Undergraduate Curricular Peer Mentoring Programs

Whether or not a college currently offers a Supplemental Instruction program, uses peer leaders in First-year Learning Community, or assigns Peer Tutors to courses, Undergraduate Peer MentoringPrograms will provide educators with concepts, examples, and findings useful for program development, innovation and enhancement. Contributors describe an international and interdisciplinary set of programs from the perspectives of program administrators, instructors, students and teaching assistants, while the editor reviews four decades of research, incorporating examples into theory and practice sections.

Tania Smith is assistant professor of communications studies in the Department of Communication and Culture and has been involved in developing peer mentoring programs, hosting peer mentors, and teaching peer mentors across the University of Calgary since 2005. With a background in English literature, rhetoric and writing studies, she has studied innovative program and course development involving service-learning, mentoring and other forms of collaborative learning. She has co-authored with two senior peer mentors a textbook titled Curricular Peer Mentoring: A Handbook for Undergraduate Peer Mentors Serving and Learning in Courses (Trafford, 2009) and is author of a 2008 Innovative Higher Education article on the pilot year of the arts peer mentoring program.