Undergraduate Curricular Peer Mentoring Programs

Curricular peer mentoring is a programmatic approach to enrich student learning and engagement in postsecondary courses in which instructors welcome a more experienced undergraduate student into a credit course they are teaching. The student then serves as peer mentor to the students enrolled. Peer mentors can provide a variety of peer-appropriate, course-specific mentoring, tutoring, facilitation and leadership roles and activities that complement the roles of the course’s instructor and teaching assistants both in classroom settings and beyond. A program provides training and ongoing support for a larger number of peer mentors and instructional teams and manages recruitment and program research and quality. This volume provides research findings, definitions, theories, and practical program descriptions as a foundation for program development and research of undergraduate curricular peer mentoring programs in higher education. This work builds on a long history of higher education program development and collects a significant amount of literature that has previously been scattered.

Andrew Barry is Lecturer in Sociology at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He has published widely on technology, politics and social theory.