The Chronicle of Mentoring & Coaching, Vol. 2, October 2019, Special Issue 1 108 T HE C HRONICLE of MENTORING & COACHING TM Valuing the Whole Student: Adapting Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy to Peer Mentoring Stephens, V. Dickinson College This presentation illuminates key ways Gloria Ladson-Billings’ influential theory of culturally sustaining pedagogy, previously known as cultural relevant pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 1995, 2014), could inform the way peer mentors working with historically underrepresented students perform their work. I argue that an intentional cultural relevancy lens could improve and transform the way mentors help mentees acculturate to the campus culture, seek resources, and communicate with faculty, all of which improve retention and success. Culturally sustaining pedagogy initially grew out of efforts to think more critically about the way teacher education programs train teachers to address the cultural needs of their underrepresented students. The positive impact of the culturally sustaining approach is a potentially useful approach beyond the classroom that could enrich the ways practitioners and their students support the needs of historically underrepresented students. The presentation aspires to help administrators and faculty who lead peer mentoring and education work, and peer leaders themselves, integrate the culturally relevant lens into their training curriculum and programmatic practices. Literature Review A variety of U.S. colleges and universities have embraced the “inclusive excellence” paradigm to ground their eforts to diversify their student, faculty and staf populations, expand curriculum and integrate inclusive practices. Inclusive excellence “refects a striving for excellence in higher education that has been made more inclusive by decades of work to infuse diversity into recruiting, admissions, and hiring; into the curriculum and co-curriculum; and into administrative structures and practices. It also embraces newer forms of excellence, and expanded ways to measure excellence, that take into account research on learning and brain functioning, the assessment movement, and more nuanced accountability structures” (Williams, Berger, & McClendon, 2005, p. iii). Over the past decade Dickinson College, a residential liberal arts college located in central Pennsylvania with approximately 2,300 enrolled students, has experienced a signifcant increase in the population of students from historically underrepresented populations. These include students of color, international students, and frst generation students. Retaining underrepresented students is integral to inclusive practices, and a variety of approaches can foster retention, including peer mentoring programs. In fall 2019, the Director of Dickinson’s Popel Shaw Center for Race & Ethnicity submitted a program proposal to the Vice President of Student Life for the Academic and Co-Curricular Excellence (A.C.E) peer mentoring program. A.C.E focuses on retaining frst-year students from underrepresented populations by pairing mentees with trained upper-class mentors. In spring 2019, the Director hired 20 students to serve as mentors for 2019-20 and each participated in a mandatory two hour weekly seminar for six weeks. The Director selected Students Helping Students: A guide for peer educators on college campuses (Newton & Ender, 2010) as the primary seminar text. Because the mentors focus on targeted populations, the Director decided to introduce students to several interrelated concepts to enrich their ability to serve mentees. These concepts, including Dee and Daly’s (2012) notion of “cultural agents” in higher education and Bufy Smith’s (2013) writing on college’s hidden curriculum and the three-cycle mentoring model (Tyson, 2014), were synthesized under the umbrella of Gloria Ladson-Billings’ culturally relevant, and culturally sustaining pedagogy. During the frst training session, the Director reviewed the institutional context for the A.C.E program’s genesis, reviewed common challenges for frst-year students (Newton & Ender, 2010, p. 45-52) and explored common concerns for historically underrepresented students who attend predominant white institutions (PWIs) (Hawkins & Larabee, 2009, pp 180-186). This exposure helped students clarify the diference between a structurally diverse student body, compared to a student body that feels genuinely included. The Director built from this by exposing students to Bufy Smith’s defnition of hidden curriculum as “the unwritten norms, values, and expectations that unofcially govern the interactions among students, faculty, professional staf, and administrators” that is “typically revealed to students who possess the institutional cultural capital and social capital that is rewarded in higher education” (Smith, 2013, p. xiv). Linking this information to Dee and Daly’s (2012) observations about the struggles students of color experience accessing these diferent forms of capital (p.168-170) helped introduce peer mentors to the notion of them serving as “cultural agents.” Dee and Daly defne a cultural agent as an “Individual who has the capacity and commitment to transmit cultural knowledge of an institution or system to others” (Dee & Daly, 2012, p. 168). Examples of this knowledge includes “Norms and expectations regarding studying, involvement in academic work, and participation in campus life” (Dee & Daly, 2012, p.168). Some of the ways peer mentors can assist mentors includes helping them decode the textual nuances of their coursework, build their campus network and see the validity of their own cultures (Dee & Daly, 2012, p. 171-176). After engaging the peer mentors in