Fall Issue

In this reflection paper, I map six trauma-informed principles to the higher education setting. Specific to this paper, I employed trauma-informed educational practices (TIEP) during the fall 2020 semester when the COVID-19 pandemic continued to surge. Most of the 21 enrolled graduate nursing students were front-line workers who, in addition to the traumas experienced at the bedside, were experiencing personal stressors as well. The duality of roles – nurse as caregiver and as adult learner – shaped the TIEP. I describe my roles as theorist, researcher, and expert in nurse-specific psychological traumas and my own secondary trauma. Last, I present informal results of the TIEP and my recommendations for the future.

This paper grew from remarks I offered on February 26, 2021 at a drop-in mentoring session of the Faculty Mentor Support Circle at the Susan Bulkeley Butler Center for Leadership Excellence. I point to three pathways to success in faculty-to-faculty mentoring: a clear belief that above all mentoring requires one to commit to the success of another; an understanding of the essential reciprocity at the heart of mentoring; and the need for clear communication as well as the realization that mentoring evolves over time and should conclude without complication and via no-fault exits when the time comes. I then go on to discuss how these pathways might be accommodated in three models of faculty mentoring that prevail in the academy, namely the hierarchical, dyadic model; the group mentoring model; and the peer mentoring model. I argue that the last model is especially promising for faculty whose needs are routinely rendered invisible in the academy, such as international faculty, underrepresented minority faculty and contingent faculty. That said, no model for mentoring is guaranteed success and each must keep guardrails in place, such as no-fault exits, to ensure course correction when needed. I look at some ways technology has brought mentoring within reach for faculty otherwise isolated by virtue of their URM status on field and conclude by pointing to the need for all stakeholders to contribute to, and regularly refresh their understanding of, the rich and growing body of literature on mentoring in our times.

Given the widespread use of business school teaching cases as a pedagogical instrument, we investigate how often People of Color and Hispanic people appear in these teaching cases. Using the best-selling business case studies from a major case distributor, we categorize 114 protagonists by their race and Hispanic ethnicity. Comparing the frequency with which People of Color appear in case studies with their percentage of the general population in the United States, we find that Black and Hispanic people are underrepresented, while White non-Hispanic people are overrepresented. We conclude that this disparity risks harming students in the underrepresented groups and fails to prepare all students for leadership in a multicultural world.

The increasing mobility of academies gives rise to the question of how mobile academics navigate their migration, what are their motivations and their experiences. Using data from 35 interviews with German academics in the UK, this paper explores mobility along a complex spectrum between voluntary move and professional necessity. It then explores how the specific national context of being a German in the UK impacts migratory experiences. Finally, the paper discusses concerns and challenges of combining academic mobility with family life. The paper calls for a critical exploration of mobility of academics and highlights opportunities as well as the challenges that it presents.