Since January of 2017, I have been collaborating with the Refugee Development Center, a local grassroots, nonprofit organization. Together, we have built a research-practice partnership (Penuel & Gallagher, 2017) characterized by mutual goals relative to the social and academic well-being of immigrant-origin youth and families, most of whom have refugee-backgrounds. As partners, we iteratively develop research projects that attend to the literacy and language aspects of the center’s year-round English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) classes. The RDC is a major node in a network of local partnerships, including a longstanding one with Dean Esquith of the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities and other RCAH faculty.

The present study was situated within the third year (2020-2021) of a multi-year project, The Leadership Institute for Young Leaders, that was initiated in 2018 by Dean Esquith and the social worker at the HRC, Carly.

Given the constraints of the COVID-19 pandemic, like teachers in schools, community-based youth workers (Baldrige, 2018) have found it difficult to connect with and engage learners in meaningful literacy and language-focused learning opportunities. Therefore, the purpose of the present study was to explore how a super-diverse (Vertovec, 2007; 2019) group of doctoral students navigated their roles as volunteer mentors in a community-based Leadership Institute designed to foster refugee-background youth’s leadership qualities, interpersonal communication skills, and literacy and language development during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study asked: Given one-to-one pairings with a doctoral student mentor and multilingual, refugee-background youth mentee, what challenges and successes did doctoral student mentors experience in the context of community-engaged scholarship during the COVID-19 pandemic? What contributed to the successful building of rapport among mentor-mentee pairs, despite being limited to communicating in virtual contexts? What were the affordances of the virtual context that we may want to maintain in future years?

In fall of 2020, I recruited eight doctoral students from the College of Education to join the Leadership Institute collaboration as RDC volunteer mentors for and with the young leaders. Since meeting as a whole group in person (or virtually for that matter) was not possible, we decided to try a one-to-one mentorship model. Carly and I paired each doctoral student mentor with a high-school or community-college-age “young leader.”

All eight doctoral student mentors agreed to be participants in a qualitative study about their development as community-engaged scholars. Two of the mentors identify as cisgender male and six as cisgender female. Out of four female mentors who were born in the U.S., three identify as white and one identifies as a Muslim Palestinian-American. The other four mentors are transnational doctoral students from Nepal, India, Argentina, and Chile. Their ages range from 23 to 36.

Data sources included audio recordings of mentor-mentee sessions (for each mentor-mentee pair, a one-hour session weekly for approximately 12 to 14 weeks, but there were gaps and inconsistencies for some pairs), pre- and post-interviews with the mentors, monthly one-hour Leadership Institute team meetings; and mentors’ post-session written reflective memos. These data were collected from November 2020 to May 2021.