Tbers, 

We had a great turnout at the Teaching Breakfast this morning. Thanks to all
who came and participated in the discussion.  It was, IMHO, excellent.

The posting below offers some provocative comments on the professors' role
as mentor to students. It is from Chapter 19: Reconceptualizing the
Faculty Role: Alternative Models, by James R. Chan, Michael V. Fortunato,
Alan Mandell, Susan Oaks, and Duncan RyanMann, SUNY Empire State
College, in Reinventing Ourselves, Interdisciplinary Education,
Collaborative Learning, and Experimentation in Higher Education, Barbara
Leigh Smith & John McCann, Editors. The Evergreen State College. Copyright ©
2001 by Anker Publishing Company, Inc.  All rights reserved. ISBN
1-882982-35-5. Anker Publishing Company, Inc. 176 Ballville Road P.O.
Box 249 Bolton, MA 01740-0249 [www.ankerpub.com]

Reprinted with permission.


                    FACULTY AS MENTOR

A certain privilege has traditionally been
associated with the status of the faculty member:
access to specialized knowledge, the prerogative
to identify what is important to learn, the right
to impart that knowledge to those who come to us
to gain it, and the authority to judge if another
has acquired appropriate learning.  In
conventional academic settings, the very
expertise of the faculty has been framed by a set
of boundaries that separated faculty from
students.  Faculty held the important knowledge,
conveyed it to those who cared to know, and
developed criteria for and carried out what was
determined to be appropriate evaluation.

The presuppositions of such a model have been
opened to debate by a range of issues and
realities that now characterize our educational
landscape.  We live in a world where the question
of what is important to know is not easily
answered and where the amount of knowledge at
least theoretically available to us continues to
expand at a phenomenal rate: that is, in a world
where such authority is fleeting.  Even the
supposedly clear and meaningful disciplinary
conditions that informed so much of our own
education and our identities as academic
professions have been thrown into question.  No
thoughtful faculty person can know enough about
what there is to know to make final claims about
that knowledge.'

Further, the institutions within which we work
have dramatically changed.  The range of students
who enter our classrooms-in terms of ethnicity,
race, gender, age, and life experiences-has
expanded.  It is nearly impossible to prejudge
who will sit before us, what they already know,
what they want to know, and what tools we might
employ to most effectively help them learn.  What
we had taken for granted before (however
appropriately or inappropriately) we cannot
assume today.

Institutions have responded to some of these
realities in a number of ways.  The drive to find
a viable market niche and to respond to new
clientele has meant more flexible schedules,
evening classes, weekend options, distance
learning programs, the formal acknowledgement of
learning gained outside of accredited academic
institutions, and institutional fixtures (from
orientations to the library to course guides)
that are more user-friendly.  Clearly, colleges
have become more aware of trying to meet the
needs of an increasingly diverse student body-of
providing levels of access, particularly through
newly devised delivery systems that had not
existed before.

Most of these institutional changes have been at
the edges of faculty experience.  They have not
usually touched the more protected arena of
faculty privilege.  Particularly with the
inclusion of a greater number of working adult
students, however, faculty have been called upon
to expand the range and nature of their
interactions with students.  On a simple level,
it has not been unusual for faculty to have
increased the hours they are available to
students outside of the classroom.  More
significantly, because of the experiences, goals,
dilemmas, and academic strengths and weaknesses
that these so-called nontraditional students have
brought to our academic worlds, faculty have
found themselves taking on more advisory roles,
serving as guides and consultants, and helping
their students negotiate their way through
formerly alien academic terrain to gain the kinds
of skills and competencies that we know they
need.  The inclusion of such a counseling
dimension into the very fabric of many of our
lives as academic instructors has also meant a
subtle but important shift in the nature of
communication between faculty and student.  We
have learned to listen with new attentiveness and
care, knowing that our ability to understand and
respond is directly related to our students'
success as learners.

But the most powerful shift occurs when the
interrelated movement from providing better
institutional access to listening and counseling
does touch the very core of the conventional
faculty role.  And it is here that the potential
of a new relationship between students and
teacher emerges.  As Mandell and Herman (1996)
have described such a collaborative stance is at
the heart of the role of faculty as mentor.  That
is, in an institutional context that works for
true access (not only for admittance but for the
possibility of success), listening becomes a
necessary art, and teaching-and the knowledge
upon which it is based-becomes an ongoing project
of locating and/or creating imaginative learning
tools to respond to the academic needs of
individual students whose voices we can never
disregard.  Garrison (1992) describes the
emerging dialog this way:

Only through continuous and critical dialogue
between learner and facilitator can a dynamic and
optimal balance of control be realized.  The
balance of control will probably shift depending
on the context and the proficiency of the
learner.  However, through sharing control there
is an increased probability of students reaching
desired and worthwhile learning goals which, in
turn, would result in improved motivation,
ability to learn, and self-directedness. (p. 144)

In the last few years, the word mentoring has
taken on a rather hierarchical cast.  In such
contexts (many of them corporate), mentors are
experienced guides who know and can offer expert
advice, those who have been especially successful
and can show others how to succeed.  But the
notion of faculty as mentor introduced here
emphasizes sharing control and meaningful
reciprocity.  In fact, it is about the deliberate
creation of opportunities for common learning. It
also is motivated by the quest to follow the lead
offered by an individual student's questions,
concerts, or idiosyncratic understanding into new
areas of academic exploration, even those that
stretch and challenge our own sense of what we
know.  In this way, mentoring accents the
importance of our strengths as academic
generalists who have learned to work with
problems that cut across the disciplines and
themes that are inherently interdisciplinary.
Mentoring embeds us in a distinctive approach to
teaching and learning that deliberately
legitimates the questioning of faculty authority
and the claims to knowledge upon which that
authority rests.  By inviting a student to
participate in his/her own learning (for example,
through faculty and students creating
individualized learning contracts as an integral
part of the learning process or working together
to design an entire curriculum), and by providing
room for a student to gain the new skills
necessary to work independently, we offer
ourselves as engaged interlocutors who
demonstrate that we care deeply about dialog and
reflection and about the critical examination of
pertinent questions, many of which were not our
questions at the start.

In effect, through interactions with their
students, mentors try to model the very kind of
learning they hope their students will continue
to pursue.  That is, in a quite powerful and
palpable way, the ideal of lifelong learning,
usually reserved for students, equally pertains
to the faculty mentor.  We are always in the
process of creating new studies with students,
tinkering with old plans, searching for and
coordinating effective resources, immersing
ourselves in a new question, following the lead
of an issue that a student has begun to
articulate, making connections with a colleague
who may offer a suggestive direction.  We are,
above all, listening, guiding, trying out new
learning strategies, and staying alert to what
may become yet another opening.

Perhaps like all more democratic experiments, the
experience of faculty as mentor is a rather
precarious one.  Traditional faculty authority
has been based on bodies of knowledge and
academic structures that reinforce them.  To
enter a world of mentoring is to practice with
the expectation that through serious and honest
discourse and negotiation (and a community of
other mentors who can provide support,
encouragement, and critical scrutiny), plans for
individual studies and curricula can be built
that are academically rich and that flow from the
lives of our students as parents, workers,
scholars, members of a community, and citizens.
To gain experience in such a faculty role that
emphasizes not separation but connection, dialog,
and a reweaving of relationships of authority is,
in itself, a new kind of privilege.