A Light in the Dark: A Qualitative Meta Synthesis of Pre-Tenure Faculty Mentorship Promising Practices

Abstract

The pre-tenure period for faculty members is often a professionally and personally challenging time. Mentorship and professional development programs serve as an important aid, providing needed support in their pursuit of a positive tenure decision. Institutional faculty mentorship programs often provide this important resource, though their practices differ widely based on a range of factors that are often not well understood. This dissertation used a qualitative meta synthesis to determine promising, emergent practices in formal and informal pre-tenure faculty mentoring programs across higher education institutions in the United States, with a particular focus on equitable principles and policies for women and faculty of color. Critical theory anchors this study, with the Mentoring Pathways Program Model (MPPM) serving as a conceptual framework. The qualitative meta synthesis resulted in 93 eligible academic studies from a total of 1270 potential articles. MPPM coding revealed that institutional mentorship programs often neglect to center the lived experiences of women and faculty members of color within their frameworks, indicating the presence of evasiveness practices. An evaluation of the MPPM itself affirmed that the majority of faculty mentorship programs studied emphasize the four tenets of the MPPM and validate the appropriateness of the model for use as in developing pre-tenure faculty members. Emergent faculty mentorship themes from this research include an uneven consideration of faculty and their needs, the trust (and mistrust) of institutional mentorship provision, the rise of non-traditional mentoring models, the use of assessment practices to evaluate mentorship effectiveness, and a self-defined pursuit of excellence. Practitioner recommendations for faculty mentorship program administrators are provided in the final chapter, in addition to a novel faculty mentorship conceptual taxonomy and opportunities for further research.