The Project Promote web site is a University of Georgia Senior Teaching Fellows project designed to support the mentoring of early career faculty.

The project arose out of conversations that took place between Lloyd Rieber, Bill Jackson, Trish Kalivoda, and the Senior Fellows group at one of the annual spring retreats (Greg Broughton, David Hazinski, Catherine Jones, Ron McClendon, Stephen Olejnik, Rosemary Phelps, Margaret Robinson).

The impetus behind Project Promote is the recognition that new faculty at the University of Georgia and at other universities face many daunting challenges. One of the most salient aspects of the new Assistant Professor experience is the absence of the support structure that existed for these individuals in graduate school. While new professors may have senior faculty available to them as resource persons, they also recognize that senior faculty have varying levels of power over them. Thus new faculty often have questions or needs that they are hesitant to articulate.

The Project Promote web site is designed to help address this situation by acting as a mentoring community for new faculty. The website connects faculty to many resources, but the anchor resource of the site is the Question and Answer Center, where early career faculty can post questions and a select group of senior faculty respond to these questions. Early career faculty are given the option to choose, when posting a question, whether to reveal their identity or other parts of their user profile. Senior faculty, on the other hand, are always identified when they post responses. At the present time, participating senior faculty are drawn from the ranks of the UGA Teaching Academy.

The Q&A Center is not a threaded discussion forum. Rather, the Q&A Center is structured around early career faculty questions and multiple senior faculty responses to these questions. The person who asks a question has the option of adding comments or clarifications to the question being posed; but this person is the only one given this option. Thus a searchable archive is allowed to grow that consists of questions and their answers. Typically, multiple perspectives will be brought to bear on a particular question. A disclaimer at the bottom of each Q&A Center page reminds participants that these answers are opinions only, and matters of UGA policy must be verified with the appropriate sources.

In addition to the Question & Answer Center, Project Promote features other resources and tools. Chief among these is a set of resource menus that have been carefully assembled with UGA faculty in mind, especially those who are new to the university. The three main sections of the menus are: 1) faculty-specific UGA resources; 2) general UGA resources; and 3) resources external to the university. Any UGA faculty member, regardless of rank, may find these menus useful.

Project Promote is supported by the University of Georgia Office of the Vice President for Instruction in cooperation with the Center for Teaching and Learning.

Project Promote at UGA