Mentoring for protégé character development

Abstract

As role models, mentors serve as moral exemplars to their protégés. Yet, since the mentoring literature gives scant attention to the mentor's role in protégé moral education, mentors are largely unwitting participants in this process. Grounded in research from moral psychology and philosophy, this article provides guidance to mentors who want to be more intentional about the process of protégé character development. Based upon a theoretical analysis, eight propositions are offered regarding ways mentors can help their protégés form character as an integrated system of motivation, emotion, knowledge and cognition through experience, reflection, and inspiration.

Notes

1. I am adopting the convention of defining character as a disposition. However, as a complex system comprised of knowledge, emotional, cognitive, and motivational components, it is not unlike the non‐dispositional conception adopted by certain Neo‐Kolbergians (Narvaez, 2005).

2. Knowledge about how to be virtuous is both tacit and declarative. Declarative knowledge is that which can be rendered and transmitted in propositional form. In contrast, tacit knowledge is routinely used and taken for granted but cannot be articulated.

3. It should be noted that the ancients were much more concerned about the character education of the young than with the challenge of building character among adults (Kristjánsson, 2000).