Developing Mentor Networks
May 25, 2017, ACE Women’s Professional Development Day
Discover the Leader in YOU!
Barbara LeSavoy, PhD, Director, Women and Gender Studies
The College at Brockport (SUNY)
585 395 5799
Session Abstract: How do women working in multiple aspects of higher education build strategic networks within and across campuses that enable professional mentorship and growth? This session introduces participants to the Greater Rochester Consortium of Women and Gender Studies Faculty (GRC) and the Seneca Falls’ Dialogues (SFD), as local and regional networking models that link diverse academics into collective and collaborative mentorship systems. The session offers participants the chance to consider the needs and benefits of mentoring via networking and to develop hands-on strategies for constructing similar mentor networks in their own regions and work settings. Session participants will walk away with an institution-specific action plan that bridges colleagues and programs to avenues of professional collaboration and support.
Moments: Why Network? What are the Gains? What are the Challenges?
Conversation: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Challenges/Constraints (SWOC)
Logistical Context:
Where are you located geographically and what is the size/status of your program/area within context of the institution where you work? What like programs/colleaguesoperate in local/regionalproximity?
Strengths
What words/sentences best describe yourprogram strengths? Consider yourcapital per:
- Teaching/research areas of specialization
- Program/department milestones
- Students/faculty initiatives
- Resource support
- Local/regional collaborations
Weaknesses
Similarly, what words/sentences best describe your program weaknesses and or conflicts. Consider disruptions to WGST capital per:
- Teaching/research areas of specialization needs
- Staff
- Campus directions
- Resources logistics/ Institutional climate /fiscal variables
- Networking disjoints
Opportunities
- What collaboration/networking opportunities might exist on your campus/in your community?
Challenge Considerations:
- Fiscal Obstacles
- Networking Limitations
- Governance Structures
- Curricula Challenges
- Institutional Climate
Ongoing Gains:
1.Safe / energizing /nurturing /redemptive space where power is rediscovered.
2.Helps operate within/outside the increasingly market-driven academy.
3.Regionalization coordinates/maximizes already overtaxedcapital.
4.Enables a collective that can confronthistoric challenges/exclusions.
5.Documents patterns.
6.Connects and coalition builds.
7.Blends technology with in person grassroots feminist activism/reinvigorates face-to-face.
Plans:
- Monitor hiring practices/discriminatory procedures that hinder the advancement of women across the region.
- See forward a community-based feminist collective using face-to-face.
- Shift conversations about what is valued in educational institutions at large.
- Promote tangible resource sharing and discipline-specific innovations
- Scrutinize regional anti-feminist/racistpractices impacting women/oppressed groups.
- Recruit/partnerwith other colleges in support of students.
- Network area faculty, staff, students to each other and help them build a foundation for learning/research/activist activities
Challenges:
1.Collectivism and regionalization run counter to the hegemony of traditional academic hierarchies and competitiveness.
2.Authority and voice often dissipates when members return to home institutions that are entrenched in the very hierarchical practices they reject.
3.Vulnerability of non tenure and women of color.
4.Invisible labor of women often critiqued as feminized or maternal by anti-feminists
5.Resist yet collude with higher education’s profit-driven mentality.
Action Plan: Suggested Questions:
- What are some of your strategic goals and where do you see your program in the next year, 5 years?
- What three variables would best help you realize your WGST goals?
- What campus/community/regional resources do you see as potential allies?