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These projects are intended as examples of
previously funded grant activity, and applicant teams are
encouraged to creatively develop Mutual Mentoring projects that
address their unique circumstances, challenges, and cultural
“norms.”
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Anthropology Department
The Anthropology Department assigned one formal mentoring
partner to each new faculty member. These partners met
one-on-one regularly, and the entire group of new faculty and
their mentoring partners met five times a year for luncheon
meetings. In addition, the Department offset a portion of the
travel costs for the new faculty to attend the national
conference of the American Anthropological Association, where
they hosted a Mutual Mentoring Meeting for all alums of the
Department, establishing important mentoring partnerships with
anthropologists in related fields.
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“Blacklist,” A Network for Women
Faculty of Color
“Blacklist” was created as an interdisciplinary mentoring
network of women faculty of color at a variety of career levels
(Assistant, Associate, and Full Professors). The goal of this
group was to support and retain women faculty of color at UMass
Amherst and the Five Colleges through regular meetings of the
network. The members brainstormed ways to overcome challenges in
and outside of the classroom, created a travel grant program for
members to present their scholarly work at conferences, and
served as an important source of professional and social support
for each other.
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History Department
The History Department assigned two mentoring partners to all
pre-tenure faculty (one mentoring partner in a similar
geographical or subject field, and another with a similar
methodological or theoretical research approach). The mentoring
partners met four times over the course of the academic year in
meetings organized around issues of orientation, research,
teaching, and preparing for tenure. The Department provided
modest stipends for the mentoring partners and also conducted
two needs assessments to ensure that the mentoring efforts were
responsive to the needs and concerns of early career faculty.
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Psychology Department
The Psychology Department implemented a Group Mentoring
Initiative (GMI) in which all new Psychology faculty were paired
with two mentoring partners, one at the early/mid-career stage
and one at a later career stage. The GMI met formally six times
over the course of the academic year in facilitated,
topically-driven group meetings on issues of research, teaching,
and tenure. In addition, the new faculty met individually or in
small groups with their mentoring partners to discuss issues of
specialized interest, and were provided with modest stipends to
offset the costs of getting together.
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Women’s Studies Department
The Department of Women’s Studies created an inter-institutional
Mutual Mentoring project with the Department of Africana Women’s
Studies at Bennett College in Greensboro, North Carolina. The
purpose of doing so was to build across the differences of an
established women’s studies program at a large public university
in the northeast and a new program at a small, religiously
affiliated HBCU in the south. The departments organized a
planning conference in Washington, DC, where they developed
teaching modules, team-taught courses, and other programs to
help make the most out of the teaching and research strengths of
their respective faculty.
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