Mentoring Within Difference

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Mentoring Within Difference

• Not Mentoring With Indifference

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The product we seek to deliver when we mentor

• a kind of organizational "literacy" or "savvy"
• a form or style of successful agency
• a set of productive relationships
• the individual (mentee) him- or herself

3
Characteristices of more traditional approaches
to mentoring

• usually, though not always, dyadic
• transmitting methods and assumptions from
  existing (white male) scholarship, teaching, and
  leadership models
• ostensibly based on a kind of spontaneous
  selection, a natural affinity between a
  younger, or less experienced, initiate and an
  older colleague

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What is Mentoring?

• Instrumental functions
• sponsorship
• exposure
• coaching
• protection
• challenge

• Psychosocial functions
• role modeling
• acceptance
• confirmation
• counseling
• friendship

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• Role Model provides an example, an image, an
  option of a way to be and act. Little or no
  interaction or concrete support is necessary.
• Advisor emphasis on the academic, usually a
  faculty member assigned to the student to guide
  the students fulfillment of requirements towards
  a degree
• Sponsor gives key help within the organization
  in order to advance the career of the protege,
  although s/he might not offer emotional or social
  guidance.
• Mentor/Friend has a vested interest in the
  well-being and success of the protege,
  emotionally as well as professionally, and
  provides socio-emotional support.

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Some Assumptions about Mentoring (Programs)

• The mentor's job is to initiate proteges into the
  culture and workings of their institution, so
  that they can more successfully contribute to the
  community.
• The mentor's job is to train mentees in a set of
  abilities that have been proven successful.

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Some Assumptions about Mentoring Pgms (contd)

• Institutions are meritocratic entities, in which
  credibility is earned through the use of a set of
  skills and natural abilities that are recognized
  as excellent.
• Mentors do not confer credibility blindly, but
  bring out already-existing ability in their
  proteges.

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Some Assumptions about Mentoring Pgms (contd)

• Mentors and mentoring programs are not effective
  unless they are fully integrated into the life of
  the institution that is, unless they have
  credibility and are not marginalized.
• All institutional affiliates wish to identify
  with the image, values, and methods of their
  institution equally.

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Some Assumptions about Mentoring Pgms (contd)

• Mentoring furthers the stated (static?) mission
  of the institution.
• The aim of mentoring is, first and foremost,
  transmission of hard-earned knowledge and
  reproduction of existing models of success. It
  is mostly a one-way street.

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Some Assumptions about Mentoring Pgms (contd)

• Standards of excellence and criteria for
  credibility are not contingent or subjective.
• The mentor seeks to provide the mentee with
  tools, knowledge, information and not power,
  privilege, or "a leg up.
• Mentees want to become just like their mentors.

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Questions

• What happens when we abandon a basic
  transmission model, when mentoring becomes a
  two-way street? To the mentor and mentee? To
  their institution?

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• Can new models for
• - scholarship
• - advising
• - teaching
• - leadership
• develop when mentoring is carried out according
  to the traditional transmission model of
  mentoring? How?
• Does it matter who is doing the mentoring, if the
  model is the same?