What I'm reading right now: Mentor, by Laurent Daloz

I feel blessed that my Student Affairs position (and functional area) allows me the opportunity to maintain longer term relationships with the students I serve on campus. Compared to my colleagues at the community college where I work, this is a fairly rare opportunity as our student affairs are oriented more around Student Services, so many of them handle long lines of students requesting services, rather than providing prolonged support or mentorship.

I am currently reading Mentor by Laurent Daloz, and though I am only into the second chapter, the book has already given me enough to think about that I've been inspired to write. Lisa Endersby and I have been involved in a long-term conversation regarding mentorship within student affairs, including planning a presentation for the upcoming 2012 NASPA conference. As a greater proportion of the students we serve in the community college are adult learners (compared to my four-year counterparts), I'm finding the book extremely relevant and descriptive of how I conceptualize my work. Granted, I will only be in this position for another month and a half, but the book was purchased for departmental usage and my reading validates it as a valuable resource for our work.

Daloz is using mentorship as a framework for working with adult learners in reaching their educational goals. In particular, he uses the metaphor of journey to describe the educational path of adult learners, and he describes mentors as the guides on that journey. I've had many conversations about the role of mentors in the lives of underrepresented and underserved students as these mentors can provide the type of guidance traditional students receive before and through their college experiences, but I haven't given as much thought to this role in the journeys of adult learners. In particular, I love how he describes the role of a mentor as engendering trust, issuing a challenge, providing encouragement, and offering a vision (p. 31). (Anyone notice challenge and support there?) These themes are of particular importance to adult learners as it respects the life experience they bring to college but recognizes that they too are students who want to learn and are looking to maximize their time "out of life"--not immediately focused on family or work--that they are on campus, in college. My experience working with adult learners is that they simply need reassurance to rebuild their confidence as students--that they are on the right track--rather than the more intensive needs that traditional students bring as emerging adults trying to figure out what will happen next for them in life. Often when adult learners return to school they fear they no longer have the same energy/ability/capacity to be students again, and simply need to be shown that yes, they do, and moreso, their life experiences can provide even better preparation than those moving from one school to the next.

Daloz also does a fantastic job balancing the content of his book--application of developmental theory, framework for mentorship--with stories from his own experience as an educator. As I continue to read I may come across more blog inspiration, but for now all I can say is that I highly recommend this book. Check it out from the library, or convince your director to add it to your departmental resources!

Bryce
Follow me on Twitter: @BryceEHughes

Reference: Daloz, L.A. (1999). Mentor: Guiding the journey of adult learners (2nd Ed.). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

To Mentor...or to Navigate?

I posted on Twitter the other day that I had just presented to the student government budget committee asking for increased funding for the program I supervise. I work at Green River Community College where I oversee the Commencement Achievement Program, an initiative out of Diversity and Multicultural Affairs geared toward helping students independently navigate the college system. I received a response from Lisa Endersby, a student affairs guru out of our neighbor to the north, which led to an email conversation about mentorship. She asked me why we call my student staff Peer Navigators, rather than mentors, and how that structures the paradigm of their work.

Many of us work in some capacity supporting or supervising student mentors. This mentorship appears in various paradigms, such as student leadership, peer tutoring, or, quite often, explicitly defined mentorship. Each of these different titles describes the various roles and functions our students fill in our programs/departments/divisions/colleges/etc., yet each title was intentionally chosen to frame their work within a specific paradigm and provide them a framework for reflection on how they serve their peers. Our exchange got me thinking a little deeper about why our program chooses to call them "navigators" rather than something more common, like "mentors." It was a term I inherited, but my director and I built it explicitly into my program's mission statement. Why do we consider it such a unique and valuable title?

Over the past two years, I've worked with our Student Life graphic designer to come up with a graphic to use in our literature and our promotional materials. Because we call our students "Peer Navigators," and the program has a mission around college navigation, she recommended a compass. I loved the idea as it symbolizes navigation, and the concept of direction (North, South, East, and West) has cross-cultural meaning. It provides a conceptualization of the college environment as a stormy sea, and our program provides navigation and direction to help students keep afloat above the waves. We work with mostly first-generation, low income, and otherwise underserved students, for whom the college environment is terribly unfamiliar and very intimidating. Our students can become overwhelmed by the process of attending college itself, let alone their coursework to complete their degrees, and quickly feel strong feelings of isolation and the desire to return to "friendlier shore."

I train the Peer Navigators to be a mentor to their students, but also to guide their peers toward developing their own skills to independently navigate the college system. Since many of them had similar college experiences, they can empathize with the students who access our program and authentically guide them from that common understanding. Often if a student thinks a question she has is stupid, she begins to believe she is the only one with that question, and that college staff may belittle her for not having all the information needed to attend in the first place. Asking another student can be much more comfortable, especially if the response is, "Oh yeah, I had that same question. Let me show you how I got that information."

Transitioning from high school to college includes a huge cultural shift in how each institution functions. College requires a greater degree of independence and self-motivation on the part of the student, and also requires prior knowledge of the lingo and processes on which all the aspects of college attendance operate. For students who do not have access to this information prior to admission to college, the transition becomes a barrier to degree completion. The college becomes a stormy sea, and the student a solitary captain navigating the murky waters rising on all sides. We call our students Peer Navigators because they become a compass, map, and literal navigator to walk side-by-side with their peers relying on their own experiences to help navigate the storms toward calmer waters.

Bryce