Supporting, working, and collaborating with colleagues is vital for a successful working environment. I approach my mentoring by actively listening and allowing a safe and welcoming environment for my mentees to open up and discuss anything they want. I believe to be able to help anyone, we have to listen very carefully first to understand their needs. Confidentiality is extremely vital in a relationship as such. Anything said and discussed in my mentoring sessions are confidential and there is no judgement. The relationship I create with my colleagues and mentees is very important to me. These relationships are a two-way street. I usually learn a lot from them and grow from this experience. Having this kind of mutual respect and safe environment is the only way to achieve successful goals and establishes a healthy relationship between mentor and mentee.
At Arizona State University, I have worked and collaborated with many colleagues and administrators alike. I have build mentoring relationships with fellow junior faculty members and created community of practices for us to share and support each other. I have aided with encouraging faculty with their research and helped with their teaching. I have also been a mentor to many staff. My door is always open and have guided many of them with their work and their future careers. I have been a mentor to many graduate teaching assistants, who I consider fellow faculty. I have listened to their problems and issues and guided them to be successful both as teachers and future faculty members. I have helped them with their teaching and supported them in the application process to make that transition from graduate teaching assistants to full-time faculty members.
At GateWay Community College (GWCC)/Maricopa Center for Learning and Innovation (MCLI), I mentor various colleagues in an official and unofficial capacity. In an unofficial capacity, I consult, advise and mentor colleagues (faculty and staff) aiding in their various needs. Officially, I mentor faculty going through their first five years of tenure. I am currently mentoring two faculty members who are in their fourth year of their tenure. This includes setting goals for them, observing and evaluating their teaching, aiding in their professional development and help them achieve success in their tenure.
Supporting students’ work plays a big role in the way I see my work and position as a professor and mentor. I enjoy working with both undergraduate students at all levels as well as graduate students. Creating projects that expand students’ engagement with their studies beyond the classroom and challenge them to achieve their goals occurs in many different forms and ways. Meeting with the students regularly is part of this process and seeing them grow, active in their own learning and reach their potential is very awarding not just to them, but also to me. Having students being creative and finding a topic and project they really love excites me, thus I allow my students to discover their own interest when they are writing research papers or presentations, which in return allows them to think critically about their topic choice. An example of that took place during the fall of 2015 in my Intercultural Communicative Competence course. The final project for the course was a research paper. During a discussion of material during the second half of the semester, it became obvious that two students who were ROTC students as well and a student who worked as a Tutor for a tutoring center realized that more people needed to be educated and trained in intercultural communication. As a result, they asked whether they could create a teaching/training manual for the ROTC/tutoring center as their final project. Finding their passions within the course and being able to implement it into their daily lives was very rewarding for the students and myself. Being able to see how students develop and become as passionate and enthusiastic about the subject matter as me, is an amazing experience. Additionally, working with students who want to continue their research projects beyond my course and presenting with them at conferences is an honor. Knowing that each student is different, I make sure to include diverse teaching methodologies and approaches to the material. I encourage all students to think about their projects and their learning beyond my course and always allow students to voice their opinions and bring in a different perspective. I believe that is the only way we all learn and grow. One of my favorite parts of working with students is seeing them the following semesters after taking class with me and hearing what they have done and how my courses have affected them and their lives. My commitment to students shows in the variety of contexts.
I have provided advising and mentoring support for students in Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Linguistics, and Spanish in form of honors contracts and theses, applied projects and thesis projects and conference presentations. I have co-chaired an honor thesis in Japanese and in German. I have participated as an active reader on numerous MA thesis and Applied Projects in Art History, English, French, German, and Spanish and have directed many Applied Projects. I worked with different undergraduate students of all levels on honors contracts, where the students were able to take a related topic of their own and expand it. I have regularly worked with students on individualized instruction (GER 499). I have been approached by a graduate student, who is working on her PhD in Chinese Literature and is adding a Computer-assisted Language Learning (CALL) certificate, to work with her on a project. Through this mentorship, a new project emerged and we submitted a paper for an international conference. We will be working on another project that we will be submitting to a different conference and hopefully publish an article on our findings. As a supervisor and coordinator of the German instructors, I work very closely and intensively on teacher training. The mentoring process has always been a learning experience for me, since I see it as bi-directional. It is a great opportunity to work with motivated students and instructors alike and has allowed me to reflect on my own work. Working with students has always been the reason why I wanted to pursue a career in higher education.