Designing Trauma-Informed Online Support and Mentorship for African Applied Science PhD Scholars

Rsif has over 260 scholars undertaking their doctoral studies in 15 AHUs across Sub-Sahara Africa, and twenty-nine IPIs where the scholars are hosted as part of their research work. These doctoral scholars navigate across countries, systems, and cultures in their pursuit of their PhDs. As a result, they are connected through the program but are seldom physically located in the same place.

Doctoral work is complex and overwhelming. Program attrition rates are high (van Rooij et al., 2021). Our students are from diverse backgrounds, and many student’s narratives include overcoming huge adversities. Moreover, as these students travel the world for their studies, their risk of experiencing negative circumstances that interfere with their educational journey rises from factors including separation from the familiar and difficulty belonging (Winchester-Seeto et al., 2014). A trauma-informed learning approach assumes that an individual is more likely than not to have experienced trauma in their life and plans a learning climate and approach that accounts for this assumption (Lynch & Richardson, 2024). This seemed critical when looking at all the factors our scholars were navigating. We wanted our platform to be a trauma-informed learning ecology that would support scholars with the connectedness and mentorship they needed to be successful in their academic pathways; understanding that every student who is supported through challenging situations and is enabled to complete their PhD journey contributed to our scholarship’s success.

A multi-tiered system of support framework is frequently used to create trauma-informed learning ecologies (NCTSN, 2017). In this framework, three levels of support are provided to learners: The first tier is universal resources for all students, to reduce the likelihood of unnecessary harm or stress for students. The second tier is early intervention to support at risk scholars. The third tier is intensive supports. The Rsif platform was designed focusing on tier 1 universal supports for all scholars, to be a virtual place for community and shared growth. It expanded to include tier 2 supports related to gender-based mentoring.

Dr. Hannah Grossman identifies as an applied researcher and learning scientist, merging cognitive science-derived learning principles with community participatory design approaches. These dual lenses are seen in her dissertation work encompassing both a quasi-experimental study in the role of contextual information in learning from video and an instructional technology project to mitigate barriers in access to information around skill-based learning for underserved learners (Grossman, 2019). In collaboration with Gambian development professionals, Hannah identified local skills that could be shared through video and developed educational videos for an audience of rural, low-literacy women. The project followed best practices in participatory video design including collecting community voice, preferences, and values (Lunch & Lunch, 2006; Van Mele, 2006). These practices shaped the learning content and the context for the videos’ creation. The way that content was presented, the order of information, the information being shared, and the ways in which information was shared were guided by cognitive science-derived principles of best practice (Kirschner et al., 2009; Mayer, 2009). The efficacy of this approach was demonstrated through high learning outcomes observed across experimental groups and by learners’ reported ease of content assimilation (Grossman, 2016).

After concluding her dissertation, Hannah became a workforce development instructional designer—training behavioral health professionals in trauma-informed approaches at the UCLA-Duke University National Center for Child Traumatic Stress. She continued to design processes and systems with a strong theoretical basis in cognitive science developed using intentional collaborative design principles (Grossman & Layne, 2018; Grossman & Brown, 2023).

Hannah continued to collaborate in African educational technology contexts after her doctoral work. When a collaborator learned that Rsif programmatic leadership saw a need for an online platform that could support virtual community and provide overarching support for scholars as they progressed through their PhD process, this collaborator recommended Hannah and her trauma-informed design approach. She had experienced it firsthand and helped integrate it into their collaborative co-research process (Pallitt et al., 2023). From the project onset, the application of a trauma-informed lens for the project and about the design and adoption processes were intended inclusions and outcomes identified as important goals by both the contractor and Rsif programmatic leadership.

Ms. Wangari Wanjiku initially joined the project as an intern. Wangari was selected due to her previous involvement in science education within nearby villages, where she actively engaged with the community and gained valuable insights into gathering user feedback in local settings and developing systems tailored to local contexts. Being a beneficiary of community goodwill herself, she possessed a strong desire to make a difference in people’s lives and empower communities, one individual at a time.

The platform design and usage adoption conducted by this pair was supported by an IT Tech and by Dr. Everlyn Nguku, who oversaw the platform project. Everlyn is a capacity building specialist at Rsif. Her expertise in the program components and academic settings involved in the program provided her with a strong understanding of what strategies would work with the Rsif community, the aspects that needed more support, and how to work with the organization to make our goals obtainable. Everlyn’s participation was always a pleasure, but was limited by the complexity and workload of her other responsibilities.

The Rsif Team comprised 25 staff members, with the largest group being the seven-member capacity building team. Their roles encompassed various tasks within the program’s day-to-day operations, such as onboarding and orienting new scholars; matching scholars with IPIs; organizing courses, seminars, and workshops for scholars; ensuring timely payment of stipends and submission of quarterly reports; and establishing research networks between the program and associated universities and institutes. Due to the nature of their responsibilities, the capacity-building team took the lead in platform planning and activities.

Given the extensive scope of their work, the capacity-building team had to efficiently manage multiple roles among themselves and was already handling a substantial workload. This climate factor was relevant to both our design process and adoption strategies, as we had to consider that introducing additional tasks would necessitate extra hours invested both in team member self-learning and in training users (especially those that required extensive use of unfamiliar technology). We designed under the constant constraint that assigning several supplementary tasks to individuals would strain the team’s resources and capabilities. Thus, we had to be intentional about the features and tools we integrated into our platform.

Hannah’s work in trauma education guided our selection of models and our approach to identifying practices to incorporate in our platform work. We used two trauma-informed frameworks created in behavioral health spaces to determine what platform supports might be appropriate: The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) Trauma-Informed Approach Guide (2014) and the Integrative Trauma and Healing Framework (McGlynn-Wright & Briner, 2021). Both trauma-informed frameworks were informed by behavioral health experts skilled at applying research findings and lived experience to create practical recommendations based upon social emotional supportive interactional principles. While these models were not designed specifically related to learning science, we took models validated in behavioral health settings and used learning science to bridge how they could be enacted in our learning ecology.

SAMHSA is a USA government organization that funds and oversees trauma work in the United States. In 2014, they released a guide for the purpose of developing a working concept of trauma-informed approaches and a shared understanding of these concepts such that they would be appropriate to support best practices across service systems. To create this guide, they integrated three branches of knowledge: trauma-focused research, practice-generated expertise, and lessons shared from those with lived experience of trauma and its impacts. This rigorous bridging of sectors and framings, using behavioral health expertise to support the translation of practice across service sectors, created a robust theoretical framing of trauma-informed approaches having both theoretical validity and real-world utility (SAMHSA 2014).

This SAMHSA guide includes six key principles fundamental to trauma-informed approaches:

To create a trauma-informed approach in an online support system, we analyzed how we could transfer our conceptual understanding of a trauma-informed learning ecology into the context of the design and adoption of an online support and mentorship platform for this group of scholars. We decided to do this by incorporated practices that built these components into interactional experiences and settings. We used these six categories as conceptual framing to determine the features and platform components we would include. For example, to improve transparency, we provided supervisors with tools and system training to facilitate communication about their program requirements. Another conceptual area we focused-on extensively was how to foster the creation of informal places and community for peers to interact and build peer support.

The second trauma-informed model we applied was the Integrative Trauma and Healing Framework, authored by applied behavioral health providers and researchers Teddy McGlynn-Wright and Leslie Briner. The framework is based in applied crisis intervention work and developed within a community of practitioners. It has four foundational statements that create a refined understanding of what trauma is and how to support healing from it. The four statements are as follows:

“1. Trauma and healing are embodied on 5 levels: individual, collective, systemic, intergenerational and/or historical.

2. Trauma is the harmful interruption of safety, agency, dignity and/or belonging-- fundamental needs of all human beings.

3. Trauma is experienced in the body-brain, overwhelming our ability to cope with and integrate thoughts, sensations, and emotions connected to an experience.

4. Pathways to healing occur anytime we do anything that restores and/or promotes safety, agency, dignity and belonging and moves bodies towards integration and wholeness.” (In The Works, 2021, https://​intheworksllc.​squarespace.​com/​inflections/​2021/​3/​30/​integrative-trauma-and-healing-framework).

This model places trauma and healing in an ecological framework—in our case, our community of staff, our scholarship organization, our PhD supervisors at both AHUs and IPIs, our scholars across subject matter and cohort, our alumni, and the larger applied science academic and industrial communities. We used the Integrative Trauma and Healing Framework’s definition of trauma–any harmful violation of safety, agency, dignity, and/or belonging, and their pathways to healing, building safety, agency, dignity, and/or belonging–to identify the actions we wanted to mitigate and the actions we wanted to engender in the platform.

With the aim of creating a powerful system that encompasses all the objectives of mentorship, we embarked on a literature review centered on mentorship practices within the context of African higher education. The examined papers and articles pointed towards five categories of mentorship that our program could incorporate to support our scholars: 1. Formal mentorship (as opposed to just scholar supervision), 2) Peer mentorship, 3. Informal mentorship, 4) Field-specific mentoring, and 5) Mentoring women. We delved into each of these categories in detail and considered how we could incorporate them into the platform to empower our users and community.

In accordance with Rsif policy, all faculty associated with the program agree to provide supervision to scholars in their programs. Within the higher education landscape in Africa, the literature examined indicated that there is overlap in the categories of mentorship and supervision. Some sources view mentorship as embedded in a doctoral supervisor’s role. It entails helping students’ growth and development by listening, motivating, helping scholars develop and troubleshoot their research projects, supporting networking for the scholar, and playing the role of mediator within their field of study (Al Makhamreh & Stockley, 2020; Hund et al., 2018). Other researchers view a supervisor’s role as more limited, describing it as the process of supporting postgraduates throughout their research by engaging in guiding communication. The supervisory role is limited to supporting their supported scholars’ research journey and development as researchers (Petrucka, 2019; Maistry and Eidsvik, 2017).

These differences in definition became a factor because Rsif supports faculty across international contexts and institutional policies. Our faculty balance programmatic responsibilities—such as reporting and supervision duties—and institutional ones—often including formal mentorship responsibilities. The workload associated with formal mentorship responsibilities in both contexts was seen as unreasonable, especially without the resources to provide extra compensation for the role expansion. Given this context, we focused our faculty platform features on easy-to-adopt supervision tools. Acknowledging that supervision can be professionally defined to exclude providing social emotional support to scholars, we prioritized those features that also supported mentorship capabilities.

Peer mentorship was another component identified as integral in effectively supporting scholars. It is defined as a helping relationship in which individuals with similar characteristics (such as age or experience) come together, either informally or through formal mentoring schemes, in the pursuit of fulfilling some combination of functions that are career‐related—such as information sharing and career strategizing—and social-emotional—such as commiseration, emotional support, and friendship (Kram, 1983; Terrion & Leonard, 2007). Within the framework of higher education, the overarching goal of peer mentorship is to build systems and provide spaces for both formal and informal interactions and relationships to flourish (Bystydzienski & Desai, 2015; Manabe et al., 2018).

Another component of effective mentorship we identified was informal mentoring. Informal mentoring is spontaneous, lasts longer, and is usually initiated by participants, while formal mentoring relationships tend to be shorter and are developed by the assignment of protégés to mentors (Moorosi, 2012 and Ragins & Cotton, 1999, Allen et al., 2004). Informal mentorship seemed well-aligned with our programmatic needs and goals, so we designed multiple platform elements to engender informal mentorship opportunities. We incorporated virtual social spaces, emphasizing respectful and friendly informal interactions among our users guided by our understandings of trauma informed settings. By embracing this approach, we acknowledged that informal mentoring relationships did not need to be bound by programmatic understandings of what was supportive but instead offered opportunities for self-created and determined authentic interactions.

Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) academic fields play a role in enabling global innovation and research. All Rsif thematic areas are designated STEM fields. Furthermore, research indicates that mentoring relationships significantly impact mental health and contribute to the recruitment and retention of students from underrepresented backgrounds in STEM fields (Hund et al., 2018; Giraldo et al., 2020). Therefore, fostering effective mentoring should be a central objective for STEM faculty and institutions, given its positive influence on field-based learning and providing social emotional support (Hund et al., 2018).

To facilitate field-specific mentoring within the academic disciplines, we decided to create both formal and informal community spaces for each of the five Rsif Thematic areas: ICTs, including big data and artificial intelligence; food security and agribusiness; minerals, mining, and materials engineering; energy, including renewables; and climate change. These dedicated groups serve as virtual spaces for scholars to engage in field-specific sharing and connect with experts and mentors within their respective fields increasing the likelihood of the trauma-informed peer support.

One of the primary goals of the Rsif program was to address imbalances in the number of women and disadvantaged groups in STEM fields in Africa. The platform’s design is such that Rsif can offer mentorship specifically tailored for female scholars. In Sub-Saharan Africa, women face barriers to entry and advancement in STEM fields. This presents a social justice concern and impedes progress in solving Africa’s complex development challenges (Beintema and Marcantonio, 2010; Drame et al., 2015; Okeke et al., 2017). Literature documents that a lack of mentoring alongside family obligations deter women’s academic careers (Bredella et al., 2019). To ensure equitable opportunities for our community, we considered how mentoring in the context of our institutions could enhance the careers of faculty members who have been historically excluded or marginalized, especially women. We designed the platform to offer secure spaces for women by utilizing exclusive channels, resource libraries, and groups that would allow for both formal and informal interactions.

This review of mentorship in STEM postgraduate programs across the African continent provided a framework for our thinking about the possible features we could incorporate into the platform to support our mentorship goals. When combined with our trauma-informed frameworks, these helped us define the types of supports we would include in the platform and the ways we could incorporate them to help reduce the difficulty of the PhD process and support our scholars’ resilience through the process.

The design goal of the platform project was to create an online system that would support PhD scholars in their efforts to become academic researchers and professionals. These skills include the subject-matter specific skills, but also the social emotional skills they need to be successful in the academic workforce (Maor et al., 2016). Additionally, the platform had to allow for the process of academic supervision, mentorship, field specific networking, and collaboration. It needed to provide scholars with social emotional and academic support by means of information sharing, enrichment opportunities, and insight into academic systems. The platform was to be an online place for professionals to interact with other professionals as they engaged in formal, informal, and peer mentorship, to widen people’s options for support.

In this work, we used each trauma-informed strategy principle and foundational statement as a conceptual bin for identifying and organizing the potential technical features we might include in the platform. We explored how we could provide or increase each of the six SAMHSA trauma-informed approaches and the four Integrative Trauma and Healing Framework strategies for healing across supervisorial responsibilities, formal mentorship opportunities, peer mentorship promotion, and providing opportunities for informal mentorship, field-specific learning, and supporting female scholars. Table 1 summaries the supports and functionality we included based on our literature review and our application of the trauma-informed frameworks.

After careful review of multiple available platforms, the Rsif organization decided to use the MS Teams, SharePoint, Delve, and Viva Engage applications to assemble an online support and mentorship platform. We integrated the Apps together and created usage suggestions to align the components together into an online support system. This can be can be seen in Table 2.

Following the completion of the platform design and identification of our usage goals, we transitioned to working towards programmatic platform adoption, using a participatory approach with our community–defined as our staff collaborators, our scholars, AHU and IPI supervisors and mentors, program alumni, and funders. The following section will discuss our adoption iterative events and the learning associated with them. This information is summarized with additional details about methodology and feedback-based decision-making in Table 3.

Our platform adoption work began with Rsif staff members, the organizational team needed to ensure that the platform, once created, could be sustained and maintained. We focused on enhancing the capacity of the Rsif staff to integrate the platform into their professional roles and work tasks.

We created example platform materials exemplifying our usage goals. Then we conducted a staff training session with experiential learning in the usage of platform components, including formal communication channels, document repositories, and two community spaces: one an staff community space to foster peer support and another for the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology campus to foster location-based belonging.

After participants successfully signed in, they engaged in activities to familiarize the staff with the platform. We incorporated feedback from the staff to refine our designs and goals. We encouraged staff members to envision how the platform could support their Rsif roles, and we provided additional one-on-one support sessions to assist them in navigating the platform. We guided these interactional choices aligned with the trauma-informed frameworks. It guided our reasoning to begin with our staff—to avoid harming their dignity in making programmatic changes without their voice, to amplify staff agency in guiding future platform interactions, and to support the development of psychological safety related to their personal technology skills and professionalism.

The feedback we received from our staff was critical in adapting our design. Most relevant was that signing onto the platform was challenging; the Teams desktop app did not allow users to be signed on to multiple Teams accounts simultaneously, and included automatic integration with other Microsoft products, which made it confusing and difficult to launch. Given that all our staff and many of our users would need to be able to use multiple Teams accounts, this was a substantial problem. Once signed on, staff felt that the platform navigation was manageable.

Staff’s primary feedback in this adoption event was that integrating the platform into their work settings and contexts would require time. We adjusted our priorities and focused on creating the staff infrastructure for the platform as recommended through the lens of collaboration and mutuality. We determined that we were unready to support a large-scale adoption of the platform and instead focused on increasing internal capacity.

Approximately six months after our staff training, we held another adoption event, this time with a group of scholars and supervisors. In this group we ambitiously labeled Platform Development Pioneers, we hoped to foster belonging and connection amongst early platform adopters. We used this group to collect feedback and share skills through participation in platform use. Like the staff event, we had our Pioneers explore platform features through an experiential learning scavenger hunt. We conducted these introduction sessions split over two days with a total of 62 participants. Overall, the feedback was positive, with requests to onboard more people, create user guides, and develop platform activities to encourage participation. Specific suggestions were provided for incorporating activities onto the platform and sharing relevant materials (especially those supporting the integral process of matching students to supervisors and aligned programs).

Following the introductory session with our Pioneers, we conducted an inquiry into the needs of supervisors using the platform. Due to the diverse settings and technological proficiency of associated faculty, we identified varying levels of complexity in platform adoption. Some supervisors were already technologically savvy and found using the platform less challenging, while others had limited technology experience. To increase adoption among supervisors, we prioritized a small number of user-friendly platform features aligned with their roles. These features were determined through interviews, focus groups, and discussions with supervisors and staff–guided by the principle of empowerment, voice, and choice.

Recognizing that supervisors would benefit from familiarity with the platform before their scholars started using it and that their dignity might be harmed if they were not offered the opportunity to approach this change from their place as experts, we organized a training session for supervisor site coordinators. To assist coordinators, we compiled a library of platform use aids covering different aspects of the platform. Two sessions were conducted for supervisors to onboard and learn how to use the platform. Feedback indicated that supervisors faced challenges due to mentorship requests from their home institutions and uncertainty regarding reliable adoption at their sites. However, a significant portion of participants expressed interest in the platform’s potential and provided suggestions for its usage, including utilizing it for official paperwork and transparent communications at the site level.

Following the training with supervisors, the Rsif staff team decided to leverage the platform to support their roles and communication with AHUs, IPIs, and scholars. In capacity-building meetings, the staff identified specific areas where the platform could be easily integrated, such as storing program resources and materials on the platform’s SharePoint, utilizing Rsif emails to access scholarly resources, and creating dedicated Teams to address capacity-building needs, including FAQs about matching and stipends. Seminars for students and other student-alumni meetings were also moved to the platform to enhance familiarity.

At the current point, the platform design is complete, but its use integration process is ongoing. Hannah has concluded her role as consultant but continues her role as informal mentor to Wangari. Wangari is now the platform project coordinator and specialist. She and the rest of the Rsif capacity-building team work collaboratively to incorporate new materials and continue the dissemination of the platform with Everlyn’s ongoing support and guidance.

The goal of the Rsif mentorship platform was to support PhD scholars through the academic and social emotional challenges faced during their PhD journeys by offering an online platform for multiple forms of academic mentoring and support. Through formal and informal communication channels, seminars, workshops, and intentional community, the platform has enabled open communication between mentors and mentees, scholars, faculty, and program itself. It created a central place for the scholarship—a virtual shared space.

The project did have its challenges. It was initially conceived to be conducted in approximately six months. Our timelines necessarily had to be adjusted to work with the time constraints of the program staff and the technological training needed to assure there would be a possibility of adoption. The work spanned more than two years. Another complexity was that the platform’s design and development were executed virtually, due to the geographical separation of team members. Hannah, the project director and research lead, was based on the West Coast of the USA, while the rest of the platform team was in Kenya, an 11-h time difference. Dealing with different time zones posed a notable complexity, necessitating considerable flexibility and understanding in scheduling meetings and discussions. Hannah and Wangari met twice weekly; these were early mornings for Hannah and late evenings for Wangari. The challenges were particularly pronounced during the roll-out sessions, as we had to accommodate more than four different time zones in our planning. Additionally, aligning the skills/strengths of diverse personalities proved to be a difficult task, especially in a context where distance and lack of face-to-face interactions were barriers to collaboration. The work the team did to develop an in-depth understanding of the Rsif community and the contexts in which it operated played a pivotal role in the perceived success of the mentorship platform.

Ultimately, the Rsif program considers the platform project a success. The community believes that the mentorship platform has successfully accomplished its primary objective of creating places and processes that enable high-quality mentorship opportunities for its scholars. Usage examples include scholars establishing dedicated university-based channels within the platform for enhanced communication, interaction, and information exchange among their peers and hosting alumni network meetings and resources—fostering a sense of continuity and connection among past and present scholars. Informal conversations thrive within Viva Engage communities, generating substantial engagement and interaction, thus solidifying the platform’s role as a vibrant and dynamic community hub.

Rsif had already undertaken activities to provide additional support to its female scholars before the platform was added to the program. Nonetheless, the platform became an important tool for supporting them, as it offered a secure environment where women were encouraged to express themselves, leading to better communication regarding their needs and difficulties. Feedback collected through the platform has led to programmatic improvements, such as the creation of guiding materials about motherhood and supportive IPIs and the development of a reporting system to support program transparency and scholar safety.

We felt that certain platform features were available to all scholars but held even greater significance for our women scholars—such as informal industry mentorship, peer support, and informal places to connect with other scholars sharing similar journeys as they navigated a multifaceted world burdened with competing obligations. These initiatives not only foster transformation but also serve as a source of inspiration for female scholars, promoting inclusivity and empowerment within the academic community.

Rsif faces a challenging situation concerning mentorship, as it cannot mandate formal mentorship improvements from its supervisors. There is no way that we can assure mentoring fidelity across our faculty. Our solution is to provide multiple forms of universal supports to all our scholars, thus mitigating potentially negative impacts of inadequate guidance from their supervisors.

Rsif continues to explore ways to use the platform to support its scholars. For example, Rsif is looking to combine the existing mentorship supports provided by the platform to develop a volunteer webinar series conducted by experts from different fields. This type of initiative could improve program viability, create new collaborations, and introduce scholars to innovative approaches in the field. As they move forward, the Rsif capacity building team continues to use frameworks from higher education mentorship and trauma-informed practice to guide platform usage and implementation.