Demystifying the higher education system: Rethinking academic cultural capital, social capital, and the academic mentoring process.

摘要

This dissertation addresses the persistent problem of de facto academic cultural segregation within higher education. Today, many students of color and White students attend the same colleges and universities, yet they do not have equal access to the hidden curriculum, that is, the unwritten and unspoken norms, values, and expectations of the institution. Providing students access to the hidden curriculum is crucial for helping students improve their ability and performance in the formal curriculum. In order to address this problem, I examine how formal academic mentoring relationships influence the quality and types of institutionalized academic cultural capital (e.g., students learning the "appropriate" ways to discuss their grades with professors) that is transmitted from mentors to mentees.; I construct a new academic mentoring model based on Pierre Bourdieu's notion of institutionalized cultural capital and social capital and educational theorists' concepts of mentoring and the hidden curriculum. The four stages of this model are advising, advocacy, apprenticeship and surrogate parenthood. Data for this analysis are drawn from in-depth interviews with twelve undergraduate mentees and eight administrators and faculty mentors who participated in traditional mentor programs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The major findings of the study are the following: (1) Students have to have a level of competency in both the hidden and formal curricula; (2) Mentees within the same mentor program have differential access to institutionalized academic cultural capital; (3) There is a hierarchy of skill sets and knowledge bases that are associated with the domain of the hidden curriculum; and (4) Mentors and mentees tend to remain at the advising stage and mentors transmit low-levels of academic cultural capital to their mentees at every stage. The findings indicate that academic mentor programs should be restructured to include a standard academic mentoring curriculum which would improve the quality and types of institutionalized academic cultural capital that is transmitted to all students within the program.