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Fostering Effective Mentorship in the STEM Ecosystem

THE ROLE OF MENTORSHIP IN STEM

For one of the workshops, participants came together to discuss effective mentorship for disabled people in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) in education and in the workforce, and the transition between the two. Melissa McDaniels, associate executive director of the Center for the Improvement of Mentored Experiences in Research at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and Edmund Asiedu, co-chair of the National Disability Mentoring Coalition, began the day with a discussion of their forthcoming commissioned paper¹ on the role of mentorship in disrupting ableism in STEM.

McDaniels positioned their paper in the context of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine consensus report on the Science of Effective Mentorship in STEMM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine). “This was a powerful report; it basically acknowledges there is a science of mentorship,” that can frame conversations about how mentorship can disrupt ableism in STEM. She pointed out a quote from the chair of that study, Angela Byars-Winston, that “talent is equally distributed across all sociocultural groups; access and opportunity are not.” The consensus study also offered a shared definition of what mentorship is, McDaniels added, as many different things can

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¹ McDaniels and Asiedu, 2023, The Role of Mentorship in Disrupting Ableism and Advancing STEM (https://nap.nationalacademies.org/resource/27245).

come to mind when talking about mentoring: “Mentorship is a professional working alliance in which individuals work together over time to support the personal and professional growth, development, and success of the relational partners through the provision of career and psychosocial support” (NASEM, 2019). McDaniels stressed that mentorship involves a relationship.

Some of the positive outcomes from mentorship for all people include identity affirmation, a sense of belonging and connectivity, increased self-efficacy, persistence in educational spaces and professional spaces, as well as career satisfaction and productivity. The literature, McDaniels said, indicates that high-quality mentorship offers disproportionate benefits to people from underrepresented groups (Beech et al., 2013).

Challenges Specific to People with Disabilities

People with disabilities face specific challenges when participating in mentorships, McDaniels said. Lack of representation in education and work, as well as the challenge of disclosure, creates assumptions about the lack of mentors with similar lived experiences, especially in specific work or educational spaces. But mentorship is not just happening in dyads, McDaniels added. There is also a lack of access to career and development resources that are tailored for, and accessible to, individuals with disabilities and a history of negative mentorship experiences.

“We often think of mentorship as this wonderful thing, but not all mentoring relationships lead to important outcomes,” McDaniels said. The four factors critical to promoting positive outcomes in mentorship, she said, are (1) identifying and aligning expectations between the mentor and mentee; (2) building trust in mentoring relationships, especially where one of the individuals has a disability and the other does not; (3) self-reflection by both parties; and (4) mentorship education.

Roles for Mentors

Asiedu continued the presentation by discussing roles mentors of people with disabilities can take on. Mentors can have the same expectations for mentees with disabilities as those who do not have disabilities, he said. “We are highlighting this because we would want a situation where mentors will say, Okay, I believe in this person. This person has what it takes to get to this goal.” Mentors can also disclose their own disability, if applicable.

That builds trust, he added, and helps the two to be connected in a way that promotes the mentorship relationship. Importantly, mentors must share expectations for themselves as well as mentees, he noted. One thing Asiedu remembered from his own mentors is that they were “constantly reminding me of how much they were interested in my success.… That really kept me on track.” Discussion of expectations must also include what specific roles the mentor will take on, for example, career guidance, meeting other professionals, or solving workplace challenges, and how often and where they will meet.

“It is so important that as a mentor, you develop a unique way of listening to your mentee and listening to what they share,” Asiedu said, including asking them about their own lived experience and to reflect on their own identity as an individual with or without a disability. Mentors are role models, not only in careers but in other aspects, especially if the mentee wants to be an advocate or fulfill a specific role in their STEM field, he said. Mentors can educate themselves about best practices in mentorship, learn about different types of disabilities and the disability of their mentee, and be aware of career and development resources. “If you are a researcher and mentoring somebody whose main goal is to become a researcher, make sure you have access to other resources that will be useful to the development of this individual … and then you keep sharing that when needed,” Asiedu said. This also includes searching for accommodations and understanding the accessibility of the resources and opportunities you are connecting them with, he added. Mentors can also ask mentees if they use person-first or identity-first language, and protect what is disclosed to them about disability status, unless the mentee has given them the authority to be open about it.

Roles for Mentees

Mentees have their own roles to consider, Asiedu said. This includes understanding the value of having mentors with or without disabilities and exploring different ways to find the right mentors. Alumni groups and organizations focused on people with disabilities may offer suggestions, as well as organizations and people who are in the fields and professions you are interested in, he said. Mentees should try to disclose their disabilities to their mentor early, if possible. “I know that some people delay that because they are stigmatized as a result,” he said, but in a mentorship, that disclosure will be super helpful to the relationship. Mentees need to be proactive in

asking questions, setting short- and long-term goals, and meeting regularly so the relationship does not fall apart. “Take responsibility for the agenda and plan,” he said. “Don’t be dependent on your mentor. You can develop that in partnership with the mentor.”

“Mentors and mentees each have agency” in the process, McDaniels said, but there are also important roles for educational institutions, employers, and national organizations. Educational institutions and other employers in STEM can create employee support groups and other services, create programming around national disability mentoring day, and consider the role of mentors and mentorship in their policies for critical transition moments, such as hiring, onboarding, and graduation, she said. Organizations can also create mentoring awards, educate the entire workforce on disability etiquette, and fulfill their role in providing accommodations, she added.

Roles for Organizations

National organizations focused on disabilities and STEM mentorship can contribute by increasing awareness of inclusive mentoring, recognize mentors and mentoring programs for their contributions toward inclusive mentoring, and promote evidence-based practices that improve mentorship relationships for all people, Asiedu said. Rupa Sheth Valdez, associate director of the Department of Public Health Sciences and the Department of Systems and Information Engineering at the University of Virginia, asked what the first steps an individual can take if they are thinking about mentoring disabled individuals and how they can be a more effective and responsive mentor.

“Being aware of oneself matters,” Asiedu said. “It supersedes everything. Once you know yourself, you know the limits. You know what you can do.” Being resourceful and targeting the help toward the interests of the mentees is crucial, he said. “You want to arm yourself with all of these resources.”

MENTORSHIP PAIRS SHARE THEIR EXPERIENCES

Michele Cooke, professor of geosciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, introduced the next part of the workshop by sharing her own successful mentoring experience. Meeting her mentor in her master’s program, who was also Deaf and Hard of Hearing, “changed my

perspective on professionalism possibilities.... Meeting that person made me elevate my goal.” There is a wide spectrum of who can be a mentor, Cooke said. “Mentors can be disabled, abled; they can be a coach and they can be a peer. They can be a colleague.”

Accessibility Adaptations Can Benefit Everyone

Hoby Wedler, CEO of the Wedland Group, and Dean Tantillo, professor of chemistry at the University of California, Davis, spoke about their collaborative mentorship partnership as far back as Wedler’s undergraduate years. When Wedler joined Tantillo’s group, their approach was one of talking about both scientific problems and accessibility problems, then working together to remove roadblocks. Tantillo also encouraged him to apply to graduate school, and Wedler eventually joined his group as a Ph.D. student.

“It was an opportunity for us to test out how computational chemistry would work for me and how we could make things accessible in the lab,” Wedler said, including making 3-D printouts of molecule visualizations to be held and manipulated. “I think a lot of what we decided and discovered … was a lot of the sighted students in the lab found our techniques useful and productive for them as well. “We used to call it Hoby’s rule,” Tantillo said. “Anything we develop for Hoby has to be useful for sighted people as well.” It was said jokingly, but such a framework was not only helpful for other people but allowed for wider acceptance and rapid development of technology or processes. Another major learning experience for Wedler when working with Tantillo’s group was what can happen for disabled students when they are given a chance. “You can step out there and give it a try,” when an instructor like Tantillo involves people who may not know what their true potential is. “You unlock it. You pull it out of them,” he said. That’s what it means to be a teacher, Tantillo said. “If you are going to be a good teacher, you have to tune in to your students and understand what their needs are and what their style is,” helping everyone to make the most of their potential and provide opportunities and tools to do that.

The benefits of their mentorship also extended to other students and instructors, especially when they put together a chemistry camp for students with disabilities that attracted attendees from around the country, Wedler said. “We can take something like that and get other people excited about the things we are excited about in order to move forward and create the best possible future for as many people as possible.” Tantillo said Wedler had gotten him thinking differently about both scientific problems and

nonscientific problems. “I want to challenge the way I think about things, and it is always, always a pleasure to puzzle things out with you,” Tantillo said. Both of them share the philosophy that they “don’t focus on what can’t be done. Instead, we focus on what can be done. Even if it is small steps forward, just moving forward is the important thing.”

Access and Inclusion

Raja Kushalnagar, director of the Information Technology undergraduate program and Accessible Human-Centered Computing graduate program at Gallaudet University, and Matthew Seita, a recent computing and information sciences graduate at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), discussed their experiences working together at RIT, as well as other mentoring experiences as Deaf people. The two met when Seita was in a program encouraging students who were Deaf and Hard of Hearing to learn about computer systems. Seita said it was his first experience learning about research on accessibility, among other things. “I saw a Deaf person in research at the university, and they had a similar experience to me,” he said, adding it was a way to learn about what other Deaf people were doing out in the field.

Kushalnagar said his initial experience at graduate school at RIT was similar, but during his Ph.D., there was no community of Deaf individuals in his program. “It was a very tough and a very isolating thing.” he said. An ally, Richard Ladner, was a hearing person and had set up a program at the school with hearing people who could sign and were involved in research. “Instead of just helping, they were also learning the computer profession as well,” Kushalnagar said. He was encouraged to be a mentor himself going forward. Seita said that college could be isolating for him as well, but the research program he participated in with Kushalnagar helped integrate him into the wider research community, helped him improve, and gave him the experience of presenting his work at a meeting, which helped him to meet more people who were researching the same thing.

Kushalnagar’s mentor mindset includes both accessibility and inclusion, and that is why his group was not Deaf-only. “We have access, but we also need inclusion,” he said. This adds to the number of people who are sharing their perspectives and sharing different experiences to grow together. Seita noted a time when people were verbally talking in a lab, and he missed out on their conversation. “I really needed people who were more willing to work with me and to provide that inclusion,” he said.

It helps a lot to have shared interests in research and shared experiences with challenges, Kushalnagar said. “Maybe our experiences are differing in some ways, but it is building a better product and building a better community.” He is looking forward to seeing what happens in the future with a more diverse group of faculty, internships, and professionals. Building relationships professionally across people who are Deaf and allies, as well as people with different disabilities, has a significant effect, Seita said. Having an advisor he can directly communicate with, either through ASL (American Sign Language) or the written word, is really important. “If there isn’t an interpreter, the communication sort of breaks down”; interpretation does not come directly from the person he is getting advice from.

Communication across Multiple Methods

Another conversation featured two students, Loam Shin and Michelle Olson, both at the Rochester Institute of Technology, and their advisor, Kristen Shinohara, assistant professor in the School of Information at RIT. Shin had “heard great things” about Shinohara. “I knew she was a researcher and that interested me.” They got involved in a project focused on user interface design in technology for Deaf and Hard of Hearing researchers and designers. They planned how they were going to approach the project by talking about user-friendly technology specifications, brainstorming different ideas for the technology, and contemplating the interactions people would have with it. “It wasn’t easy at first, I’ll be honest, because I use ASL,” Shin said. “Deaf people who use ASL such as myself, we are very hands-on people. We use our hands as much as possible. It is tough to find ways that will play to those strengths.”

Olson is part of the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, located on RIT’s campus. She enrolled there because she wanted to find a major that was inclusive for her language, and she wanted to study STEM. Olson called it a great pathway to success, where “both Deaf and hearing people can work together online and in person. It has been a streamlined process.” Having multiple communities on campus makes for a great environment, she added.

Shinohara noted that she is a hearing person and both Olson and Shin are ASL signers. She asked the students for their perspective about how they work together. Olson said it was a different experience compared with an all-Deaf mentor group or an all-signing mentor group, but “they still always work hard together,” and Shinohara is a great person to challenge

them and bounce ideas off of. They prioritize getting interpreters for their meetings, but also do a lot of work over email and Slack.² Olson added that it is nice to have Shin to brainstorm together in their native language, and it is important to have two ASL signers involved for the nature of their work. Shin said she agreed. “It is a privilege to work with Kristen. People like her keep it interesting.…We have a lot of values in this group that are shared. It is accessible and that’s what is most important to me.”

Shinohara asked them, based on their current experience, what they are looking for in future mentoring experiences. Shin said it was important to find someone who is willing to work with you no matter your accommodations, and make accessibility a given. “Having an interpreter is crucial. Making sure that we get all of the terminology, and we don’t miss anything, that’s crucial,” she said. Olson said that one of the major elements she wants to carry to future meetings and mentorships is providing an agenda before they meet.

Shinohara said she had resources at her institution to develop that mentorship relationship, including quite a large team of ASL interpreters and a system for scheduling them, which is often not the case at other universities. “This is the first priority I have when we are setting up meetings is to make sure we have that support,” she said. If she was not at RIT, from a faculty member perspective, she would want to find grant funding or other departmental services to do so.

MUTUAL MENTORSHIP IN THE DISABLED STEM COMMUNITY

Logan Gin, assistant director of STEM education, Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning at Brown University, moderated a panel on ways people with disabilities in STEM offer mentorship and community building with each other.

Ana Caicedo, professor of biology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, began the blog The Mind Hears, written by and for Deaf and Hard of Hearing academics, with fellow UMass colleague Michele Cooke in 2018.³ They had two main goals in mind, Caicedo said. First, “as scientists with hearing loss at a predominantly hearing institution, we felt very

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² Slack is an instant messaging and workplace communications tool; for more information, see https://slack.com/.

³ Available at https://themindhears.org/.

isolated,” she said. By creating the blog, they could reach others and build a network of academics with hearing loss, decrease the isolation that many of them felt. Second, they felt they were “constantly reinventing the wheel” trying to meet the recurrent challenges of teaching, service, and research duties, and were not sure they were coming up with the best strategies. The blog became a forum for peer mentoring, to share experiences and potential solutions to professional challenges, she said. The Mind Hears publishes every 3 weeks, written by Caicedo or Cooke or other contributors. There are a variety of post types; Caicedo’s favorite are profiles of Deaf and Hard of Hearing academics in various fields and career stages. They have also started informal drop-in chat sessions via Zoom to connect more with other Deaf and Hard of Hearing academics.

Alyssa Paparella, a Ph.D. candidate at the Baylor College of Medicine, started a platform called DisabledInSTEM because she wanted to make a difference for disabled scientists.⁴ She began on social media and with a website, then expanded to a mentorship program. “I wanted to know I wasn’t the only disabled scientist out there,” and she offers discussions and more representation to disabled scientists. Paparella valued having a mentor when she was an undergraduate, but he was not a disabled person and did not understand the barriers and obstacles she faced. “I wanted to create a community where even if [their mentor] wasn’t a disabled mentor, they could share their experience with fellow mentees and have the support network.”

Edward Manyibe is the research director at the Rehabilitation Research and Training Center at Langston University, a historically Black college and university in Oklahoma. The center focuses on employment equity for multiply marginalized people with disabilities, and he is the co-principal investigator of a project designed to mentor postdocs interested in research in the fields of disability and rehabilitation.

Erica Avery, a recent Ph.D. graduate in physiology from Johns Hopkins University, is one of the founders of the Equal Access in Science and Medicine committee.⁵ Her group “quickly turned into a very tight-knit community. We realized that there is such a need for community among people with disabilities in our field.” They work with leadership and student disability services to improve access, change the culture, and “really raise our voices,” including building their own programming: a lecture series of

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⁴ For more information, see https://disabledinstem.wordpress.com.

⁵ For more information, see https://equalaccesshopkins.com/.

disabled speakers, disability pride month, book clubs, listening sessions, and panels.

Lessons Learned

One of her biggest lessons from developing the mentorship program was accepting feedback and critique from others, Paparella said. “I started a program of how I thought [it] would fit the best needs for people, but it doesn’t mean that’s exactly how it needs to be envisioned.” The program was originally one-on-one mentoring, where pairs connected on their own. Based on the feedback she was getting, she now incorporates pod mentoring or mutual mentoring, where there are three mentors per group and between five and seven mentees. This creates a group structure that avoids one person becoming overwhelmed, she said. “In the case of a mentor, sometimes they just get burdened in a year-long program, as things have come up that they may not have expected.” A pod structure allows for people to learn from each other across the mentor-mentee relationship. “This is something I wouldn’t have considered if I didn’t take the feedback from others,” she said.

Caicedo shared that it has been “sobering” to realize that the amount of work it takes to sustain “even a loose mentoring effort” like their blog is greater than it appears. Managing The Mind Hears has been immensely gratifying and created the peer mentoring network that they needed, but the work competes with the rest of their academic obligations. “Learning how to balance the work on the blog with everything else we have to do is sort of an ongoing journey,” she said.

Avery agreed that there was isolation between disabled students at her institution. In some of the surveys they did, more than one-third who identified as disabled had not registered with student disability services, nor disclosed to anyone around them. “It was very difficult to find each other,” she said. “When we felt frustrated with policies in place or decisions from university leadership, we always are wondering if it was just me … we have learned through having a community that we weren’t alone at all.” Just having people who also understand what you are going through is so meaningful, Avery noted. Peer mentorship is “how I really started to learn I didn’t need to shrink myself or make myself invisible.… I really began to deprogram from the internalized ableism,” especially from working at a medical institution.

Minority-serving institutions are underrepresented in receiving federal grants, Manyibe said, but their program is geared toward developing

researchers who can secure grants and continue to be role models in their field, so they source mentors from other universities. They also learned that there is no single mode of mentorship that can serve everyone, and they have developed several models: peer-to-peer mentorship for faculty members across minority-serving institutions, multiple peer mentorship for postdoc researchers, early intervention models for students’ postsecondary education, and a short-term mentorship program where faculty from other institutions are integrated into the project so that they understand how to write and manage a grant. “There’s no way one mentor can … meet the needs of each person,” Manyibe said, so there is a need for multiple mentors. For example, a person with a disability may need a mentor who also has a disability but also one who has experience doing research, and one who understands how to develop relationships and manage time as an academic.

Different Aspects of Life and Disclosure

The Mind Hears is targeted at graduate students and later academic career stages, Caicedo said, because their experience was that the support structures became weaker and weaker higher up the career ladder. “For example, disability services in universities will usually know how to help a Deaf student who is taking classes. But then when the instructor is Deaf, they are more lost about how to help out in that situation or how to help out a faculty member who has to present at a conference,” she said. Some situations they have covered include how to teach effectively, participate in conferences with a hearing loss, navigate faculty meetings, carry out fieldwork, and disclose deafness when applying for jobs.

Paparella’s mentorship program ranges from high school to faculty, so they cover a wide range of situations and issues. Most often, people are concerned about disclosure, including how and when, and the process of getting accommodations, “especially if you are not certain and haven’t had experience to be in a lab to know what tools or accessibility issues you have.” Mentees want to learn how to feel empowered in the lab work they want to do, she said. It is hard to balance how you feel about disclosing with feeling safe to do so, Avery said. “I disclose because, really, I am just too tired. I don’t want to be invisible. I don’t want to shrink myself,” she said, but doing so has led to instances of retaliation.

Refraining from disclosing can also affect opportunities to bond. For example, Avery was once working in the same department as another student who founded her group, but they had no idea they both had chronic

illnesses; instead, they found each other through a graduate student association meeting. A primary issue that arises with their group is dealing with toxic hustle culture and tokenism. They have been leading the charge to create programming, build accepting spaces, and celebrate the efforts of students with disabilities.

Universities have also been pushing to “return to normal” by taking away pandemic-era changes that benefitted disabled people, such as asynchronous learning, teleconferencing, and working from home, and Avery’s group is focusing on pushing back, “trying to get that message through to leadership.” They also teach faculty to lift up the voices of disabled colleagues and promote a better inclusive culture, she said. The group also offers mentorship through positive conversations about management and symptoms for people in school with chronic illnesses: “There are so many disabilities out there and there are so many represented in our group, but we connect on so many levels about what our experiences are and how to … manage the barriers.”

Defining Roles and Expectations

Gin asked Paparella and the other panelists how they define roles for mutual mentors. This year, Paparella asked mentors to contribute by meeting with mentees once a month, then asked the mentorship groups to find a topic each month they would be interested in discussing as a group. She asks for each group to have a designated note taker, and each time, a different pod group shares their notes with the entire program. “So, you are learning from other discussions you might not be a part of.” There is also a Slack channel for people to have informal conversations, she added.

Research is very intense, and Langston University has designed their mentorship programs to cover a long period of time, as long as 5 years, to help people not feel pressure that they have to do things quickly, Manyibe said. They also meet with mentees to understand what is going on in their lives. “Historically Black colleges and universities are known for having close relationships for students,” he said, and that close relationship is important in terms of mentorship. During the pandemic, his program was dealing with more personal issues as people were struggling with the isolation from their family members and trying to provide support. That is part of the mentorship, he said. “If someone is not healthy, they’re not going to be productive in research. So, we had to make sure that we attend to those aspects.”

Visibility and Training

An audience member asked what can be done to make sure leaders have the training to mentor and make sure it is equitably available. Formal mentorships are not offered to everyone, Manyibe said, so they are in constant discussion with university leadership about how they can take what they learn and spread it to the whole university. But expanding mentorship goes back to the concept of investment, Manyibe said. “Mentorship is intensive,” and at minority-serving institutions there are not as many mentors, and those who take it on are already overburdened with teaching and other responsibilities. They advise looking for mentorship programs for faculty outside the institution, including options at the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. National Science Foundation and at broader online mentorships.

Another audience member asked how to increase the visibility of people with disabilities among academic faculty and more senior folks to make it easier for disabled students to feel like they belong or feel safe disclosing themselves. The more we encourage everybody in academic settings and other settings to view disability as part of diversity—especially given the push for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives—disabled faculty can become more visible to students, Caicedo said. Avery agreed and said that “out lists” LGBTQIA+ faculty could join encouraged students and others to feel safe, but “there was a lot of fear” around a similar concept for disability. “I can understand why people, especially faculty, would not feel comfortable being visible in order to have relationships and mentoring,” she said. Hiring disability experts for DEI offices and other interventions would create a safer environment for faculty to be visible, she added. It is also the reason students are probably more represented in the disability community than are faculty, Avery added, and it is a huge burden on the few that do and have mentoring and supportive relationships with students.

Paparella agreed and said that it was up to wider institutions to build this visibility and the conditions that allow it. “I also want to challenge everybody who is [here] right now, as an ally or somebody interested in learning about disability, what are you doing when it comes to conferences or your societies that you are part of? … I would really hope that you take this lesson and do a reflection of your own institution and societies and the conferences you attend,” she said.

REFERENCES