The Role of Reverse Mentoring in Creating a More Connected Campus
Embedding Student Voice in evaluative processes across the University is one target found in the University of Leeds’s Access and Student Success Strategy. ‘Student Voice’ has become somewhat of a buzzword within the higher education (HE) community over the past few years, yet it continues to be of paramount importance to ensure that institutions, such as Leeds, are acting in the best interests of their students. A key question being: How we can engage with student voices meaningfully and authentically?
We need to ensure that students have a supportive and safe forum to have their say and be listened to, especially those from underrepresented backgrounds, but this is something that remains a practical challenge. A vast amount of research on student experience demonstrates that students from underrepresented or minoritised backgrounds may face additional vulnerabilities linked to experiences of being negatively impacted by unconscious bias, discrimination, prejudice, or general ignorance or lack of understanding of culture and background.
Initial Idea
Reverse Mentoring in HE inverts ‘traditional’ roles, positioning students as ‘Mentors’ and staff as ‘Mentees’, with a view to educating and empowering both sides and catalysing cultural change through sharing and discussion of unique lived experiences in safe environments. Unlike traditional mentoring, where a senior person mentors someone more junior, in reverse mentoring, a senior leader is mentored by a more junior person whom, from a diversity and inclusion perspective, is different from them in some way, and who has a different experience of the University as a result.
Rachael O’Connor, an Associate Professor in Leeds’s School of Law and Lead for Academic Personal Tutoring, came to the University in 2018 following a career as a solicitor where the practice of Reverse Mentoring is more common within day-to-day working life. In 2018, the opposite was true in HE where there was little evidence of its application. Recognising that Reverse Mentoring could be a useful tool to facilitate Student Voice for underrepresented students - given the hierarchical parallels between the legal profession and HE - Rachael completed a small-scale pilot study between International Students and Staff in Legal Education, evidencing and arguing that ‘Reverse Mentoring deserves a prominent place in ‘post-pandemic’ University strategies.
“The pilot study in Law was really a feasibility study – the first to explore equality, diversity and inclusion focused reverse mentoring in a HE context. Since then, there is a growing interest in reverse mentoring in the HE context with a number of recent empirical studies advancing this area. I’m really pleased that Leeds has been at the forefront of developing understanding of this topic via my pilot and subsequent projects.”
Rachael O’Connor
A Cross-Institutional Pilot
Building on Rachael’s work, a cross-institutional Reverse Mentoring scheme was piloted in 2021 by Educational Engagement and the Leeds University Union (LUU) to investigate whether this was a forum worth pursuing as a larger, whole-institution initiative that could increase students' sense of belonging at Leeds. With a focus on the voices of underrepresented students, Mature (21+) and/or students from an ethnically-minoritised, international and/or widening participation background were encouraged to apply to be Student Mentors.
Following the pilot’s success, the scheme was expanded across the University in 2022 and developed into a research study supported by Rachael. The University is also exploring the intersection of academic personal tutoring and reverse mentoring through Rachael’s LITE Fellowship.
Building the Research Study
The research study aimed to capture the views and experiences of underrepresented students taking part in Reverse Mentoring and assess whether being a Reverse Mentor could increase sense of belonging. The study looked at two research questions:
Does participation in Reverse Mentoring lead to increased feelings of value, visibility and belonging for students from underrepresented backgrounds at Leeds?
Does participation in Reverse Mentoring lead senior staff to develop a greater understanding and appreciation of the challenges faced by students from underrepresented backgrounds at Leeds and result in them introducing changes to practice in their areas of responsibility?
In early 2022, Student Mentors and Staff Mentees were recruited, undertook training and matched. Over the remainder of the 21-22 academic year, Reverse Mentoring meetings took place in-person where possible, although online meetings were also permissible to support accessibility. Participants completed pre and post questionnaires and took part in post-project interviews to assess the impact of mentoring against the study’s research questions.
The Mentor/Mentee Experience
For the study, 26 Student Mentors, who identified as being from an underrepresented background, were recruited and matched with Staff Mentees. Students valued the opportunity to have their voices heard, one Mentor said:
“I was really interested in it first because it's like we're mentoring the teachers whilst being in school. You're not normally put in situations where the roles are reversed so I thought that's quite interesting. And then they obviously want to hear what we have to say and I just felt like - because of lockdown - first year was all online and so I didn't feel like I had any involvement in the University like, I was a student, but then I didn't really feel like I was a student at the same time and I thought this was a way to get more involved.”
Another commented,
“I thought that the interesting factor was that the faculty member will try to know us. That was what interested me - that I could talk to someone about our requirements and about how we could feel more at home at university.”
All Staff Mentees held a senior leadership position at the University of Leeds and included Deans, Pro-Deans and Directors of Professional Services. Staff were interested in getting involved in a new forum for Student Voice:
"I'd never heard of anything like it before, and it certainly seemed like it would be a valuable experience to talk with students. I mean, I've been the student, but not for a while – I was interested in what their experience is like today and what could we learn from that?”
Other staff members got involved for different reasons:
“I'd heard Rachael present about Reverse Mentoring in law and had been quite interested in thinking about how we might do it here. I kind of saw it as fundamental to my job actually - any opportunity to hear from students, particularly in a structured way, is good”.
Over the course of the academic year, there were four meetings between Mentors and Mentees which took place across campus. One Student Mentor described their experience:
“Our meetings were like an hour and we would just basically go get coffee but most of the time she (the Mentee) arranged it just because she had such a busy schedule...like we would discuss it, but it would mainly be off her timetable which was completely fine because I didn't necessarily feel like her setting the time or the place affected the power balance. I remember being invited to her office for the first meeting – she was like ‘well do you want to?’ and I was like well you have a nice office, like it doesn't really… I don’t feel intimidated. And then I felt like I got to know a bit more about her by seeing her office - she had souvenirs and an interesting office space.”
“Another time we went to Caffe Nero, which I think maybe changed the tone a bit just because there were more people around, I don't know, maybe I didn't feel outspoken as much, and it was also nice to be in a more natural environment where you would have a chat with someone anyway. It just felt quite normal that we were getting a coffee together. Like it didn't feel like weird or anything.”
Some staff did initially find the reversal of roles a challenge:
“I've done a lot of mentoring and so as somebody who's done a lot of mentoring, you have to do a very conscious stepping into the mentee role which I had, you know, I'd spent some time thinking about in advance and was confident that, yeah, I know how to do this.”
Yet, Student Mentors were positive about the response of Senior Staff to the programme. One reflected:
“My Mentee was a really good listener and I just felt like she was really interested to hear about me. And then sometimes she would ask me questions that I hadn't thought about either, so it was quite like it wasn't just one-sided.”
Another said:
"My Mentee was so cordial, and we both got along very well, and it turned out good. I felt comfortable talking to him and he completely gets me despite my lack of speaking knowledge of English. Despite that language differences.”
Senior Staff also found the new role presented an interesting staff/student dynamic:
“I think the usefulness of the mentoring relationship there was that she wasn't coming with a complaint. It wasn't as if I was her personal tutor and she was saying this really isn't working for me and or I need some support – instead, it just kind of emerged out of the conversation.
“I suppose one of the surprises was the nature of the relationship was really, really different to any I’ve experienced before. It just had a different tone and different feel to it because the roles were different.”
The Impact
Student Mentors showed increased feelings of belonging (average score based on survey results increased from 3.08 to 3.7) and value (average score increased from 3.13 to 3.45) to the University of Leeds after taking part in Reverse Mentoring. One Mentor reflects:
“I feel that, not just with Reverse Mentoring, but with Learning Champion and course Rep and a few other things, there’s things I’ve wanted to say, and I've never had chance to do it. I feel that now, here, at the University of Leeds, you get that opportunity.”
Another agrees:
“Having somebody in authority who listens to you, and that follows up and gives you feedback - it's really good and I and the overall thing for me was the fact that there's somebody there in the authority, they didn't just listen, you know they actually took on board what we said.”
After the mentoring meetings, students had more confidence in senior staff’s understanding of their background and experiences (average score based on survey results increased from 2.44 to 3.8):
“I learned a lot about how the University is trying to get better and how they are aware of how the divide is increasing between middle class students and working-class students and they want to make it a safer space on campus. I just thought I would be saying things, and the University would like, okay, we’ll think about it. But they are actually trying to do something. They are trying to figure it out.”
Staff Mentees felt they had a better understanding of the challenges faced by students from underrepresented groups (average score increased from 2.81 to 3.17) as well as why these students may be less engaged (average score increased from 3.06 to 4.17) and feel less confident (average score increased from 3.75 to 4.50) at the University of Leeds. One Mentee says:
“I've learnt that we make assumptions about what students know all the time, but they don't always ask for help, or they don't feel able to ask for help.”
“I learned a lot from [my Mentee], you know, how to look at life.”
Another Mentee found that the experience highlighted ongoing issues leftover from the COVID-19 pandemic:
“what became apparent as we were talking was her experience or lack of engagement with on campus resources like the library because of the pandemic, and I don't think I had 100% realized how much learning in bedrooms is going on.”
Next Steps
Following the successful results of the Research Study, Institutional Reverse Mentoring will be embedded as an annual activity at the University of Leeds to be supported with Executive-level endorsement. Rachael is looking forward to the future:
“I’m super excited about the progress and valuing of reverse mentoring at Leeds. What started out as a relatively small-scale idea is now permeating our whole campus and approach to cultural change as an institution. It is evident from the work we have done so far that reverse mentoring is impactful and a key facilitator in our mission for change as a university. I’d love to see us collaborating with other institutions in the future to encourage the sector to engage and invest in reverse mentoring within their own contexts too.”
If you would like to find out more about Reverse Mentoring at the University of Leeds, please get in touch with the Student Success team: StudentSuccess@leeds.ac.uk.
This article was written in collaboration with Access and Student Success colleagues at the University of Leeds.
