"Mentoring, (Wo)Mentoring, and Helping Students Take Responsibility for Their Own Education"
Rebecca Rickly
Texas Tech University
"Mentoring, (Wo)Mentoring, and Helping Students Take Responsibility for Their Own Education"
Rebecca Rickly
Texas Tech University
In her article, "Taking Women Students Seriously," Adrienne Rich talks about how women students need to "take responsibility for their own education" since it was likely that no one else in academia would be taking responsibility for it. While times have changed somewhat since Rich wrote her essay, I still believe firmly in what she wrote, and I believe that it is our job, as professors, to help our graduate students take this kind of responsibility. I hesitate to use the term "mentoring" here; some feminist scholars have critiqued mentoring's associations with an old boy's network. Mentoring, in practice, grows out of a master/apprentice model, a model that invokes patriarchal and hierarchical power issues. Such a model indeed fits nicely into an academic institution, with its stratified power structures and hierarchical organization, yet reports from women in academia (see Bloom for one example) illustrate that women frequently are not given a "place in or access to the master-apprentice model of mentoring" (Enos, "Mentoring" 137).The rigid hierarchy suggested by the "master-apprentice" model shouldn't limit our conception of the term "mentoring," however; I like to think of mentoring the way Mary Ann Cain described her relationship with Lil Brannon: a "partnership, one based in mutuality-of learning, trust, risk, care, and challenge" (113). This lateral, relational web harkens back to Carol Gilligan's descriptions of women's ways of representing reality and making decisions.
As an administrator, a scholar, a mother, a wife, and a daughter, I cannot help but identify with the kind of moral decision making that Carol Gilligan identifies. I value connections, contexts, and situated analysis, rather than, as the men in Gilligan's study did, the universal, abstract, and impersonal analysis, which doesn't always make for savvy administrative practice (19). Nonetheless, Gilligan's theory has been applied to writing program work by Marcia Dickson, whose essay "Directing Without Power: Adventures in Constructing a Model of Feminist Writing Program Administration" outlines an administrative model which examines the needs of each instructor, rather than the power of a single administrator, purposely blurring authority and control. Similarly, Theresa Enos outlines a process she calls "(Wo)Mentoring" in which women don't necessarily taken on the entire burden of mentoring (which she acknowledges is desperately needed) simply because of the horrific time demands such an activity requires; instead, Enos suggests that:
I would like to echo Enos' list, and work together not only to suggest practical, institutionally-based applications, but to expand the notion of "(wo)mentoring" to include others with whom we interact: those in staff and adjunct positions; those who work with industry; those who are returning; and so forth. If we work together, we can all begin to take responsibility for our education to a greater degree.
(Adopted from pp. 142-43, "Mentoring and (Wo)mentoring in Composition Studies)
- We define mentoring so that its activities are not split between nurturing (female) and real work (male). Such work must be equally distributed among all faculty.
- We should view graduate papers as a succession of drafts; we need to turn our graduate writing courses into mentoring discussion groups where research is seen as invention, where successive drafts are discussed/critiqued, as an introduction to the processes of the larger academic community.
- We can create an environment where students can make the traditional research paper into a publishable paper (vs. the occasional faculty co-authoring).
- We can plan for graduate students to meet weekly with one or more faculty members for the purposes of introducing student to the profession. This could take the form of a communal mentoring program.
- We can use portfolios to involve graduate students and probationary faculty more actively in reciprocally based mentoring relationships. This provides a pedagogical tool for self-assessment, a record of changes as the person develops as a scholar/teacher, and it places less emphasis on the mentor as master. The apprentice is given a greater sense of control through the power of reflexivity.
Works CitedBloom, Lynn. "I Want a Writing Director." CCC 43.2 (1992): 176-178.
Cain, Mary Ann. "Mentoring as Identity Exchange: Conflicts and Connections." Feminist Teacher 8.3 (1994): 112-118.
Dickson, Marcia. "Directing Without Power: Adventures in Constructing a Model of Feminist Writing Program Administration." In Writing Ourselves into the Story: Unheard Voices from Composition Studies. Eds. Sheryl Fontaine and Susan Hunter. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 1993. 140-153
Enos, Theresa. Gender Roles and Faculty Lives in Rhetoric and Composition. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 1996.
____. "Mentoring-and (Wo)mentoring-in Composition Studies." Academic Advancement in Composition Studies: Scholarship, Publication, Promotion, Tenure. Richard C. Gebhardt and Barbara Genelle Smith Gebhardt. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1997. 129-145
Rich, Adrienne. "Taking Women Students Seriously." On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978. New York: Norton, 1979.
