Mentoring Female Students in Engineering as a Way of Caring

Patricia Jiménez, Jimena Pascual, Andrés Mejía

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapterpeer-review

Abstract

In this chapter, we report on a mixed research study about the ways mentors attribute meaning and purpose to the practice of mentorship in a program for first and second-year female students of industrial engineering at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso (Chile). A quantitative analysis (principal components) of 28 mentors’ responses to a questionnaire about their motivations to be mentors prompted us to examine more deeply one of the factors found. Motivations constitutive of this factor referred to mentors’ ways of attributing meaning and purpose to their practice, which can be understood in terms of caring. Four focus groups with 13 mentors in total allowed us to advance further into the examination of what the good pursued by this practice of mentorship meant for them. In our analysis, we drew from Tronto’s four phases of care: caring about, caring for, caregiving and care receiving, and their corresponding defining moral elements: respectively, attentiveness, responsibility, competence, and responsiveness.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationLecture Notes in Educational Technology
PublisherSpringer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH
Pages143-164
Number of pages22
DOIs
StatePublished - 2022

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Educational Technology
ISSN (Print)2196-4963
ISSN (Electronic)2196-4971

Keywords

  • Ethics of care
  • Higher education
  • Mentoring
  • Motivations to mentor
  • Retention
  • Women in STEM

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