A Community-based Career Mentoring Project “Juniors and Mentors (JAM)”
Designed by Angela Lee-Smith (Yale University)
Mentees and their mentor get together and talk about their career – Law. Years later, the mentees come back as mentors
- Project Overview
- Presentation, 2020 Virtual Summit on Project-Based Learning, National Heritage Language Resource Center (During Pandemic).
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- Applicable Proficiency Range Intermediate –high to Advanced Proficiency
- Applicable Language ALL
- Project Abstract Through the JAM (Junior and Mentor) Project, undergraduate students are matched with graduate or alumni community mentors based on shared career interests, majors, or areas of expertise. Each junior and mentor spend time together engaging in conversations about career goals, offering and receiving guidance, and sharing insights—all in the target language—over the course of two to three sessions per semester.
- Project Description
- Project Rationale
- Project Goals and Objectives
- Project Outcomes
- Major Tasks Mentees meet with their mentors for career advice/mentoring. At the end of semester, each mentee submits their reflective writing as a project report and all mentees have an in-class discussion to share their experiences they had with their mentors, along with how those experiences ultimately affected their career preparation and paths. All of these activities are conducted in the target language.
- Project Duration 2-3 hours sessions with mentor outside of classroom; 2 times of in-class discussion (one hour each time) during the month of October ~ December (Fall); February~April (Spring).
- Primary Genre Inquiry, Request, Advice, Report
- Pedagogical Approaches Community-based, Content-based, Language for Professional/Academic Purposes.
- ProM Planner ProM JAM
- Supplemental Materials
- Assessment Students take the project exit self-reflection survey as a final process after completing the project tasks—mentoring sessions, in-class discussions, and presentations. Access Link
- Guest Speaker Series, Career Talk As a part of the project, the class organizes and hosts a guest speaker series, 직업의 세계, in which guest speakers from various professional fields give a career talk. Each talk series offers an engaging QA and discussion session after the speaker’s talk. Mentors can be invited as guest speakers, and usually, one or two speakers are invited in the semester. The following sample career talks feature speakers who are former students of KREN 153: Advanced Korean: Sociocultural Practices and perspectives at Yale.
- Action Research Article_JAM (PDF)
Lee-Smith, A. (2018). Linking Language Learning with Community: A Community-Based Learning Project for Advanced Korean Courses.The Korean Language in America, 22(2), 167–189. Penn State University Press.
- IIW 2025: JAM Redesign: A 4+1 Model for Intermediate Heritage Learners