Taubman College faculty member Irene Hwang has won a 2024 Teaching Innovation Prize from the University of Michigan’s Office of the Provost for creating a new approach to mentorship that aims to foster greater equity in architectural education.

Hwang’s initiative was one of five U-M projects to receive the $5,000 grants. Hwang, a lecturer in architecture, serves as director of the Equity in Architectural Education Consortium (EAEC), which was founded in 2018 by U-M and partnering universities Florida A&M, Florida International, Hampton, Howard, Morgan State, Tuskegee, and Oklahoma.

The consortium’s central activity – and the project that won the U-M provost’s prize – is the “Stacked Mentorship Model” (SMP), a new model of mentorship that has included some 650 participants from 20 institutions.

The EAEC developed the SMP model to help leverage various resources and forms of capital to collectively reduce inequities and disparities for students of color and other underrepresented groups in undergraduate, graduate, and professional architecture programs. As a comparatively small-sized STEM professional field, architecture is characterized by a strong, rigid culture dominated by its legacy as a “gentleman’s profession.”

The Stacked Mentorship Model includes five core “stacks” of mentorship activities. It creates a framework for increased access and representation, as well as exposure to diverse teaching and learning contexts, new remote teaching and learning methods, advances in inclusive pedagogy, and the development and implementation of co-curricular learning activities.

The project has created a meta-mentorship community of students, faculty, alumni of color, and other underrepresented groups from all levels of education and experience and higher educational institution types.