Mentoring with: reimagining mentoring across the university

Abstract

Traditional, formal mentoring structures established within the space of the university can be rooted in patriarchal systems of power, hierarchy, and exclusion that perpetuate neoliberal and capitalist understandings of individualism and exceptionalism. This model privileges certain forms of knowledge and expertise, often that of senior, tenured faculty rather than those who are ignored or overlooked as ‘experts’ such as historically underrepresented tenured and untenured faculty, contingent faculty, and staff. In this paper, we seek to reimagine the concept of the traditional mentoring relationship rooted in power and hierarchy into a more democratic, empowering model across the space of the university. We do this by expanding upon the concept of power mentoring which emphasizes mentoring networks rather than individual relationships. Power mentoring centers reciprocal support and mutual benefit, infusing a feminist ethics of care into the spaces and structures of the neoliberal university. We draw on Joan Tronto’s caring with to frame mentoring as collective, collaborative, and democratic: mentoring with. Based upon a collective reading of Ensher and Murphy ’s Power Mentoring: How Successful Mentors and Protégés Get the Most Out of their Relationships and conversations from our faculty learning community about mentoring, we argue that mentoring relationships within the spaces of the university should emphasize the role of dynamic networks between faculty, staff, and administrators to build upon existing feminist praxis to develop a more inclusive, geographic system of mentoring, which enables participants to grow, develop, and learn with one another.

Keywords:

• Care ethics
• feminist mentoring
• mentoring
• mentoring networks
• neoliberalism
• power mentoring

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the Pew Faculty Teaching and Learning Center at Grand Valley State University for allowing us to space and time to discuss mentoring. We would also like to thank Barb Blankemeir from the Pew Faculty Teaching and Learning Center for her contributions to our group discussion. We would like to thank Karen Falconer Al-Hindi, Ozlem Altan-Olcay, and the three anonymous reviewers for their feedback and support of this piece.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Denise Goerisch

Dr. Denise Goerisch is an assistant professor of Integrative, Religious, and Intercultural Studies at Grand Valley State University. She received her PhD in Geography from San Diego State University and University of California, Santa Barbara. Her current research project is about college students’ engagements with the costs of pursuing higher education in the US. Her previous research focused on the socio-economic lives of children and young people. She has published on topics related to faculty care work, qualitative methods, emotional labor and girlhood, children’s work and play, and leadership in informal educational spaces.

Jae Basiliere

Dr. Jae Basiliere is an assistant professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Grand Valley State University. They received their PhD in Gender Studies from Indiana University. Their research falls at the intersections of rural queer studies and LGBTQ performance activism. They are currently working on a book project that traces the ways in which LGBTQ performance artists have used their platforms to interrupt dominant activist narratives about inclusion in state structures and undermine assumptions about rural homophobia.

Ashley Rosener

Ashley Rosener is a liaison librarian at Grand Valley State University. She received her MLIS from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests include scholarly communication, mentoring, and grassroots professional development in academic libraries.

Kimberly McKee

Dr. Kimberly McKee is the director of the Kutsche Office of Local History and an assistant professor in Integrative, Religious, and Intercultural Studies at Grand Valley State University. Her monograph, Disrupting Kinship: Transnational Politics of Korean Adoption in the United States, interrogates the institutional practice of international adoption and adoptee activism (University of Illinois Press, forthcoming 2019). Her work also has been featured in Journal of Korean Studies, Adoption & Culture, Feminist Formations, and edited collections on transnational kinship and representations of Asian Americans. She serves on the executive committee for the Alliance of the Study of Adoption and Culture. McKee received her Ph.D. in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from The Ohio State University.

Jodee Hunt

Dr. Jodee Hunt is a professor of Biology at Grand Valley State University, and serves as faculty fellow in the Office of Undergraduate Research and Scholarship, where she leads initiatives in mentoring student scholars. She previously served as chair of the Faculty Council in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, where she spearheaded development of the Out of the Box series of faculty workshops on collaboration, communication, research, teaching and service, for which she was awarded the Communications Cordon. She earned her Ph.D. in Systematics and Ecology from the University of Kansas and a Master's in Biology from San Diego State University. Her current research embraces collaboration with regional zoos investigating animal well-being and conservation involving both undergraduate and graduate students. Her publications address diverse topics ranging from education, research and innovation at the bottom of the economic pyramid in Nicaragua, ecology and behavior of terrestrial and aquatic vertebrates, and restoration and landscape ecology.

Tonya M. Parker

Dr. Tonya M. Parker, AT, ATC is an associate professor in the Department of Movement Science at Grand Valley State University. She earned her PhD in Sports Medicine from the University of Oregon and is a certified athletic trainer. Her research interests are wide ranging and include collaborations across the university exploring the role of mentoring in academia, gait and its recovery following concussion, the motivations for not reporting concussion in collegiate athletes, and the role of exercise in stress management and the college student. Her recent publications include the reliability of activity tracking devices and the influence of exercise empowerment on life stress.