A participatory action research (PAR)-influenced mentoring program for graduate students

Abstract

The study described a mentoring program of a state-funded research and its effects on research and reflective practices to graduate students. Participatory Action Research (PAR), designed as a methodical and program framework, engaged nine mentors (researchers of a state-funded research) and 29 graduate students (purposively invited) to training-based mentoring (workshops and field work), small group mentoring (within research cells), and peer mentoring (field work and software-aided coding analysis). Observations, mentors’ narrations, and reflection journals extracted the experiences of the participants on the mentoring program. These reflections revealed that mentors and mentees learned many skills in the mentoring program. They had transformed challenges and difficulties (time management, field work) into learning episodes leading to reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action. They realized the importance of the theory-practice-reflection paradigm in all research endeavors. Hence, PAR-influenced mentoring helped develop their research skills. However, low engagement of the others may be due to time aspect, which may be looked into in a replicated study.