Nurturing the future generations of Rubin scientists with effective, culturally responsive mentoring
Authors: Federica B. Bianco (TVS, ISSC, DESC) fbianco@udel.edu; Sara (Rosaria) Bonito (TVS, SMWLV) rosaria.bonito@inaf.it; Laura Inno (TVS) laura.inno@uniparthenope.it; Rachel Street (TVS, SMWLV) rstreet@lco.global; Lior Shamir (ISSC, GSC) lshamir@mtu.edu , Shar Daniels (TVS)
The LSST TVS JEDI task force; The Rubin LSST Science Collaborations DEI Council
OCTOBER 2023: THIS PROGRAM IS NOW SPONSORED BY THE LSST DISCOVERY ALLIANCE EQUITABLE PRACTICES GRANT
The Rubin community has broadly and extensively committed to fostering the new generation of talent with attention to inclusivity and equity. Many grass-root and organized activities have resulted from this commitment, culminating in the Mentoring plan for the LSSTC Catalyst Fellowship program in which a team of mentors is recruited (and importantly financially supported!) to nurture the postdoctoral fellowship awardees. However, mentoring is a skill that, like all skills, must be learned, and most academic institutions do not have structures in place to train mentors in effective mentorship practices; to cite Byars-Winston and Dahlberg (2019), The Science of Effective Mentoring, “Because mentorship can be so influential in shaping the future STEMM [science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine] workforce, its occurrence should not be left to chance or idiosyncratic implementation. There is a gap between what we know about effective mentoring and how it is practiced in higher education”.
The need for mentors’ training is echoed in our field in the white paper of the American Astronomical Society (Jischke 2019). Well-intentioned scientists may make mistakes that can impact a junior scientist's career and influence its trajectory and retention in STEM, as demonstrated for example in Hansford and Ehrich (2006); Chelberg and Bosman (2019); Markle et al. (2022). Furthermore, several Rubin programs including the Catalyst fellowship, and the recent Heising Simons-funded Building a Diverse Generation of Rubin Scientists program, developed under the 2021 “Preparing for Astrophysics with LSST Program”, by the Heising Simons Foundation through grant 2021-2975, and administered by Las Cumbres Observatory, which focuses on mentoring groups from minority-serving institutions to enable entry-level projects into Rubin LSST, have encountered difficulties in recruiting mentors, even when the mentorship responsibilities are financially compensated, as is the case for the Catalyst fellowship (the author of this proposal can testify to difficulties encountered by the Science Collaboration chairs in recruiting mentor candidates). This can be explained by lack of training in mentoring as well: the task of mentoring becomes daunting, especially for a conscientious perspective mentor, when mentoring is unstructured, mentors did not have access to training, are not instructed in how to measure the impact of their mentoring activities or how to assess the needs of their mentees, and how to structure their mentorship activities so that they are effective but can fit within their other academic responsibilities.
What type of training
Evidence-based mentoring best practices have recently been the subject of many studies and publications. While the question in the literature some 15 years ago seemed to be “Does Mentoring Matter?” (e.g. Eby et al. 2008), literature prior to the 2010s establish a wealth of evidence to firmly answer this question: mentoring does matter! So the pressing question in becomes, “What Makes Mentoring Effective”. To cite Beutel and Spooner-Lane (2009) “the success of mentoring relationships lies in the skills and knowledge of the mentors; yet this also requires developing professional–personal relationships”, including with a focus on the identity of the mentee and their belonging to historically marginalized groups in STEM.
A recent, comprehensive randomized study of mentorship outcomes conducted by the Center for Improvement of Mentor Experience in Research (CIMER) (Byars-Winston al. 2022) reads: “The Science of Effective Mentorship in STEMM (Byars-Winston and Dahlberg, 2019), documented that demographic variables like race and ethnicity interact with mentees’ perceptions of their mentored research experience and what they value in a research mentor, especially for those from historically excluded racial/ethnic groups in STEM (i.e., Black, Indigenous, and Hispanic/Latinx). However, some research mentors may not see the relevance in acknowledging such variables in their mentoring relationships (Butz, et al. 2019; Prunuske et al. 2013 ). Others may be hesitant to address social identities, including race/ethnicity, in mentoring relationships because of concerns of being misunderstood as being prejudiced or otherwise offending their mentee (Byars-Winston et al. 2020). McGee et al. (2010) described how racialized STEM education can compromise the experience and success of students. In contrast, one study showed that UG STEM students from historically excluded groups whose research mentors addressed the link between their cultural backgrounds and their student experience as well as validated their racial and academic identities reported greater involvement in research, higher science identity and belonging in research, and higher STEM degree graduation rates than those whose mentors did not do so (Heager et al. 2016). On the basis of this evidence, the NASEM report (Byars-Winston and Dahlberg, 2019) authors concluded that recognizing and responding to cultural diversity can contribute to mentors’ effectiveness and that there is an urgent need to build this capacity in research mentors (Barber et al. 2020)”
Who would lead the training
Fortunately, not only are best practices available in the literature, but mentoring training is now available and becoming more popular. In particular, we identified the Center for Improvement of Mentor Experience in Research (CIMER), run out of the University of Winsconsin-Madison, as the ideal mentoring program for our community.
Their mentor training portfolio can be reviewed at https://cimerproject.org/entering-mentoring.
This organization runs a variety of training programs. Among them, we identified the most effective for our community to be an Entering Mentoring Facilitator Workshop program. This is a train-the-trainee style program.
Who would have the opportunity?
The four (4) initial mentors should be selected to form a diverse group (considering ethnicity, gender, institution of affiliation, science, and other identity traits). They will be recruited among the Science Collaborations. The selection process will be defined in detail with a rubric to be agreed upon by the PI team. The Catalyst fellows’ mentors (either from Expansion Sites or from the SCs) should be offered the opportunity to participate and be selected if their participation forms a sufficiently diverse group. This team of four trained facilitators would enable extension of the training opportunities to the entire Rubin community and to the Catalyst mentors in particular.
How would you assess?
The proposers believe that the impact of these activities will be profound and long-lasting. However, the success of mentoring cannot be measured in the short term.
The assessment of this program’s impact and success will be as follows:
Your/your team's experience
The proposers are experienced mentors with several students and postdocs under their mentorship. PI Bianco and Street are current Catalyst mentors. PI Bonito was a mentor in the aforementioned HSF Building a Diverse Generation of Rubin Scientists program. However, the proposers have not participated in the CIMER training or other formal mentorship training as of today.
Approximately when
CIMER offers regular training sessions multiple times a year. Depending on when the funds will become available, we expect to be able to take advantage of a session within six months. Following training sessions led by the newly trained mentors should happen on a 6 months basis, so that within a year of the award we should see both the initial CIMER-led training session and the first Rubin-own training session happen.