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Imagining Mentoring

By Alan Mandell and Lee Herman
photo Famous mentor and disciple relationships, left to right: Socrates and his disciple Plato; Confucius; his disciple Mencius; Johann Wolfgang von Goethe; his mentor Johann Gottfried von Herder   [Socrates and Plato: Raphael/Getty Images; Confucius: ©Keren Su/Getty Images; others: Wikimedia Commons]

My dear Agathon, Socrates replied as he took his seat beside him, I only wish that wisdom were the kind of thing one could share by sitting next to someone--if it flowed, for instance, from the one that was full to the one that was empty, like the water in two cups finding its level through a piece of worsted.                                   --Plato, Symposium

We are faculty members at a university where all of the faculty staff are given the title "mentor." This means that every professor, every teacher, tries to work with students by attending to their individual learning, interests, backgrounds and questions. We help our students plan their curricula and we do individual tutorials with them on topics that they have identified as necessary for their degrees. We also help them find resources and other mentors. We listen to them and counsel them about how to bring their experiences into their studies and as they explore how their education can improve their lives.

Here are the qualities that mentors try to live up to when they work with students. Imagine how you can apply qualities such as these to your own life situations:

1. Mentors are intellectually compassionate: They care about the interests, questions and concerns of their students. They help them design and engage in learning activities suited to their individual purposes and abilities.

2. Mentors understand that most knowledge claims are provisional: They acknowledge the limits of their own and others' understandings. They welcome their students' ideas and want to understand the experiences and thinking which led them to their conclusions.

3. Mentors must scrutinize their own assumptions and cherished beliefs: In order to take unfamiliar and challenging ideas seriously, mentors must step back from themselves.

4. Mentors prefer collaborative dialogue: This is how people learn from one another. It is the way mentors put their own abilities to the service of the learning needs of others.

5. Mentors gradually learn what helps each student learn: Mentoring requires flexibility. As mentors discover more about each student, they improvise new methods and resources for that individual.

6. Who students are, what they really want to learn, and what they might learn emerge slowly. Therefore, mentors wait.

Mentoring seems to be everywhere these days--in education, business, human services and government. It is important to appreciate that mentoring is often advertised for improving relationships that are customarily unequal: teacher and student; supervisor and supervisee; senior and junior; virtuoso and apprentice, to name a few. However, the soothing quality of the word doesn't actually alter those relationships but too easily obscures their asymmetry. The virtues of genuine mentoring, as we have tried to describe them above, demand sharing authority and nurturing others. Perhaps the call for mentoring is so loud today because these virtues are so sadly diminished.

Unlike water "finding its level" between unequally full vessels, learning never flows of itself from one mind to another. As Socrates (who claimed to know so little) did know, learning is achieved by the learner, not delivered by the teacher. We ask you to imagine that the heart of mentoring, whatever the context, is helping people become their own teachers.

photo Famous mentor and disciple relationships, left to right: Frederick Douglass; his mentor William Lloyd Garrison; Helen Keller with her mentor Anne Sullivan; Werner Heisenberg; his mentor Niels Bohr [Wikimedia Commons]

Alan Mandell, (left), is mentor, college professor of Adult Learning and Mentoring and Lee Herman, (right), is mentor/coordinator at the Empire State College in New York, U.S.A. They jointly authored the book From Teaching to Mentoring: Principles and Practice, Dialogue and Life in Adult Education, published by Routledge in 2003.

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