Kovac—CC Mentorship

Running Head: Kovac—CC Mentorship

Unpacking Mentorship as a Means for Knowledge Transfer in the Community College:

A Discussion of Urgency, Opportunity, and Relevant Theory

Submitted to

Dr. Don Turnbull

In Partial Fulfillment of the Course Requirements for

INF385q—Knowledge Management Systems

Submitted by

Jason Kovac

November 20, 2008


Introduction

Preparing community college faculty for the challenges of teaching and learning in the 21st century is a compelling task for contemporary leaders in higher education. One critical step in the process is that of knowledge transfer, where tacit and explicit knowledge is shared among employees, towards a workforce with heightened sensitivity to classroom issues, and an improved capacity to respond. Davenport & Prusak (2000) note that “knowledge is transferred in organizations whether or not we manage the process at all” (p. 88). Though options abound when seeking to manufacture the most effective means for knowledge transfer, we are reminded that “knowledge transferred by means of a long apprenticeship or mentorship is likely to have high viscosity” (p. 102). These person-to-person connections seem to be effective in helping staff overcome resistance to skills development; in the community college, they may be relatively effective means to advance how faculty understand and respond to constraining factors at work in the classroom.

This paper will offer a brief outline of some of the factors contributing to the urgency of knowledge transfer among current community college faculty. It will posit opportunities to be found among a confluence of trends, as influenced by communications technology and the behavior of contemporary students. It will highlight the potential for community colleges to leverage emerging tools towards a model for teaching and learning that responds to demonstrated interests of stakeholders. Most importantly, it will offer some details regarding mentorship as a means for knowledge transfer among community college faculty, a critical task for any college that wishes to advance their teaching and learning programs in response to these factors.

Urgency and Innovation

The next generation of community college leaders will inherit a system rife with financial challenges: the percentage of institutional budgets funded by the state is in decline (Lasher & Sullivan, 2004; ECS, 2000); community members are often tolerating the highest taxes and tuition rates they might bear (Kim, 2007); resources made available by partners are finite at best—at worst, absent. Scholars point to several root causes—declining public trust in the higher education system (Roueche, 1997), increased competition from Medicaid, corrections, and other state-funded public needs. Regional specifics aside, it is a picture not likely to improve significantly in the near future. As such, contemporary educational leadership has learned to be entrepreneurial—they seek to become master fundraisers, to create partnerships with business and industry (Roueche, 2005).

Indeed, the call for higher educators to innovate has been sounded at the highest levels, including the Spellings Report (A Test of Leadership, USDoED, 2006), commissioned by the U.S. Department of Education. Though recommendations included in this report are broad, the repeated emphasis on seeking innovation is unmistakable. Says the panel of authors: “American higher education has become what, in the business world, would be called a mature enterprise: increasingly risk-averse, at times self-satisfied... It has yet to successfully confront the impact of globalization, rapidly evolving technologies, and increasingly diverse and aging population, and an evolving marketplace characterized by new needs and new paradigms” (USDoED, 2006, p. xii). Rethinking the way community colleges do their core business of teaching and supporting learning seems fundamental to “ignoring the status quo”; if the future of public funding cannot be guaranteed, community college leaders need to re-imagine the way learning is delivered, towards improved potential for revenue, via means both affordable and engaging.

Stakeholder Trends

In 1999, Professor Anthony Giddens, then Director of the London School of Economics, traveled the world to give a series of lectures on globalization. He had this to say about the explosion of communications technology that was (and is) feeding the trend towards cultural globalization: “Changes are happening today under the impact of globalisation. In the Western countries, not just public institutions but everyday life is becoming opened up from the hold of tradition... Where tradition has retreated, we are forced to live in a more open and reflective way” (Giddens, 1999). Though the debate on the merit of globalization remains fierce, community college leadership would do well to focus on the cultural results of this awesome trend: a population more keenly aware of choice, less interested in the “normal way” of doing things. This seems in keeping with what we know about contemporary students. Students of the 21st century are and will continue to become radically different than any we've known. Though a generalization would belittle the individuality stressed above, most profiles of millennial students note that these are people who don't know what life was like before the Internet; who have high comfort levels with technology; who are focused on personal relevance of learning and results (Jafari, 2006; Guess, 2007; Carlson, 2005). In effect, these trends outline a policy of practice—created by students from the bottom up. Those colleges who doesn't pursue innovation towards engaging these students are likely to see their student success rates plummet, their funding problems increase, and their reputation decline rapidly.

Opportunity

Brown & Adler (2008) posit: “Arguably, the most visible impact of the Internet on education has been the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement, which has provided free access to a wide range of courses and other educational materials to anyone who wants to use them” (p. 18). Platforms such as MERLOT (http://www.merlot.org/) and OER Commons (http://www.oercommons.org/), and groups like The Center for Open and Sustainable Learning (http://cosl.usu.edu/) afford educators the opportunity to share, explore, enhance, and expand anything from a simple homework prompt to a series of multimedia-rich learning objects with other teachers across the globe.

The OER is a tremendous platform for helping community colleges innovate in light of contemporary ideas about “the long tail,” an economic concept utilized by businesses like Amazon.com and Netflix, who are able to address low-frequency interests not satisfied elsewhere, thanks in large part to the relatively low overhead of running an online business. The sum of sales per these low-frequency interests ends up being substantially equal to, if not greater than, the revenue from high-frequency, "hot" items. Community colleges using platforms like OER Commons to store and share educational resources become part of a community of knowledge sharing, where educational opportunities are available for repurposing, towards satisfying the unique interests of local consumers. As Anderson (2006) reminds us: “Most of us want more than just the hits. Everyone's taste departs from the mainstream somewhere. The more we explore alternatives, the more we're drawn to them” (Anderson, 2006, p. 18). How uncannily like one scholars' description of millennial students, who “want the academy to provide more learning alternatives, not just different ones... Millennials are not monolithic, they want services explicitly more customized to their personal preferences” (Sweeney, 2005). As Giddens notes, globalization is bringing an intensely individual quality to our stakeholders' interests. The era when our communities, our students, will be satisfied by traditional “greatest hits” is likely in decline.

Web2.0 tools are empowering a broader segment of contemporary faculty with the means to be producers of rich classroom content. Platforms such as OER Commons help these teachers share these learning objects for reuse in different contexts. Together, these tools open the door for rethinking the way courses are prepared by higher educators and delivered to students. They seek to leverage the great wealth of knowledge available—often cached in the minds and memories of faculty, staff and other stakeholders—and create new opportunities for emerging experts to produce media-rich educational content. The tremendous challenge that remains, however, is building equity among faculty regarding their understanding of pressing issues, and their effective competency in response. The diffusion of innovation is a time-intensive process (Rogers, 2003); the organizations who emerge as those most effective in responding to these issues are likely to be the ones who are deliberate in building connections between faculty whose pedagogy and technology competency are more robust and those whose talents are yet underdeveloped.

Getting Faculty Up to Speed

Any organization that seeks to bolster knowledge transfer between employees has options—given finite resources, there are likely limits to which methods can and should be pursued. Mentorship is one means by which community college leaders might connect new or untrained faculty with teachers who have begun to embrace the tools and concepts described above. Roadmaps that a college might reference in developing a mentorship program are complex, nuanced, and often customized to a specific context—as such, there are few “easy answers” for community colleges seeking to realize the benefits of mentorship among faculty. The following is offered as an introductory touchstone, with every appreciation for the considerable task that would remain for any college building a mentorship program.

Mentors are described as individuals with experience and influence who teach those with less experience (Crow & Matthews, 1998). Roles that a mentor might play for mentee include teacher (Levinson et al., 1978), sponsor (Schein, 1978), challenger (Daloz, 1983) and confidant (Odell, 1990). Williams (2004) describes the mentoring process as “a socialization strategy that helps aspiring administrators learn the requisite knowledge, skills, behaviors and values to take on complex, responsibility-laden school leadership roles” (p. 55). The potential benefits of interacting with mentor include growing an understanding of role responsibilities (Crow & Matthews, 1998), enabling an appreciation for the complexity of group process (Daresh, 1988; Barnet et al., 1999), and developing awareness, interest, and engagement with contemporary and historical voices in the field (Gordon & Maxey, 2000).

Corollary to the concept of mentorship is that of legitimate peripheral participation (LPP), introduced by Lave and Wenger (1991):

LPP provides a way to speak about the relations between newcomers and old timers, and about activities, identities, artifacts, and communities of knowledge and practice. It concerns the process by which newcomers become part of a community of practice. A person’s intentions to learn are engaged and the meaning of learning is configured through the process of becoming a full participant in a sociocultural practice …. This social process includes, indeed it subsumes, the learning of knowledgeable skills (p. 37).

In short, employing legitimate peripheral participation means creating ways for newcomers to a group or organization to observe, understand, and experiment in meaningful ways with the processes involved in doing the work at hand, without feeling they are totally culpable for results of risks taken during the learning process. Conversely, LPP would also suggest that new group members with limited opportunities for working with the group and their tools/resources will see their potential for growth and learning stunted to some degree. Other scholarship on legitimate peripheral participation also emphasizes the active and situated nature of the learning process (Guldberg, 2008; O'Donnell, 2007; Fuller, 2005). To some scholars, the modes of interaction that constitute legitimate peripheral participation have as great an effect on the learning process as the expertise that is the subject of the learning.

Even in cases where a fixed doctrine is transmitted, the ability of a community to reproduce itself through the training process derives not from the doctrine, but from the maintenance of certain modes of coparticipation in which it is embedded (Lave and Wenger, 1991, p. 16)

Master–apprentice relations lead to an understanding that mastery resides not in the master but in the organisation of the community of practice of which the master is a part. A de-centered view of the master as pedagogue moves the focus of analysis away from teaching and onto the intricate structuring of a community’s learning resources. (Guldberg, 2008, p. 36)

Thus, when thinking about the organization of mentorship experiences using legitimate peripheral participation, the expertise of the mentor should not be the only consideration—the way we help mentees interact with mentors will play an important role in the learning that happens. Significant promising practices emerge upon review of scholarship on mentorship:

l  Mentors [should] facilitate the journey from novice to full practitioner by focusing on the individual intern’s experience, developmental levels, interests, dispositions and interpersonal skills (Gordon & Maxey, 2000)

l  Mentors [should] challenge interns and build confidence in their developing abilities by scaffolding growth-promoting experiences, shifting between nurturing and challenging or between supporting and prodding (Crow & Matthews, 1998)

l  As a mentor perceives problems in some aspect of an intern’s work, the mentor [should] alert the novice to the problem, explains the possible consequences and challenges the intern to try another method (Tomlinson, 1995)

l  Mentors [should] respect those they assist and will work to facilitate, rather than control, the work of new volunteers (Little et al., 1984)

l  Mentors will seek to evaluate situations from diverse points of view and generate many alternatives for solving problems (Bova & Phillips, 1984)

Throughout the literature discussed above, we see an emphasis on combining low risk with high expectations for mentees, on opportunities for observation and collaboration, and on avoiding mentorship in a bubble—situated learning and developing an appreciation for context seem a key goal for any mentorship experience. These recommendations mean many things for a community college that seeks to build a faculty better equipped to respond to emerging challenges and opportunities—future research may wish to further explore these ideas as relevant to specific college contexts. Perhaps just as important, however, is the reminder to community college leaders that effective mentorship does not mean a casual relationship where new and old staff are forced into co-location; there are significant theories to be applied towards the design of effective mentorship, each of which has the potential to make valuable contributions to the future success of such programs and the organizations that support them.

Conclusion

This paper has sought to explore the concept of mentorship as applicable to knowledge transfer and professional development among community college faculty in light of urgent emerging issues facing contemporary higher educators. Were a college interested in realizing the great potential in mentorship or apprenticeship programs on their own campus, there is substantial work left to be done—these pages have but scratched the surface of promising practice, where case studies and other scholarship might help stakeholders build a more robust program. Community college leaders would do well to remember that mentorship is one option among many to achieve knowledge transfer among faculty—a complete learning program will likely include a diverse mix of activities, including the deliberate construction and support of a culture where random conversations, knowledge fairs, open forums, storytelling, and any number of other methods are leveraged towards a more capable workforce (Davenport & Prusak, 2000).