Pairing middle school students with college students can make for interesting and diverse mentoring relationships. Such relationships can have a great impact on all students involved. Metro Youth Partnership in Moorhead, Minnesota, successfully runs such a mentoring program called LinkingUp, which was started five years ago and pairs future teachers from Concordia College with middle school students whom teachers and counselors have identified as showing great academic potential. These students may not have a network of support and the knowledge of what takes to go to college. Mentors show them what it is like to be a college student and encourage them to see college in their future. The mission of the LinkingUp program is two-fold: using the mentoring relationships to enhance the educational experience of college students and encouraging the middle school students to explore their college potential through their connection to a positive role model.
LinkingUp addresses some of the differences between the mentors and mentees, but also takes care not to let differences define the program. “We want to be able to deal with it, to acknowledge it,” says Barry Nelson, coordinator of Moorhead Healthy Community Initiative. But LinkingUp also wants the middle schoolers to know that the low-income background most of them have in common is not the defining reason for their presence in the program.
Kristina Hein, LinkingUp coordinator, stresses the importance of an open mentoring in which questions can be asked. “There was a girl who, when I was handing out snacks, said, ‘Kristina, I’m so hungry, but I can’t eat anything.’ I wasn’t exactly sure about her religion or culture, so I asked some questions and found out that she was fasting. It was the perfect opportunity for me to learn about her culture and for her to share and be proud of it.” Being open, asking questions, and receiving an answer in return can clarify a great deal in a mentoring relationship. And it’s all about asking the questions in the right way. Instead of asking, “What do your parents do for a living?” (which assumes that a child lives with his or her parents and can be a sensitive subject), mentors are coached to ask, “Who do you live with?” or “What does your family do during the day?”
“We want mentors to know how to address the questions, and we stress being able to ask the questions in the right way,” says Kristina. LinkingUp staff have found that the college students involved in the program gain invaluable experience from their mentoring relationships, learning about the kinds of teacher they would like to become, as well as what kinds of students they would like to teach.
One of the hopes for the program is that the positive mentoring relationship will influence both the middle school students and college students in making productive choices for their futures. The first middle school program participants are just a year or two shy of graduating from high school. LinkingUp has been following these students and is excited to learn how the program has influenced their decisions about life after high school.
Kristina Hein, coordinator of LinkingUp, can be contacted at 218-299-5437 or at
mhcikristina@cableone.net
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