Humanities in collaboration: Mentored teaching experiences among humanities graduate students

Mentor teacher guidance

The mentor faculty at Tri-C served critical roles in the participants’ enculturation to the profession. These mentors acted as welcoming facilitators who familiarized the participants with their classes, course content, learning objectives, and student profiles. They also functioned as trusted advisors for lesson planning and professional advice following participants’ teaching segments. Overwhelmingly, the participants’ extolled the interpersonal relationships that the faculty cultivated with them, describing their rapport in affectionate terms. According to Kloe, her mentor teacher “gave off a motherly feel,” “worked as a team,” and created “a family feel” (Journal 1), while Nick believed his mentor teacher was “like a good coach” who had a “presence in the asynchronous classroom” (Journal 2). Participants also reported that they were treated like colleagues rather than students and were given more teaching responsibilities as the semester unfolded (e.g., teaching a full unit, leading class discussions, grading assignments, holding Zoom office hours). Additionally, the participants particularly admired how their mentors demonstrated building relationships with students by letting them know that “someone cares about them” (Nick) and connecting them to campus resources (e.g., reading specialists).

A related aspect that participants noted frequently was how invested mentor teachers were with their students’ academic and personal success. According to participants, each mentor practiced various forms of boundary-setting with their students. For example, Annika, Irene, and Kloe’s mentors often held frank conversations with Tri-C students about personal life choices and served as sounding boards for students’ non-academic conundrums (e.g., health issues, family strife, financial concerns, life skills). These honest, transparent discussions contrasted sharply with the participants’ previous experience with their own professors at CWRU. Annika wrote that her “one-woman music department” (Journal 1) mentor was

…very accessible to her students. She put two phone numbers (one for texting) on her syllabi, so that students could text or call her anytime, even on the weekends…She has a nuanced understanding of her students’ interests, goals, and abilities as they change from admission to graduation. (Journal 2)

In contrast, Nick observed his mentor’s concrete approach to setting personal and professional boundaries: “From 9 to 5, he is like 100% in the class….but after 5, he’s logged out [of email]. And on the weekends, he’s logged out to be with his family. So I think that’s pretty cool” (Interview 1).

Overall, participants praised their mentor teachers for modeling the human side of teaching that often can be overlooked amid other pressing matters in graduate education, such as research and curricular requirements for degree completion (Gooblar, 2019; Marino, 2020). Mentors’ pedagogical and interpersonal actions also appeared to awaken participants’ conceptualization of how classroom instructional techniques, lesson sequencing, and teacher dispositions can expedite student learning (Schram and Wright, 2011). It is possible that the participants’ immersion in a community college teaching setting with a purposefully-paired mentor was an ideal combination for participants as they learned to negotiate the fluidity of teaching roles (Rodgers and Scott, 2008; Van Lankveld et al., 2017). For the participants, the mentors epitomized the intertwined notions of structured content learning, empathetic student rapport, and positive workplace climate, despite the limitations associated with COVID-era online teaching (Nash, 2021). By and large, these traits appeared to reflect the affirmative dispositional styles of faculty mentors that Noy and Ray (2016) and Balleisen and Wisdom (2018) highlighted. Irene encapsulated these gestalt sentiments when she wrote,

[My mentor] was extremely kind, patient, and generous with her time. She was empathetic while making sure her students did the work they needed to do to succeed. It became even clearer to me that the culture at a community college, or at least at Tri-C, is very different from that of a conventional 4-year institution, in that there is generally more investment in the success of their students...I hope to bring the empathy and investment in students I saw in her to whatever teaching opportunities are in my future. (Journal 3)

Student interaction

The students at Tri-C served as the second integral element in participants’ enculturation to community college teaching. Like many 2-year, access-oriented schools (Darling, 2019), Tri-C students reflected a wide range of diversity, including age, race, ability, background, religion, career stage, and socio-economic status. Over the course of the semester, participants became acutely aware of the breadth of experience that community college students bring to the classroom. Participants often worked with students across disparate life stages, from 14-year-olds taking college-credit courses to military veterans, working parents, and retirees seeking career changes or continuing education opportunities. As Nick remarked, “Community college students are real people in that they come from all different kinds of places. They have responsibilities, jobs, families, and these big lives that they need to be responsible for” (Interview 2).

Tri-C students were particularly helpful in familiarizing participants with how to construct meaningful teacher-student relationships. Through consistent classroom interactions and discussions, Tri-C students unwittingly taught the participants how to approach the classroom with a focus on teaching. As Annika wrote, “I enjoyed the back-and-forth interaction as students started to complete their exercises, asked me questions, tried new strategies, and eventually succeeded at their task” (Journal 3). Similarly, Kloe commented that “connecting with the students and watching them connect lessons with previous lessons was a great success. It was good to know that they truly were learning something from the class and sometimes even applying lessons to their own lives” (Journal 3). In addition to making connections between the course material and their life circumstances, Kloe’s students seemed to help facilitate class activities. She said that one “benefit of having older [adult] students in class is that they’re getting others engaged when we do [WebEx] breakout rooms” (Interview 1).

Participants also learned to adjust their teaching approach when lesson segments did not go as planned. Kloe found that teaching online was “an interesting roller coaster,” and that implementing engaging activities in such a medium was challenging. Irene and Nick both noticed a wide range of academic skills among students (e.g., reading comprehension, content retention, self-directedness), which, to them, appeared to be more prevalent than at 4-year institutions. Nick observed that “[t]he biggest challenge in an online asynchronous course is making sure that students complete the course. Only about half of our students will actually finish it” (Journal 3). Nick’s use of collective our in the aforementioned statement (“our students”) appeared to signal an implicit sense of collaborative ownership in the educational process. Finally, Annika reflected on her own moments of impasse during class instruction:

The biggest challenge for me has been what to do when I’ve explained a concept and the students are still lost. I try to find multiple ways of explaining [a concept], demonstrating an exercise for practice, referring back to the textbook, or something that my mentor teacher taught. Sometimes, none of my strategies work, and the students still have no idea what the concept is…My main concern was that I hadn’t put a lot of pedagogy to use. There was so much new information to introduce that I didn’t figure out how to use Bloom’s Taxonomy or any other system of cumulative mastery. (Journal 3)

Collectively, participants reported that Tri-C students consistently provided in-the-moment feedback on their teaching through verbal and non-verbal means (e.g., positive interactions, requests for clarifications, quality and timeliness of written assignments). Participants learned to navigate and modify their instruction in real-time or after periods of reflection, which is consistent with literature on undergraduate teacher preparation and mentorship (Baumgartner and Councill, 2017; Butler and Cuenca, 2012; Draves, 2013; Orland-Barak and Wang, 2021). Unlike many 4-year institutions that tend to enroll students within similar peer groups, degree tracks, or life stages, 2-year community colleges can represent a broader swath of society (Bickerstaff et al., 2020; Darling, 2019) and can offer teachers innumerable opportunities for engaging with students who reflect the community-at-large (Kramer et al., 2021; Zapata, 2019). Thus, the Tri-C students and mentor teachers served as twin enculturation agents who helped to shape participants’ concept of community college teaching, as well as the lasting connections that can develop from such interactions. As Irene stated,

[The students] really grew on me, and I’m very sad to leave them at the end of the semester. They were great students who were willing to participate, ask questions, and were there to do the work…Yeah, I will miss them. (Interview 2)

Overall, our analysis revealed the importance of the collaborative pairings between faculty mentors and graduate students, and it suggested that administrative attention must be focused on ensuring productive collaborations. In fact, the faculty from Tri-C were actively involved in recruiting their colleagues to serve as mentor teachers for the participants in this study, and, as we will note below, such mentorship deserves compensation and recognition. In our study, the mentor faculty served both as a primary resource for the graduate students’ developing awareness of the context of community college teaching, and as an opportunity for the graduate students to reflect on how they wished to interact with their own future students. That the mentor faculty and the community college students themselves served such an important role in helping the graduate students develop as teachers is perhaps not surprising. It is, however, illuminating to note how labor-intensive such teacher preparation opportunities are to establish and maintain. In humanities and humanistic social science disciplines, attention to interpersonal relationships often has been embedded in the research questions and scholarship (Bickerstaff et al., 2020; Darling, 2019; Pippins et al., 2019). The current study demonstrated the important of attending to these relationships in pedagogical settings as well.

Teacher identity construction

Throughout the study, the participants spent a great deal of time interrogating their sense of what it meant to be a teacher. This process took a number of different forms, including observations about their mentor teachers’ dispositions and practical classroom strategies, as was discussed in the previous theme. Such practical observations, as well as the preparation for the teaching units that the participants planned, were the subject of multiple conversations between participants and their mentor teachers. The participants all discussed how important these conversations were to them. For example, according to Irene, this dialogue provided “insight into how [my mentor] creates assignments…or what she’s thinking about when she’s conducting the class” (Interview 1).

In addition, the participants looked back to their own educational experiences to draw on positive and negative examples that helped shape their own teacher identities. For example, Kloe spoke about her desire to be seen as approachable and empathetic, in contrast to some of her former professors:

I’ve had those very closed-off professors who don’t want to share anything…you call them Dr. Whoever…and you don’t want to go to their office hours, and I don’t want my students to feel that way. I want them to be able to ask me questions, to email me...I want to know about their lives. (Interview 2)

Not only did Kloe differentiate herself from her former professors in this reflection, she also displayed her understanding of her future self as a teacher who will interact with “[her] students” in ways that show she “know[s] about their lives.”

For Nick, the opportunity to teach in an asynchronous English composition course was exciting, he said, because “I love taking asynchronous classes. Love taking them!” (Interview 1). Yet, as a teacher, he wrote that conducting an online, asynchronous course was “a different beast!” (Journal 2). This disconnect between his student-self and his teacher-self forced Nick to refine and expand his teaching repertoire. He wrote of the experience:

My two primary strengths as a teacher are my ability to build relationships and the energy I bring to the classroom. Asynchronous, online teaching kneecaps me regarding both skills. As a result, I’ve become more thoughtful, and I’ve slowed down—which are both good. (Journal 2)

Nick’s experience of asynchronous, online teaching was important to his evolving teacher identity, and it highlighted an area for future research and pedagogical development, namely: the rise of online teaching not just as an emergency measure for pandemic education, but as a rapidly increasing educational modality in virtually every sector of higher education (Nash, 2021). While an investigation of the implications of this phenomenon are beyond the scope of the current study, Nick’s new understanding of the difference between teaching and being a student in an online class was a substantial outcome of his experience, and something doctoral programs seeking to prepare the next generation of teachers must address.

In their interviews and journal entries, the participants expressed a number of concerns about inhabiting a teacher identity, including worries about appearing too young, feeling ill-prepared to address all of the students’ needs, and accepting the sometimes imperfect disciplinary fit between their research-selves and the classes in which they participated at Tri-C. At times, participants described these observations from the perspective of others, such as wondering how students were perceiving them in terms of their age or their level of expertise in the subject matter. As the semester unfolded, however, most of the participants began framing their observations as growth opportunities, rather than as anxieties. At the beginning of the semester, Kloe confessed that she “struggled a bit as a lot of the students are [her] age or older” (Journal 2), but as the semester continued, her perspective appeared to shift toward self-reflection. After the midpoint of the semester, Kloe seemed to worry less about how students were perceiving her—“I am just one of their professors” (Interview 2)—and began to use her sense of students’ perceptions to articulate her growing awareness of her own teacher persona. Similarly, Irene admitted to being initially apprehensive about teaching in a music theory course as a musicologist, but eventually gained confidence and felt successful. In her final reflection, she wrote,

I was afraid I would not have the knowledge or the analytical skills to engage with the students or teach a unit during the course of the semester. While I was certainly rusty at the start of the class in January, my music theory muscle memory quickly kicked into gear and I soon felt more confident in my analytical abilities. (Journal 4)

All four participants echoed this sense of accomplishment and confidence at various points in the experience; indeed, a sense of confidence seemed to be one of the most substantial factors determining when the participants felt most like teachers. These moments appeared to support Van Lankveld et al.’s (2017) and Jenlink’s (2021) notions of an increased teacher identity over time, as well as Rodgers and Scott’s (2008) descriptions of socially-constructed, context-dependent experiences. Given that the participants negotiated multiple identities concurrently throughout the semester (e.g., teacher, scholar, colleague, graduate student), the complexities of these interactions likely served as socializing factors (Reybold, 2003) that reinforced participants’ problem-solving skills and sense of self as teachers.

Career trajectories

For each of the participants, the mentored teaching experience had a considerable impact on their professional plans. In some cases, the experience solidified a desire to work in the context of an open-access institution. For Nick, the opportunity reconnected him with his identity as a former community college student. He wrote,

The community college professors who taught and supported me gave me the skills I needed to succeed in the college classroom…I’m here because I want to help give opportunities to people who otherwise might not have access to them. (Journal 1)

For Kloe, the desire to teach at a community college developed over time, as did her sense of belonging in the classroom. “Coming into [HUMN 422],” she wrote, “I was very unsure of what I wanted to do after graduate school….By the end, I knew I wanted to teach, especially at a community college” (Journal 4). Both Kloe and Nick described concrete actions they planned to take to achieve their career goals. For Nick, this included pursuing his doctorate and “spend[ing] the next 5 years building my teaching CV” (Journal 4); for Kloe, this meant applying for adjunct positions at Tri-C and continuing to work on her teaching skills. She wrote, “Even when I do have a full-time position (and I will not stop until I do), I will continue to find ways to better myself as a teacher…so my students can get the most out of their education” (Journal 3). At the time of this writing, Kloe had been hired to teach two introductory anthropology courses for Tri-C; Nick had moved to his doctoral program out of state and accepted a second assistantship in instructional technology in addition to his work in English.

For Annika and Irene, the experience shaped their career plans by helping them understand their expertise and skills in relation to the diverse needs of access-oriented institutions. Both participants found a strengthened desire to work in education and expressed excitement about the possibility of having variety in their teaching experiences after graduation. Annika described her goals toward the end of the semester:

I think an ideal first job at a community college for me would be something with a lot of variety in which I was teaching private voice lessons, music theory, and music history, for example, and preferably some first-year and second-year courses in addition to a prerequisite [such as the course I was assigned to co-teach]. (Journal 3)

Annika specifically commented on the difference between the career her mentor teacher built and what she believed is expected from most doctoral program graduates. She found the multiple roles and community activities available to her teaching mentor exciting and, as she said, “much more similar to what I will end up doing” (Interview 2). Thus, Annika’s experiences highlighted the value of giving graduate students opportunities to explore educational institutions beyond the ones that they have attended. For the participants in this study, a deepening understanding of career pathways was linked to a broader understanding of the diversity of teaching activities required of community college faculty.

For Irene, the idea of wearing “many hats” (Journal 4) was more daunting than energizing. She wrote,

This semester has shaped my career goals in that it has confirmed that I want a career as an educator. It has also confirmed that my ideal first job would be at a place where I can work with music majors and non-music majors. I enjoyed working with the students…but this process has also made me aware of the fact that I may not be an ideal candidate for a community college job. (Journal 4)

For Irene, who was not an active performer, the potential of working in an exceptionally small department was not ideal. Instead, she articulated a desire to work collaboratively and to “actively participate in building curriculum and shaping the philosophies and practices” (Journal 3) of her future department. For both Annika and Irene, the experience reinforced a fundamental desire to teach, and it allowed them to identify the aspects of a music career that were most appealing and congruent with their expertise.

Common to all four participants was a desire to work with diverse student populations and to create opportunities through education. For Irene and Nick, the experience strengthened and complicated their senses of their own potential contributions to combating systemic and structural inequality. Irene’s desire to diversify the way that music history often is taught was challenged by the need to maintain curricular consistency, as mandated by articulation agreements and transfer policies. “With few exceptions,” she wrote in her journal, “the current education requirements in higher education [music programs] are rooted in colonialist and white supremacist traditions” (Journal 3). As she struggled to identify and use more diverse musical examples to supplement her teaching, she recognized that “this was a very large undertaking” (Journal 2), especially when teaching unfamiliar material for the first time. Nevertheless, she remained committed to “wrestling with this paradox for the rest of [her] career” (Journal 3). For Nick, a desire to open educational doors led him to consider a future career in administration. Describing his future, he wrote,

I want to teach at community college. I decided this in late-April…Community college teaching aligns with my values, and I think I would be good at it…I might one day—after many years of teaching, of course—go into administration…we need leaders with heart and empathy, and I think I fit the bill…If I ever go into administration, it will be because I want to fight…systemic atrocities to the best of my ability. (Journal 4)

The opportunity to engage with both their 4-year graduate institution and the 2-year environment at Tri-C seemed to allow Irene and Nick the space to consider complex educational policies and structures (Reeves, 2018). This process aligns with Thirolf’s (2015) conclusion that teacher identity can be fostered by supporting and caring about students and serving their respective communities. For all four participants, being immersed in Tri-C undertakings encouraged them to consider a wider range of professional futures and missions, a tenet that Balleisen and Wisdom (2018) championed.

Preparation for college teaching

The mentored teaching experience at Tri-C afforded participants various opportunities to reflect on their own graduate preparation and what they believed was most important for their own and their peers’ professional development. They provided important insights into the ways that institutions should work to professionalize new teachers. At times, the participants described having difficulty applying pedagogical theory or even having an awareness of educational theory in general. Nick speculated that this was one result of the hyper-disciplinary attention of most graduate programs: “the training is too discipline-focused and is not about what good teaching is,” he said (Interview 2). More commonly, however, the participants expressed their gratitude for the practical teaching experience the current program offered, and suggested that similar experiences be incorporated into graduate programs. As Annika wrote, “It’s always possible to read more about teaching pedagogy and to become more of a subject matter expert, but actual teaching experience is what I need and want more of” (Journal 1). Similarly, Kloe talked about wishing she could be “more in the classroom and engaged with students” (Journal 2). She recommended allowing graduate assistants—who in her department at CWRU often serve only as graders for courses—“to teach one of the lessons or be maybe a little more involved with the [course] planning” (Interview 2). This practical teaching experience could be enhanced, the participants suggested, by opportunities to talk with their mentor teachers about both their own and their mentors’ teaching choices. Beyond the classroom, Irene believed that demystifying the university itself was essential. As she said, “It is not that the faculty hides anything from us, but…you have to ask those questions to figure out exactly how [the university] works; it can be very mysterious sometimes” (Interview 2). Participants’ sentiments were consistent with previous research on graduate student mentorship, haphazard advising practices, and a lack of focus on teaching skills (Balleisen and Wisdom, 2018; Gooblar, 2019; Schram and Wright, 2011).

The participants’ desire for more collegial communication—as Kloe stated, “I should be able to ask questions. I want to be able to learn if I’m not getting something” (Interview 2)—manifested in another realm, namely the complexities and variety of academic disciplines in general. That the four participants represented three different humanities and humanistic social science departments presented an opportunity for them to engage with each other across traditional boundaries. Irene spoke about this aspect of the experience, and for her, the potential was “less about the other departments, but more bringing to light the way that our music department functions, which I kind of just took for granted” (Interview 2). Thus, the mentored teaching experience—structured across two institutions and supported by faculty from both schools—provided an extracurricular space for the participants to reflect on their preparation and professional development (Balleisen and Wisdom, 2018; Darling, 2019; Gooblar, 2019; Van Lankveld et al., 2017). The constellation of support represented by the faculty members—none of whom had a direct supervisory role for the participants—seemed to promote growth and allowed relatively low-risk opportunities for the participants to experiment with their emerging professional identities.