Coaching toward the Professoriate: Race and Gender Conscious Mentoring for Black Doctoral Students in Engineering and Computing

在全国范围内，工程和计算机领域缺乏代表性不足的教师，人们提出了许多解释来解释流行和科学文献中的短缺。多年来，已经制定了大量的战略，倡议和计划来解决工程教授中日益扩大的参与挑战，但取得的明显收益微乎其微。该项目与美国国家科学基金会的长期利益密切相关，以增加工程和计算专业中代表性不足的教师的数量。通过执行这个项目，研究人员期望将会有更多的黑人工程和社会科学家教师，他们接受培训，在关键的、教师前的职业阶段为来自代表性不足的群体的学者提供教练和导师；增加被聘为工程和计算机学院的各类博士和博士后学者的数量；以及通过终身教职程序提高黑人工程和计算机学院的成功率。作为增加进入工程教授的未被充分代表的群体数量的一种方式，该项目的计划包括以下内容：(1)为未来的工程教师提供基于指导的有效材料。(2)招聘和培训工程和社会科学领域的在职终身教授担任教练(3)实施基于教练的师徒关系。(4)实施一项计划，在项目资助之外维持以教练为基础的指导。(5)实施一项计划，在项目资助之外维持以教练为基础的指导。(6)协调和评估基于教练的指导。在实践社区（CoP）和社会认知职业理论（SCCT）的理论和科学文献的指导下，研究人员概述了一个综合项目，以开发和实施一个基于教练的指导计划，以增强工程和计算教授多样化的途径，并开发教授和培训终身工程和社会科学教授有效指导技能的方法。在这个项目中，研究人员计划将这种指导干预扩展到40名工程和计算机领域的博士和博士后学者，特别关注那些有兴趣追求教师职位的人。此外，该计划还包括外部评估者的服务，该评估者将执行从所有关键项目利益相关者（如教练、学员、博士后经理、研究生和研究人员）那里收集多层次、多阶段、混合方法的数据。这个项目是及时的，可能有助于提高工程成功的结果在教授和博士课程。

Across the nation, there is a dearth of underrepresented faculty in engineering and computing, and many explanations have been presented to explain the shortages in popular and scientific literature. Over the years, a plethora of strategies, initiatives, and programs have been created to address the broadening participation challenges in the engineering professoriate, but minimum visible gains have been achieved. This project is closely aligned with a long-standing interest of the National Science Foundation to increase the number of underrepresented faculty in the engineering and computing professoriate. By executing this project, the investigators expect that there will be an increase the number of Black engineering and social scientist faculty who are trained to serve as coaches and mentors for scholars from underrepresented groups at the crucial, pre-faculty career stage; increase in the number of diverse doctoral and postdoctoral scholars who become employed as engineering and computing faculty; and improvement of the success rate of Black engineering and computing faculty through the tenure process. As way of increasing the number of underrepresented groups who enter the engineering professoriate, the project's plan comprised the following: (1) Developing effective materials for coaching-based mentorship of future engineering faculty.(2) Recruiting and training current tenured faculty in engineering and social science to serve as coaches (3) Implementing the coaching-based mentorship. (4) Implementing a plan to sustain the coaching-based mentorship beyond the project funding.(5) Implementing a plan to sustain the coaching-based mentorship beyond the project funding.(6) Coordinating and assessing the coaching-based mentorship. Guided by the theoretical and scientific literature on Communities of Practice (CoP) and Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT), the investigators outlined a comprehensive project to develop and implement a coaching-based mentoring program to enhance approaches to diversify the engineering and computing professoriate and to develop methods to teach and train tenured engineering and social science faculty effective mentoring skills. For this project, the investigators plan to extend this mentoring intervention to 40 underrepresented doctoral and postdoctoral scholars in engineering and computing, with a particular focus on those who are interested in pursuing faculty positions. Additionally, the plan includes the services of an external evaluator, who will execute multi-level, multi-phased, mixed methods data collections from all the key project stakeholders (e.g., coaches, mentees, postdoctoral manager, graduate students, and the investigators. This project is timely and likely to help improve engineering success outcomes in the professoriate and doctoral programs.