Not Waiting for a Seat at the Table and Creating Our Own Table: Envisioning and Creating an Asian Female-Centered Community of Practice [Full title]

There was a time when mentoring in academia, whether as a higher education officer or as a faculty, meant assimilating to a white-dominated style of mentorship that often did not take into account Asian cultural values. In addition, many Asian leadership styles are frequently viewed as lacking and unsuitable for the Western workplace. A missing component that can help provide structural support to Asian feminist women is mentorship that is specific to the needs of Asian women. Through Dr. Trang Le-Chan’s research on Community of Practices, we applied her expertise to address this need by creating an Asian woman-centered mentorship organization called AAMPOWER (Asian American Mentorship Providing Opportunities to Women for Empowerment and Resilience). A Community of Practice (CoP) can naturally evolve because of the members' common interests in a particular domain or area, or it can be created deliberately to gain knowledge related to a specific field. Through sharing information and experiences with the group, members learn from each other and have an opportunity to develop personally and professionally. In addition, a CoP centers on a group of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.
Mentorship for Asian women is duly lacking and may be the reason why so few Asian women get promoted in academia. During these precarious times of growing white supremacy and anti-Asian sentiment, Asian women need mentorship to provide a safe and inclusive space for discussing and sharing issues concerning the Asian and Asian American experience in higher education. This panel aims to discuss the role of mentorship, share supportive measures that have worked for us, and find ways for other groups to sustain their own mentorship circles with funding. We want to center this panel on sharing how we created AAMPOWER and identifying what we have learned from the workshops we have given based on the needs of this specific group of Asian women. We will discuss how to be a good mentor, how to ask for one, ways to lead with resilience, navigating microaggressions, and practicing different ways to set boundaries. We hope that sharing what we have learned can inspire other Asian groups to create mentorship circles that can address the specific needs of Asian women.