dominant group, however, in recent years, we have seen a steady growth in female students. We offer a master’s (MS) and an Educational Doctorate (EdD) degree in Educational Leadership, with options to obtain the building- and district-level licensure. Currently, the state requires a minimum of 5 years of teaching before becoming eligible for administrative licensure. The master’s program has a long history of operating in a cohort model, where the collaborating districts play a substantial role in identifying and selecting candidates for their cohorts. At the doctoral level, the initial effort to move to a systemic cohort model began around 2017; different from the master’s cohorts, the doctoral cohorts are based on the time when the students are admitted to the program. At this point, we have three doctoral cohorts of 37 students, containing 22 females and 15 males, holding a variety of building and district level leadership positions in rural, suburban, and urban districts within the state. The racial representation of the cohorts includes Black, Latino, Indigenous, and white. It is also worth noting that the tenure-track faculty (n=6) come from racial backgrounds of Asian, Indigenous, white, and multiracial.