Rhetorical Strategies for Professional Development

Investment Mentoring in Classrooms and Workplaces

Elizabeth J. Keller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351246163
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Scrittura creativa

This book extends current research and scholarship around mentoring and learning theory, illustrating how mentoring creates, enacts, and sustains multidisciplinary learning in a variety of school, work, and community contexts. In so doing, it examines the relationship between teaching and mentoring, acknowledges the rhetorical invention of mentoring, and recognizes the intersection of gender identity (as a cultural and identity signifier or marker) and mentoring. It uses mentoring as a way to reimagine value-added approaches to research and teaching practices in rhetoric and composition.

1
Introduction

Teaching, research, and service. The three pillars university professors are familiar with and committed to in their institutions. For nine to twelve months a year, a professor will teach several classes, contribute to the intellectual and practical rigor of their discipline, and serve on any number of department, college, university, and national or international committees. In the in-between moments of faculty life (yes, these moments do exist), something else happens:

The conversation after class with an undergraduate student who is interested in applying to graduate school

The consolation of a graduate student who just learned they were rejected from a conference their peers would attend

The coffee break with a colleague to get advice on an article that is almost-but-not-quite there

The one-on-one advice from a department chair about how to craft a compelling promotion and tenure case

Each of the above scenarios involves some kind or type of mentoring. All too often, the mentoring faculty participate in each year is viewed as an extracurricular component of the work they do. Somewhere, usually at the bottom of a CV (if included at all), is mentoring. And, more often than not, the kind of mentoring that is recorded on a CV is the kind that intersects with programmatic and systematic assessment; the kind that, for many professors and practitioners, is located when professional development activities like mentoring bleed into the required teaching, research, and service practices of a discipline. Then, and only then, is mentoring publicly visible.

Michelle Eble and Lynée Lewis Gaillet write in the introduction of Stories of Mentoring: Theory and Praxis that mentoring in the field of composition and rhetoric (or rhetoric and writing studies, rhetoric and writing, or writing studies) is often exemplified in the anecdotes and stories of everyday life.¹ These stories range from teacher training initiatives and programmatic and curricula development, to the delicate balances of being a parent or caregiver, while adjusting to life as a new faculty member or department administrator. Mentoring undergraduate and graduate students, junior and senior colleagues, and/or peers from other disciplines happens in a variety of ways and in various locations with material resources and technologies to help facilitate it. Simply put, mentoring relationships often happen at the same time as other teaching, research, and service responsibilities.

While mentoring in rhetoric and writing has been more significantly addressed and researched over the last twenty-five years, it is still frequently positioned as an add-on to teaching and research. Being a mentor or mentee is often considered an afterthought or undervalued task within departments and institutions, despite it taking up about as much time as teaching and research combined.² The reasons for this are situated in the local contexts of individual writing departments and programs; however, the ways in which mentoring is valued in rhetoric and writing practice is directly related to the ways in which teaching, research, and service are created, performed, and represented in the discipline.

The essays in Stories of Mentoring seek to “define the current status of mentoring” in rhetoric and writing studies by giving “insight into the character of those rare individuals who embody the term mentor.”³ The stories found in the collection are significant to particular places and time—they are situated—and they offer experiences of mentoring as students and teachers within English studies experience it. There are several sites in which to locate academic mentoring, write Eble and Lewis Gaillet, and mentoring in the field of rhetoric and composition happens most often in classrooms, faculty offices or other department spaces, and at academic conferences.⁴ The professional discourses and practices that constitute mentoring are certainly diverse and are best defined in the peculiarity of everyday life.⁵

The concept of mentoring dates back to Homer’s Odyssey and, according to Eble and Lewis Gaillet, it “signifies a range of practices and responsibilities within rhet/comp studies, but definitions of the term are hard to come by.”⁶ Additionally, mentoring is often a contested term, a term that concurrently “suggests identifying an earnest commitment to the development of colleagues” and students, while imposing institutional practices and disciplinary values onto those colleagues and students.⁷ Such experiences of mentoring speak to, as James Inman and Donna Sewell continue, the “voice (who gets to speak as a mentor) and the authority (whose voice counts and why)” of mentoring.⁸ Certainly, mentoring can be a problematic undertaking, especially for those individuals who do not benefit from particular academic investitures and practices that directly or indirectly bring about inequality instead of mutual benefit, respect, and progress.

In a field that likes to define keywords, concepts, and best practices, Eble and Lewis Gaillet further note that no extensive treatment of mentoring as an empirically studied practice currently exists.⁹ They contended that much of the scholarship that existed in rhetoric and writing about mentoring did not attempt to collect and capture specific theories, histories, practices, and reflections on mentoring; rather, writing studies scholarship addressed larger topics that mentoring is certainly a part of, if only tangentially so.¹⁰ These topics include but are not limited to the transition from graduate student to new professor, career satisfaction and advancement, promotion and tenure, and the tasks associated with writing program administration. Their edited collection began to remedy this gap in writing studies literature by highlighting selected stories from students and faculty who experienced some form of mentoring in the discipline; the essays in Stories of Mentoring “illustrate diverse ways in which mentoring is defined in everyday practice.”¹¹ The collection provides “discipline-specific, candid snapshots of mentoring within the field of rhetoric and writing,” which do not promote a one-size-fits-all approach to mentoring.¹²

Mentoring experiences, practices, stories, and how they function within a department or university accumulate over time, and in time, they can become the histories that shape the beliefs and attitudes of what constitutes learning. Rhetorical Strategies for Professional Development: Investment Mentoring in Classrooms and Workplaces takes a closer look at specific instances of how stories of mentoring accumulate in a specific context, and how those stories are arranged in relation to the beliefs, orientations, and practices of that culture. Rhetoric and writing practitioners will gain valuable insight into the complexities and capabilities of mentoring when it is used in classrooms and for career-long learning. Mentoring, as this book will show, directly informs the theories and pedagogies that constitute the field of rhetoric and composition.

Throughout the next six chapters, I will show how mentoring is a knowledge-making act, an act that is made up of a set of relational practices that are very powerful in shaping not only individual identities, but also collective workplace policies about who or what belongs in a particular place. What is more, as this book will illustrate, the act of mentoring can be a resistant one, and the participants featured in this book will illustrate that mentoring is a performance and emergence in the communities in which they belong and to which they contribute.

A Pilot Study on Mentoring, Professionalization, and Leadership

Before I begin discussing the experiences and stories of mentoring from the participants featured in this book, I first need to situate this book in a related study I conducted in the spring of 2013 with a small home construction/interior design business, Midwest Designs, located in Michigan, USA. My pilot study explored non-academic perceptions of mentoring, and how mentoring was located, named, and defined within the company. Additionally, the pilot study examined the intersections of writing, mentoring, and professionalism as experienced by the employer, employees, and interns of the company. I interviewed five people who worked for Midwest Designs: Lisa, Josh, Gabrielle, Madeline, and Jackie.¹³ I interviewed them via email, and I also observed them in their work environment for one workday. I worked with Midwest Designs for two reasons:

1. mentoring is an integral part of how the company operates, and it is the foundation of the company’s vision and mission statements, and
2. the owner of the company is a female entrepreneur and leader in a male-dominated industry.

The stories of mentoring that participants shared with me gave me new insight into the materialities, complexities, and possibilities of mentoring and leadership. I encouraged participants to share their experiences, stories, and memories of mentoring—I asked them to tell me their historical, cultural, personal, and professional attitudes and positionalities toward mentoring. Their stories of mentoring illustrated not only what mentoring was for them, but also how it made room for different kinds of on-the-job learning. My pilot study was guided by feminist, decolonial, and qualitative scholarship on learning, writing, and professional development, and also research on traditional, master/apprentice models of mentoring and alternative models of mentoring (i.e., co-mentoring and peer mentoring models). I learned that traditional and alternative models of mentoring could simultaneously exist, conflict, and mesh together in a particular workplace.

If theory, as Julie Cruikshank writes, is grounded in stories about everyday life, and these everyday actions, stories, and consequences produce the ways in which the past and present are thought about, then the stories participants told me about mentoring asked me to believe certain things about their workplace culture, about how mentoring is always already personal, relational, and professional.¹⁴ The stories of mentoring that participants shared with me in this pilot study began to make visible and connect the larger ideological and socio-cultural commitments of each participant. In this way, their stories helped them translate knowing into telling, and aided in their ability to add to or challenge the conceptions of what mentoring is and how it is invented in their particular workplace culture.

When I asked one participant, Gabrielle, about the role of mentoring in the company, she responded that mentoring is more than just a feel-good afterthought. Mentoring is the everyday actions that make visible the possibilities and limits of her job along with the possibilities and limits of humanity.¹⁵ In a similar way, another participant, Lisa, said that it is important to identify the relationship as a mentoring one because a mentoring relationship that is not clearly defined as such becomes unnecessarily complicated in terms of the roles, goals, responsibilities, and even the moral beliefs of the mentor or mentee.¹⁶ All five Midwest Design participants agreed that transparency and reflexivity help develop and sustain a positive mentoring relationship, and when both are not present in a mentoring relationship the lack of transparency and awareness ruins the relationship, and it can cause the mentee to question the ethics and also information learned from the mentor.¹⁷ A reflexive mentoring relationship means that both mentor and mentee are learning from each other at the same time, which indicates that a productive mentoring relationship is co-equal and reciprocal.¹⁸ Reflexive and transparent mentoring requires mentors and mentees to ask questions of each other, and to allow for time to reflect on a completed task or goal. Employees at Midwest Designs encouraged each other to share written or other multimodal reflections on their mentoring experiences, indicating how what they learned in the relationship contributed to their professional and personal growth.

I concluded the interviews for my pilot study by asking participants a final question: What factors affect and/or influence your relationships with the people you work with? Participants stated that the factors that influence their workplace relationships are respect; a willingness to listen and respond to coworkers; an acute awareness of the possibilities, limitations, and interests of each relationship; collaboration; humor; flexibility; honesty; trust; and integrity. I learned from Midwest Designs that the best work environment is one that is a true democracy, a space where collaboration and equality are lived daily.¹⁹

I ended my time with Midwest Designs by observing employees for one 8-hour workday. I noticed where they work, how they work, and what kinds of writing and communication practices they used while working. I observed that writing played an important, even critical, part in the teaching, learning, mentoring, and business practices of the company. Participants wrote and communicated effectively by using specific writing technologies and practices, the kinds of practices that I frequently encouraged students to use in the writing courses I had taught. Because of this pilot study, my interest was piqued; could mentoring be used to help make other workplace relationships more transparent, reflexive, and productive? A year later, in my dissertation study, I would take up some of these findings in more nuanced and thoughtful ways.

A Dissertation on Mentoring, Gender, and Workplace Culture

In the spring of 2014, I began working on my dissertation study. I decided that I wanted to work with two seemingly different groups of people, so that I could explore the complexities, experiences, invention of, and stories of men and women who mentor and/or are mentored in professional (e.g., “work”) spaces. I worked with employees from HealthTech Industries (Health-Tech or HTI),²⁰ a Midwest medical device manufacturing company, and a group of graduates from the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities (RCAH) at Michigan State University (MSU). Eight HealthTech employees were interviewed for the study, each of whom held different kinds of executive and management-level positions within the company. The HTI participants in the study were Maria, Claire, Julie, Chris, Bill, Patrick, Kevin, and Randall.²¹ The three RCAH alumni who were part of this study were Alex, Carrie, and Samantha.

Participants showed me that rhetorics are multiple, motivated, actiona...