From Teaching to Mentoring

Principles and Practice, Dialogue and Life in Adult Education

Lee Herman, Alan Mandell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134501236
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Adult Education

What is mentoring? What makes a teacher a mentor?
From Teaching to Mentoring is an argument for the power, practicality and the basic good of a simple educational idea. The authors advocate a sound, comprehensive and lifelong education, shifting the emphasis of the learning process to the needs of the student. Whilst heeding traditional criteria of educational excellence, they ask for profound educational and political transformations:
* Teachers become collaborative inquirers with their students
* Students become skilled and lifelong independent learners
* Academic institutions become learning communities embracing the full diversity of human curiosity and experience.
The book covers discussion on what mentoring is, and why it is now so much in demand. It details the distinctive features of mentoring, including asking questions, students' reflections and responses and collaborative curriculum planning.
Drawing upon two decades of extensive research and practice, and using a variety of illuminating case studies, the authors offer a stimulating and thorough examination of mentoring. This combination of theory and practice will be invaluable to anyone involved in the teaching of adults in further and higher education, as well as university administrators, programme directors and developing and training officers.

Chapter 1
What is mentoring?

Where do you come from, Phaedrus my friend, and where are you going?

Plato, Phaedrus (227a)

“What do you want to learn?”

“Why do you want to learn these things?”

“How do you want to learn them?”

“What do you believe you have already learned?”

“How do you decide that you have done so?”

We ask our readers to consider that these five questions can germinate and shape an entire education. We suggest that the dialogues initiated and sustained by these questions will sufficiently provide both the content and process of learning in academic, workplace, community, and personal life. Moreover, these questions, when asked of oneself in self-reflection, create a lifelong course of learning which is at once entirely coherent and meaningful and yet entirely open to endlessly diverse and unexpected discoveries. The name we apply to the people whose vocation it is to ask such questions is “mentor.” The deliberate practice of learning, through asking them of one’s students and of oneself, is “mentoring.”

We work in an academic setting, a degree-granting, public university. We are professors who work mainly with adult students. They are busy and pre-occupied with the responsibilities and commitments of adults to their jobs and careers, to their families and their communities. They usually want university degrees to serve their success and prosperity. They want their academic learning to be efficient and convenient: that is, to move quickly but also to flexibly accommodate the other demands on their time and attention. Adult students want their learning to make them more powerful in the world beyond the academy. And, once they are assured that the content and organization of their learning will suit these practical needs, our students also want to address the more contemplative issues which almost invariably underlie, suffuse, and trouble the daily business ordinarily consuming their attention: Who am I? What sort of life do I want to live? How can I be free? How can I treat others and be treated respectfully? What excites my curiosity, wonder, and delight? That is, our students want their learning not only to help them succeed but also to help them become something rarely attended to in their workplaces and equally busy domestic lives: they want to be happy. Our work, the work of mentors, is to help students, each one and one at a time, conceive and complete an academic education that responds to these practical and contemplative needs.

This book is about how mentors do this work and about the principles which govern its practices. We will show how we and our students enter into and sustain academic dialogues evoked by the five questions above. We will show how these dialogues address the usual requirements of a good undergraduate education, as well as our students’ individual practical needs. We will also show how the dialogical relationship itself creates a little community that is truthful, just, and beautiful – that is, a learning experience enabling both mentors and students to care for their frequently reciprocal, even universal contemplative concerns. The work of mentoring and the dialogical learning it generates are moved by what Kurt Wolff calls “cognitive love” (1976:20). This spirit is not different, we believe, from the Eros or love which Socrates claims to animate every effort to learn to live a good life (Plato, Symposium 212b–c).

Before we explain the organization of this book and then in subsequent chapters illustrate and explain in detail the practices and principles of mentoring, we offer a glimpse into the beginnings of dialogue with two students. Their particular needs and purposes are individual, even idiosyncratic; but these people are also in many ways typical adult students seeking bachelor degrees from a fully accredited university.

Doris

As soon as I ask what I can do for her, Doris quickly reels off her “resume.” After completing high school, she found a secretarial position at a local bank, and then, while raising her three children, she continued to work in various office capacities on a part-time basis. She is quite proud of what she has accomplished. But when I ask her why she has decided to come to university now, she begins to describe a difficult divorce and the need to find a way to support herself. Two years ago, she found a full time job in the personnel department of a food conglomerate that recently moved its administrative offices only a short bus ride from her apartment. Doris also discloses another part of her life: for more than twenty five years, she has been devoted to her church and to its many community activities. “Almost every weekend, I’m off to another church event. People are always asking me to pitch in, and I’m happy to do it.” As she talks, I wonder what skills Doris might have learned from all this “pitching in” and what important meanings these activities might have for her.

After two meetings in which we continued to talk about Doris’s life and academic learning, it became clearer and clearer to me that even though she was discouraged by the end of her marriage and worried because she didn’t have a professional credential, many aspects of her life have been fulfilling. She had indeed accomplished a lot and had gained the respect of everyone with whom she had worked. I learned that whether in the local business office or in the parochial school where she had been volunteering for years, co-workers and supervisors knew she was very capable. When she “pitched-in,” she in fact was the person to whom others turned to take charge. With more than two decades of varied work experience, Doris could, I was sure, earn college credit for the skills and knowledge she’d acquired along the way. But right now, both Doris and I understood that she was really stuck without a college degree.

Doris had never been to university. Indeed, no adult of her generation in her family had. She worries that her age and her lack of a formal academic background would impede, if not completely block, her success. And though with the support of her kids, she has arrived in my office, she also worries that she isn’t “real university material.” But I sensed that her enthusiasm, her strong religious values, and her experiential learning would all serve her well as she pursued her university degree. Even by our second conversation, Doris and I had identified clusters of learning, both past and future, which, although still unrefined, would quite easily form major elements of the curriculum, the bachelor’s degree program, she would eventually design. Her apparent competencies in secretarial skills, office management, event planning, and in effectively dealing with people would nicely fit a variety of educational plans. And certainly this experiential learning would serve what Doris, during this second meeting, reveals to be her life’s goal: managing a church-based service agency for children.

Shifting our focus from these practical learnings, I wondered aloud:

“Anything else?”

“Well, I do like to listen to the radio a lot. Old radio shows.”

“Really?”

“Yes. I buy tapes of the Golden Age of Radio. Sometimes I record rebroadcasts of those old shows. Actually, I’ve collected hundreds of hours of tapes.”

“You could get credit for what you already know. And, you might even want to learn more about the Golden Age of Radio as an additional study.”

“I didn’t know I could do that.”

We have discovered something else that could become part of Doris’s degree. And I have found another example of the expanse of Doris’s inquisitiveness. I’m sure she can make it.

But we both knew we were not operating in a vacuum. Her circumstances impose constraints on her learning. First, Doris needs financial support, and her new employer will fund her university education only to the extent that her degree focuses on business. So too, her very busy life – filled with work, family, and church – conspires against the pattern and pace of any typical academic calendar. Yet, however much her situation might constrain her, Doris has always embraced the learning afforded by the roles she’s taken on. She learned how to be a parent; she learned the skills needed to effectively work in diverse office arrangements; she learned how to run complex events and to set up and fund new programs; and she learned the traditions and the theology of her faith. Thus, whatever the force of circumstance, Doris has also acquired a rich general education from her history.

At this moment in her life, Doris wants to make her own path. Even though she is anxious about achieving university-level learning and about how she will manage it, she wants to learn whatever she can that will help her attain her goal and to explore whatever she’s interested in. She is looking for guidance, and she knows she needs support to make her way on this alien academic terrain. She is depending on me to get her through the rules of the academy, even though she was quick to let me know that she intends to be “a little rebellious.” That is, despite the impositions of her workplace or the academic requirements she sees she might encounter, Doris intends to concentrate on the questions and topics which matter to her. She knows that it was thinking about those things that really got her excited about going to university.

Alex

Alex walks nervously into my office to learn how our college works and to plan a first independent study with me. I ask him, as I do every student, what he wants to learn. He tells me, “I just want to learn. I need a degree.” And then, in clipped, jittery sentences, he quickly gives a history of himself: Now in his mid-twenties and living on his own since he was fifteen, he had never graduated secondary school, but managed to pass an exam, which secured him a diploma. Alex then enrolled in several liberal arts courses at another college. These were required of all first year students and seemed, in Alex’s view, to have been taught by formula and without much regard for the students’ interests or participation. He did poorly in all of them. Nonetheless, Alex was and remains interested in the topics of those courses: psychology, sociology, and writing. “Everything,” he says, “I want to learn everything.”

While I am wondering what he means, Alex also tells me that for the past few years he’s worked in a local steel mill (one that is profitable, quite modern, and, for this largely rural area, quite well-paying). He doesn’t much like the work because it’s dangerous and he knows that over the long term it will damage his health. (I’ve had students before who work there; most were frequently afflicted with colds and other respiratory ailments.) Alex gets along with his co-workers and bosses, but he feels distant from them: “I’m not interested in most of the things they like to talk about.” However, he enjoys their company when conversations turn from money, women, hunting etc. and become “philosophical” about religion and politics. Even so, his views on those matters – which seem to be critical and liberal – tend to make him feel isolated as well. Alex tells me he likes to read about these topics, about “everything” concerning human behavior and that he sometimes keeps a journal of his ideas.

I feel a pressure from the nervous rush of Alex’s presentation. He’s skillfully self-supporting in, and well-informed about, the practical world. But he’s also alienated from it. His alienation, perhaps, makes him critically reflective and contemplative. He wants to form and find his place in the world, but not just anyplace, not even a simply prosperous one, will suit him. Alex has many desires, and he searches but is certain that he does not yet know what he needs. I want to respond helpfully to his specific and individual purposes, but I also need to make sure our connection is appropriate: friendly but not too personal, academically helpful but not psychotherapeutic. So, when he pauses, I ask him, hoping to project a calm but genuine curiosity, to tell me more about some of the books or authors he’s read.

He becomes even more agitated, his pale face and close-cut scalp flushing pink. He mentions Freud and “Fost.” I realize he means Faust, and worrying that I might embarrass him, I try to causally mention the correct pronunciation while saying admiringly, “Oh, you’ve read Faust?” Alex flushes more deeply, and then says, “There are lots more. I can’t think of them all now.” And he then rushes on to tell me more about his personal life: “I need to get a degree so I can get out of the mill someday.” He and his fiancée have a child; they plan to have another. He wants to provide for his family, which his factory wages enable him to do; but he wants to do something different, “so I can use my mind,” and he’s not interested in becoming a manager or a technician. The twelve-hour rotating shift work the mill requires of its l...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1 What is mentoring?
• Chapter 2 The principles of mentoring and the philosophy of dialogue
• Chapter 3 Asking questions
• Chapter 4 Waiting as learning
• Chapter 5 Curriculum as collaborative planning and learning
• Chapter 6 The personal and the academic
• Chapter 7 The mentor as learner
• Chapter 8 Authenticity and artifice
• Chapter 9 Access to and within the academy
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index