Hi Jim, Not only a great turnout, but for me at least, a very good session. I came out of it with two!!! Great ideas from others, about how to improve my classes. Bob -----Original Message----- From: Teaching Breakfast List [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Jim Greenberg Sent: Thursday, October 06, 2005 1:57 PM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Great Turnout at TB This Morning - Faculty as Mentor Article 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 (c) 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.