For starters, I’m not quite sure how this will take shape by the time I’m finished with it. As this is a reflection, I’m just typing as I reflect my thoughts and allowing those thoughts to flow onto the keyboard. Starting in the Fall semester of 2023, my research teammates and I began a mentorship program with the high school age students at the Boys and Girls Club of Alton, Illinois. This paper seeks to act as a reflection on that experience spanning both semesters. I should clarify that, for the sake of saving time and myself from having to type seven words repeatedly, I will refer to the Boys and Girls Club of Alton, IL as the BGCA. With that out of the way, we can get down to business.
My expectations heading into the mentorship experience were quite different from how it turned out. In my head, I imagined the students being very welcoming to us as well as having a good idea of what we were doing there; in saying that, I mean that I figured the regular supervisors would have explained to the students what the purpose of us being there was and somewhat prepared them to work with us. I thought there would be a relatively even ratio of boys and girls that would be there each week consistently, especially due to the organization’s moniker of “The Boys and Girls Club.” I also, maybe selfishly so, thought the organization’s facilities would look different than they did.
In reality, the students weren’t as welcoming as we would have hoped they’d be, they didn’t seem too convinced that we could be of any use to them off the bat, and they were hesitant to even spare us a moment of their attention. We had to spend almost all of the first semester just trying to connect with them on a personal level; some of my peers had an easier go at this with the female students, but it was incredibly difficult for me with the male students. While most of the students and my group members would stay in the “teen room” at the BGCA, I would follow the boys out to the playground and try to play basketball with them in an effort to make them view me less as an authority figure and more as a peer. Once we got past the awkward introduction stage, which took place for multiple weeks due to some students being there one day and gone the other, interactions got better. I began having small but tangible conversations with a few of the boys, and started to get an idea of where they were at mentally. One aspect that came up repeatedly was the fact that most of the boys didn’t feel very comfortable speaking with some of my group mates because they didn’t feel any similarity towards them, specifically the women in my group. While this wasn’t a terribly foreign notion to me, it still caught me off guard momentarily, and I had to reflect on why that was until we went back the next week. The more I thought of it, the more I started to realize that at the age those students are at, early highschool years, a lot of them are trying to figure out what they may be; and in that process, they look to people they can see themselves in. It became more and more evident that the reason it felt like the male students of color had some sort of proclivity towards me was because I was one of the only mentors they could resonate with.
Reflecting on this, as well as on previous CODES work I’ve done, it makes a lot of sense. Research that my group mates and I did last semester during our class with Dr. Aranda revealed just that to us. We found in multiple academic journals that mentorship programs are most successful when the mentees get to pick their mentors, and we learnt that one key aspect of peer mentoring is development of a shared viewpoint (https://doi.org/10.18060/21539 ). While research is one thing, seeing it in real time is another; so it still came as somewhat of a surprise when that was the actual case for us.
Once we started emphasizing the idea of finding shared perspectives with the students, we noticed they began opening up significantly more. The mentees grew from quiet kids that seemed disinterested in us, to smiling, talkative, teenagers that seemed to look forward to our time with them each week. For anyone who may look to try mentoring, especially with mentees around this same age group, I would implore them to value patience with the kids, because it takes time for them to start feeling comfortable around adults they hardly know. I would emphasize the use of icebreakers and/or games early on to find common ground with the students, and that may result in stronger bonds being formed earlier on.
The mentorship program was a success as a whole, and I felt like I gained a lot of valuable experiences from it while also providing good advice and mentorship for the students. I think it was some of what I expected in the idea that I would gain something as well as the students gaining something, and this is definitely something I would take part in again if I had the opportunity to do so.
- -Garrison Hill, 2024