Teaching to Fish: New Course on Mentoring for Social Capital
By Liz Raposa, PhD, Associate Professor of Clinical Psychology, Fordham University
I was supervising a mentoring relationship recently in which the mentee—a 17-year-old high school student preparing for life after high school—shared that he had a passion for baking, and his career goal was to be a pastry chef and own his own bakery. His assigned mentor, a 21-year-old student majoring in psychology at a nearby college, was stumped about how to best support someone who had academic and career goals so different from her own. Fortunately, we were using a mentoring curriculum that focused on empowering youth to build social capital in their lives. The mentor was able to help her mentee map out his social supports and develop concrete skills for networking that would enable the mentee to access relevant information and opportunities—all by growing and better accessing his own social network.
Social capital refers to the positive value that we derive from our social connections, including critical information, emotional support, access to academic and career opportunities, and other resources (Bourdieu, 1986). Social capital is critical to academic and job success. And yet, many young people do not have the skills and/or access to build the social capital necessary for navigating toward their goals. As early as adolescence, students with marginalized identities (e.g., youth from socio-economically disadvantaged families and neighborhoods, BIPOC youth, first-generation college students) tend to report reduced access to the kinds of informal mentoring relationships that are critical to academic and career success (Raposa et al., 2018; Rios-Aguilar & Deil-Amen, 2012). Without a focus on the broader social networks of mentees, mentoring programs may therefore run the risk of providing social support at one point in time, without rectifying this inequitable distribution of social capital.
Fortunately, tools are emerging to help mentors (and others who work with youth regularly) teach youth to recruit and maintain social relationships relevant to their personal, academic, or career goals. Youth-initiated mentoring (Schwartz et al., 2013), which teaches students to identify and recruit a mentor from within their existing social networks, can lead to stronger and more impactful mentoring relationships than assigning a more formalized volunteer mentor (who is typically a stranger to the youth). Likewise, a course called Connected Scholars (Schwartz et al., 2016, 2018) teaches skills that empower youth to identify, connect with, and maintain relationships with potential mentors in their lives, and has been shown to positively impact help-seeking attitudes, relationships with teachers, and even college GPA.
These types of interventions go beyond the focus on establishing a single, formal mentoring relationship, instead focusing on shifting students’ help-seeking attitudes and equipping them to develop a network of relationships catered to their evolving needs. The early data from these interventions are encouraging, and suggest that they may be a powerful way to redress existing inequities in access to social capital for college students from minoritized backgrounds, which in turn could promise better psychosocial and academic outcomes for historically marginalized groups of students.
Check out a new course opportunity Mentoring for social capital: leveraging youth’s own network to amplify the impact of mentoring, taught by Dr. Elizabeth Raposa, Associate Professor of Psychology at Fordham University. The ultimate aim of this course is to teach participants to help youth in their lives learn how social relationships can be helpful to them, while also equipping youth with skills to actually build and grow their social networks.