Mentors and mentees working together to develop institutional capital : the Equity Buddies Support Network

The Defying the Odds project was undertaken in order to promote success for refugee-background and EAL/D first year students through the use of peer mentoring by second and third year students. It was developed at Western Sydney University, New South Wales, Australia with support from an Australian Office of Learning and Teaching (OLT) Innovation grant. While the project’s focus was on students from refugee backgrounds or EAL/D first year students, it expanded to include students from low socio-economic backgrounds who were first in family to attend university. Thus, the cohorts that formed the Equity Buddies Support Network (herewith Equity Buddies) included students across a wide range of targeted groups in need of support. This chapter will explore how Western Sydney University (herewith, Western) Equity Buddies mentors with a disability assisted first year mentees to learn the hidden curriculum of being a university student and build their institutional capital. It will focus on a small group of mentors who have self-identified, via their Academic Integration Plans (AIPs) as having a disability. An AIP details a combination of adjustments and is sent to the unit coordinator (Western Sydney University, 2015a). Details about the actual disability remain confidential and are not provided to the unit coordinator. The chapter will begin by describing Equity Buddies followed by outlining the theoretical frameworks upon which Equity Buddies was conceived. It will then draw findings from the students-as-mentors group, who self-identified as having a disability, focusing on their ability to coach and mentor another student, building on their own and the other student’s social and cultural capital. In particular, we want to highlight how these students were able to draw upon their funds of knowledge (Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992), and their own institutional, social and cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1986; Curry, 2008) to build the institutional capital of their mentees. Some of these mentors had academic literacy issues themselves or were younger than their mentees. Nevertheless, the support they provided to their mentees went well beyond this narrow view of what first year students need to succeed. It drew on their implicit, often hidden, knowledges (McCarthy, Vickers, & Zammit, 2014) of the university as a learning context. At the same time, students developed their own understandings of the theoretical concepts of social and cultural capital.