November 9, 2020
Research into Practice Webinar Series: Part 3 with Dr. Sarah E.O. Schwartz and Ben Dantzer
Part 3: Newer approaches to mentoring older adolescents with Dr. Sarah E.O. Schwartz and Ben Dantzer
This webinar discussed new approaches to mentoring that aim to empower adolescents and emerging adults to recruit mentors and other supportive adults. It focused on research from two such models, (1) Youth Initiated Mentoring, in which adolescents nominate mentors from their existing social networks, and (2) Connected Scholars, in which students are taught to recruit mentors and other forms of social capital to advance their academic and career-related goals.
Sarah E.O. Schwartz, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Suffolk University. Professor Schwartz focuses on ways in which mentoring relationships and networks of support foster healthy outcomes during the transition to adulthood. She conducted early and influential research on youth-initiated mentoring. More recently, she received funding from the WT Grant Foundation to evaluate an intervention she developed to teach first-generation college students to cultivate mentoring relationships and social capital in the transition to college.
Ben Dantzer is a Ph.D. student at the University of British Columbia. His dissertation research plans to investigate the benefits of youth-initiated mentoring using a more participatory approach to research that invites youth and other community members to act as "co-researchers" throughout the entire research process. His project seeks to deepen our understanding of youth-initiated mentoring and co-construct more culturally sensitive and locally-informed knowledge.
