New Directions in Mentoring

Creating a Culture of Synergy

Carol A. Mullen, Dale W. Lick, Dale W. Lick, Carol A. Mullen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781135698409
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

This collection is the result of action research carried out by teachers, administrators and professors operating a school-university collaboration. It creates a model of mentoring where guided but flexible structures are used to unleash the creative capacity of the group. The research accounts reveal much about the nature of mentoring organizations, as they are now and how they might be improved. Approaches include the use of lifelong mentoring, synergistic co-mentoring, professional peer networking and the creation of collaborative relationships and teams.

Part I
Mentoring a New Culture

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1 Introducing New Directions for Mentoring

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Carol A.Mullen

Figure 1.1: Being rebirthed as comentors (Nathan Kennedy, 1998)

We, the authors of this book, ask: How can synergistic patterns and pathways of comentoring among differently situated professionals be created? And, how can these connections be aimed at purposeful collaboration, productivity, and publication? We provide examples of mentoring relationships and networks that embody the value of collaborative learning, despite conflict and tension, and that result in democratic practices resulting in professional authorship.

For an intensive year (1997–98), the Partnership Support Group (PSG) dialogued and experimented with original material written and produced for this book. The PSG is a name that I gave the comentoring support group to underscore the effort of a school-university collaborative, a research university and university laboratory school working together to promote deeper professional links. By so doing, we, a group of teachers, professors, administrators, and other practicing professionals, as well as art students at The Florida State University (FSU) and The Florida State University School (FSUS), pursued an agenda of mutual interest and benefit.

The lead title of this book, New Directions for Mentoring, underscores the focus of this book. Our cross-institutional support group process, professional research story development, and making of this book all gave explicit attention to mentoring in its varied forms and meanings. The variation we produced demonstrates approaches to mentoring from traditional to more progressive forms and meanings. Regardless, the PSG upheld a concept of mentoring as reciprocal and highly supportive throughout the group, research, and book developmental phases. As we worked together, we wanted to capture the synergy we experienced and the community of researchers we built through the PSG. We also wanted to highlight the community that we had extended and even, in some cases, created through our individual and joint action research.

The second part of the title of this book, the metaphor of Creating a Culture of Synergy, means that the generation of synergy, or inspiration, empowerment, and energy, enables conditions for greater innovation, productivity, quality, and equality. In our case, synergy was produced in new areas of mentoring, community, and educational change. Because we had all experienced heightened forms of synergy through our research, relationship, and community efforts for this project, we decided that it needed special attention. Our synergistic comentoring bonding, then, provided a catalyst for our pursuit of new directions for mentoring and research. We value human forms of coengagement, relearning, and narrative and voice representation. Our projects, now chapters, illustrate the creation of symbiotic relationships and comentoring activity settings; redirected learning within, and transformation of, learning organizations; and new vitality of teachers’ and professors’ voices, identities, and lives.

We set our sails to deliberately learn from one another and to develop as a synergistic comentoring team. This comentoring practice of actively learning from others has supported the development of our specific topics of mentoring as well as our practices of collegiality and authorship. The general problem we recognized was how to support a comentoring approach to applied research within a power-based educational culture. The practice we therefore attempted was nonauthoritarian yet guided among different professionals within a school-university setting that, like most other partnered environments, has not traditionally enabled such endeavors.

Comentoring, to me, is a complex learning process that deserves study, careful practice, and mindful negotiation. It is a way of being that energizes people to develop appreciatively and critically while creating and sustaining synergistic development in concert with others. Through an active exchange that supports opportunity, dialogue, enthusiasm, and change, professionals can develop as they awaken to new ways of thinking, feeling, and acting in their immediate environments (see Figure 1.1). In contrast, the self functions without energy and inspiration to teach devoid of learning; to see only organizational and interpersonal barriers to change; and to avoid uncomfortable forms of “newness,” involvement, accountability, and assessment.

Comentoring for professional renewal

Throughout this book, we, the Partnership Support Group (PSG), focus on these two fundamental themes:

1. comentoring promotes the development of different approaches to action research among professionals/learners interested in understanding mentoring relationships and systems, as well as research and practice, and
2. when those within a shared culture use comentoring perspectives and strategies to represent and reflect on experience, synergy can be produced; professional renewal can be advanced; and relationships at all institutional levels can be enhanced.

This book is primarily about the use of comentorship as a framework for generating new directions in mentoring; forms of teaching/learning and relationships; and research and publication, within a school-university culture. The authors each advance their own study of mentoring that focuses, in some cases, on mostly the school or university culture, and, in other instances, on tensions within the educational culture as a whole. Individual and joint mentoring projects are accompanied, in each chapter, by our research and professional stories, action-based inquiries, and graphic illustrations.

By “research story” I mean the study of narrative as more than story, that is, as a form of inquiry into cultural reform issues (Mullen, 1994). Our studies have been designed to focus on site-based learning in a range of contexts that blend the professional with the personal. We believe that Goodlad’s (1988) call for symbiotic arrangements between public schools and colleges of education is vital and that it can be created through the development of a synergistic comentoring program. Strategies that support such comentoring activity include various forms of proactive communication, skills development, documentation, and shared processes and products.

We also wish to contribute our story of new initiative and reform to the canon of large-scale consortium work undertaken by the Holmes Group since 1987. This new structuring of institutions—involving 90-plus nationwide Professional Development Schools (PDSs)—was created to establish working partnerships among professors, teachers, and administrators to improve and reform practice. The principles of partnership used to guide a PDS consist of reciprocity, experimentation, systematic inquiry, and student diversity (the Holmes Group, 1995). To this list I, along with the Partnership Support Group of a school-university culture external to the jurisdiction of the Holmes Group, add comentorship, synergy, and coauthorship. These terms express a shared commitment to the development of an active research agenda that supports practicing professionals in representing their own voices, perspectives, and contributions in the educational literature (Mullen, in press a; Mullen, in press b). Even current scholarship paradoxically represents university professors’ lenses and interpretations of practicing professionals, not those of teachers and administrators it seeks to represent.

With this new perspective on shared research, author representation, and egalitarianism in mind, we wish to add this aspect of inquiry to the school-university bridge between research and practice. We also hope to contribute to the work of PDSs or research laboratory schools established nationwide through the effort of the Holmes Group to produce serious educational change (Weber, 1996). We recommend that university faculty can assist in a leadership role within public school faculties by creating or assisting focus/study groups of coresearchers that clearly benefit everyone involved.

As mentors who are also mentees and comentors, we do not presume to provide insights into all of the critical issues pertaining to educational forms of mentorship within school-university cultures. Rather, we invite new and critical perspectives on our own conversations and reports. We see mentorship as a takenfor- granted phenomenon in life and within educational institutions and domains, community life, and family systems. Mentoring activities can provide powerful ways of furthering the reflection and development of mentors and the mentored. The research stories and professional accounts we offer provide a structural device or aesthetic through which readers can form their own impressions. Our distinctive, interpretive patterns were made available to us through inquiry into humanistic studies of mentoring perspectives and practices. This permits the deeper examination of educational lives, development, and dilemmas, rendering these accessible to others. Our chapters therefore have educational and human value beyond the merely private or confessional.

In this edited volume, we reconceptualize traditional forms of mentoring by focusing on researchers’ actual engagement in and expression of learning contexts. We see development in terms of learning to negotiate and clarify expectations, roles, and directions leading to the transformation of relationships through strategies which can enhance school-university collaboration and faculty renewal. Teachers and researchers can use this book to entertain new ways of engaging in and representing their mentoring relationships with others, including students, administrators, and each other.

The term mentoring is used in this book to suggest a process of expanding and deepening liberatory practices and habits with, and alongside others, in the academy, schools, and other settings. We emphasize the primacy of personal experience; negotiation of understanding; practical knowing informed by theory; and applied theory shaped by human values. Our mentoring stories have implications for curriculum, and partnership and leadership, development. We uphold that enriched understanding can evolve from life-affirming and self-conscious perspectives on mentoring stances and activities. Traditional mentorship in teacher education, teaching, and academic research can be characterized as a relationship in which professors guide, facilitate, and transfer experiences and knowledge to apprentices, students, and junior-level professors. The traditional approach to mentoring suggests a relationship based on higher authority or expert knowledge. While conventional approaches to guiding professionals and students provide needed support in some instances, there are many times when a multidimensional view of mentorship reflecting a flexible, interactive process is more appropriate and even desirable (Mullen et al., 1997).

The definition of mentoring is expanded, in our book, to mean an empowering interaction among individuals who learn/research together for the purpose of personal and institutional change. Support for comentoring dynamics among professionals creates an environment where individuals share processes and purposes, ambiguities and uncertainties, writings and new research.

Our stories converge to show that progressive forms of mentoring teach mentors and neophytes about their strengths and abilities through supportive interaction, reflection, and collaborative self-study. A supportive context, such as that reported as needed within a school-university setting, will allow educators and students to develop their professional skills, research knowledge, and capacity for human connection. Those involved in a comentoring network, like the one we advocate, will constantly be learning from each other; building on what is heard; seeking comentoring opportunities; and sharing with wider and newly emerging communities.

Throughout these chapters, examples of mentoring studies, programs, processes, activities, projects, and systems are shared that we have actually conceptualized, implemented, and analyzed. In some chapters, formal assessments are also provided. We seek to provide more explicit awareness of human interaction and activity through an applied understanding of our mentoring-based research stories. Readers are engaged in each chapter in a search for effective and inspiring mentoring approaches in their own settings and roles as teacher-researchers and other professionals. The sociocultural context of this search, and the political underpinnings of work for justice and equality, is an impulse that runs throughout much of this book.

Purposes and scope

Mentoring as a form of faculty and professional development and change at interpersonal and institutional levels is, even with this book, at an early phase of development. No one perspective can be provided to manage all of the textured nuances. In qualitative forms of inquiry, the aim is to represent and understand experience as nearly as possible as its participants live it. This requires that teacherresearchers depict and consider their relationships with their participants and themselves. This we have attempted to do in relation to others. We provide a collection of teaching and research narratives and tools that promote reflection, helping mentors and protégés to reimagine their roles. The actualities of each case are embodied in our lived experiences and reflections. We take readers to the scenes we depict with developmental impact. Our distinctive ways of telling and weaving together our individual and shared stories of teaching and research include self-narratives, dialogues, transcriptions of live conversation, artworks, tables and charts, figures and poems, and various other forms of cultural identity representation.

New Directions for Mentoring has six specific purposes:

1. to argue for and to provide examples of mentoring in relationships, programs, schools, universities, school-university collaboratives, and focus support groups that foster personal and professional development;
2. to express teacher-researcher synergy using reflective research stories and professional accounts that highlight significant mentoring moments and patterns;
3. to draw attention to the taken-for-granted but genuine capacity for human beings to mentor and to be mentored in return;
4. to promote transformation of perspective, and reform of traditional mentoring structures, that have yet to facilitate ways of eliminating inequality and injustice across professional ranks;
5. to show that personal and professional life has greater meaning when infused with critical and appreciative mentoring dimensions, and support group functions; and
6. to underscore the importance and value of teachers, professors, administrators, and students working together to create a new mentoring community inclusive of sustained conversation, empathetic connection, coauthoring opportunities, and promising results.

Unique aspects and distinctive features

The promotion and transformation of educator perspectives as well as the reform of ineffectual mentoring situations/systems provide the overarching framework of this book. The articulation of effective mentoring roles, relationships, and systems is accompanied with a combined narrative and critical pedagogical approach. For example, the same page within our book can present argument and story as well as personal commentary, analysis, critique, exemplar, research, and artwork. As facilitator, I encouraged and guided the development of visual composites, featuring the synthesis of cognitive, emotional, and aesthetic aspects of new learning. Although we express a unifying perspective on the pressing need for comentoring as professionals, each author has explored the new learning while blending it with the preferred style and voice that each chapter demonstrates.

Accordingly, this edited collection has these five distinctive features:

1. argues for and provides examples of mentoring relationships, programs, systems, and activities that are developmental. The book contains aesthetic features, such as artworks;
2. emphasizes that, if researchers, teachers, and other professionals are to develop, they need to work together to highlight partnership forms of new learning and reciprocity;
3. is grounded in the belief that the experiences and perspectives of mentors and the mentored offer crucially important insights for better understanding of professional work and values;
4. draws on a wide range of classroom contexts and stakeholders invested in inquiry, including teachers, teacher educator-researchers, curriculum designers, and artists; and
5. offers a comprehensive array of applications of action-based forms of synergistic comentoring or successful partnership within and across schools and universities.

Relationship to the educational literature

This book is related to a number of other scholarly texts concerned with the practical. It is concerned primarily with perspectives on, and approaches to, mentorship. We, the authors, explore the role of mentorship as directed collaborative practice in the lives of teachers, professors, administrators, and students. Our Partnership Support Group (PSG) was extended, through our chapters, to include high school students and university and school faculty. This comentoring group is shaped by, and concerned with, school-university partnership issues.

This book is different from yet similar to my edited publication, Breaking the Circle of One (Mullen et al., 1997). The 1997 book attempts to show that research circles, such as those consisting of professors and graduate students, have the potential to be “broken” to dissolve hierarchy and isolation and to bring new awareness to comentoring development. Like the former book, this new one results from this value orientation. It is also an outgrowth of professionals’ conversations and writings within a self-study collaborative support group context. However, the purpose, local context, group process, specific methods and organic models of learning, populations, and writings are all unique.

For Breaking the Circle of One, a relatively small focus group in higher education produced accounts related to mentoring in our personal and professional lives. With New Directions for Mentoring, the support group consists of a more diverse population of educators, including teachers and administrators, whose work is shaped within a school-university environment and active program in action research. In New Directions for Mentoring the comentoring process was, in contrast to the 1997 book, deliberate, programmatic, and carefully documented through my own case study reflection and analysis. (Chapter 4 offers a discussion of the new support group process, and the Epilogue provides an assessment of this work.)

Practical guides to mentorship for teachers, principals, and other leaders in schools constitute the majority of texts available in the area of mentorship. Our book offers a different perspective, one that embraces site-based learning and applications but with analysis of theory and practice.

Finally, books on collaboration within school-university contexts differ substantively from our own. This new book is the result of the combined writing and research efforts of professors, teachers, and administrators. Books, like Pounder’s (1998a) on collaboration in schools, result from the research efforts of university professors. In contrast, the premise of New Directions for Mentoring is that promising educational change needs to involve school professionals directly in designing synergistic, collaborative or comentoring practices. A norm of equality and shared power requires that teachers function not just as “organizational interfaces” but also as integrated te...