| Mentoring as Community-Building |
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by Helen Armstrong
An individual misses of freedom by exactly as much as he misses of unity. (Follett, 1919, p. 578)
Mary Parker Follett's (1919) statement captures why I support mentoring: I conceptualize the mentoring process as an essential ingredient in community-building, necessary for the practice of freedom (Freire, 1970). Community is the crucible that supports and nourishes our growth, that validates, or violates in some instances, how we construct our identity. Our lived definitions of "mentoring-as-community," thus, either enhance the reputation of the mentoring process itself, or garner debate and opposition, depending on how, explicitly and implicitly, we have constructed the teleology of community. While the specific purposes of everyone within that community need not be, and should not be the same, all those purposes still do have to sustain the common, overarching raison d'être, the essence of the community. Within this paper I will elaborate the importance of, and the manner in which mutual mentoring serves to nourish and to sustain, indeed, to create, community. With that approach, I hope to elucidate a process that involves, not the absorption of the individual or the compromise of diversity, but an honouring of individual difference (the particular) even while that diversity is being embraced by the community (the general). There is a recognition, in my approach, that one may belong to many communities, and that the manner in which each community nourishes our becoming is not identical. My family community will support me in ways that neither my work nor my extra-curricular community can, for example. To belong to only one community is debilitating, in that one's identity, being attached to only that one community, develops with a fragility that threatens the health of the individual, and, thus, the community itself.
My introduction begs the major argument against mentoring, which is that the process is just another, more palatable, manner to serve up enforced socialization, a kind of utilitarianism that sees the interests of the powerful (not necessarily the majority) choke the lifeblood from the less powerful. Taken at its worst, mentoring can be exactly that; we have all heard of hazing and initiation rituals that have left everyone a victim, and of the practice of "soldiering" that serves to constrain the creativeness and energy of organizational members. That kind of community is not what a nourishing mentoring process supports. The difficulty is that, where mentoring is concerned, there is no compound that turns Mr. Hyde into Dr. Jekyll, or vice versa, thus allowing the observer to distinguish clearly that which validates from that which violates. Rather, mentoring is a process that can take many forms and which moves along a continuum, ranging from the tossing of keys, with a nonchalant "Good luck," to a new faculty member or student in residence, to a not-too-hidden agenda that involves an expectation to conform to the "way things are done around here." The exercise of both extremes serves to discredit the validation that positive mentoring offers.
The manufactured fear of the extremes is one of the reasons, in my opinion, why we succumb to the debilitating alienation and powerlessness of atomistic individualism, so endemic in contemporary society. While Taylor (1991) refers to individualism and the primacy of instrumental reason as two of the malaises of modernity, he points to their consequences as the third. With instrumental reason as the guiding principle,
the institutions and structures of industrial-technological severely restrict our choices, . . . [and] force societies as well as individuals to give a weight to instrumental reason that in serious moral deliberation we would never do, and which may even be highly destructive. (p. 8)
Such "reason" encourages us to abdicate the tenants of good citizenship, or to redefine that citizenship as the preparation for one's "place," consigned or chosen, in the competitive industrial technocracies of the world. We discard those moral structures that have served to guide our decisions -- faith in a higher purpose, connected more with people that with position; and a sense of community, of a communal belonging where harm done to others is synonymous with harm done to oneself.
But Donne's (1975) "Never send to know for whom the bell tolls" (p. 87) has resurfaced in a global society. We are coming to realize, now, that atomistic individualism leads not to empowerment, but to chronic disenfranchisement, where no one's voice is heard or valued, and, so, participatory and engaged voice falls into disuse. In such a state we become subject to what Toqueville (1904) defined as soft despotism. Postman (1993) contends that what happens with the erosion of our guiding structures is that we become prey to technopoly; we surrender our culture, that is, our community, and replace it with technology. There are other factors involved, of course, as well as those of industrial-technological definition, not least of which is the reaction to our own Charter of Rights and Freedoms, our subsequent inability, upon its implementation and interpretation by the courts, to imagine any other way to deal with diversity than to construct institutions that purport to stand for everything, and, thus, stand for nothing. In other words, in our efforts to protect the particular (the individual), we have compromised the general (the community), without which the particular cannot be nourished and sustained. We have been discouraged from creating public communities that are clearly defined by a guiding set of principles. There are exceptions, of course, such as separate or independent schools, which are still allowed, given the Constitution Act of 1982 (formerly the British North America Act of 1867). It may be significant to note that many non-Catholic parents send their children to a Catholic school specifically because of the presence of a clear set of moral principles that guide the purpose and goals of that school.
The world is changing, however. As much as we would like to claim that recent tragic world events are the acts of an isolated terrorist group(s), there is a growing, gnawing awareness that we have not acted as moral stewards of the world and its peoples. Globalization allows everyone access to information about how others live; everyone knows, now, that there are "haves" and "have-nots." We know that we ignore the needs of others, even of those close to us (and they ours). The introduction, implementation, and institutionalization of a mentoring process speaks to our errors of omission and commission. As such, the process means more than ensuring that students stay at our academic institutions so that we all keep our jobs. The significance of mentoring extends far beyond that reason, important as paying for the mortgage and our children's education may be.
Mentoring as community-building is a practice in humanization. As such, it cannot be judged with the measures of instrumental reason. Rather, its practice will create an environment that is conducive to "men and women deal[ing] critically and creatively with reality and discover[ing] how to participate in the transformation of their world" (Shaull, 1970, p. 16). Moreover, that praxis, rather than constricting the boundedness of one's rationality and one's freedom, increases it, to the point where the increased complexity cannot be accommodated by one's intellectual ability to pattern, and one either eliminates new information, or some of the old information, in order to accommodate a revised pattern or way of doing things. That pattern transformation may be identified as first-order, adjusting change, or second-order, transforming change. The opportunities for second-order, significant change in the manner in which one creates or constructs their identities is, thus, expanded with the introduction of the mentoring process, which, in my praxis, essentially means mutual instruction of the manner in which one lives and moves in the world.
It is important to emphasize that mentoring does not assume that one must become like the mentor. When my colleagues at the Hutterite colonies helped me with a paper on Hutterian history and our university's Hutterian teacher education program, they mentored me with their comments, their invitations to visit their communities, and their participation, with me, at a national conference. They had no intention of (and would resist) my becoming the same as they are, or vice versa. But there is now an increased mutual understanding, a knowing that, with the mentoring process, we have created a new community of support.
Similarly, in courses I teach, both at the undergraduate and the graduate level, there is an expectation of a mentoring-as-community-building process. I could not teach to the needs of the students, or they to mine, if there were not; there would be no pattern formed by our deliberations, only fragments of information that had no meaning because they were given no social context. To that end, I always ask the "So what" question. So what does this chapter/article/case study have to do with you, with teaching? Please critique and make sense of it, given your experience. A mentoring approach allows for the construction of transformative teacher-leadership, shared amongst the community. There is no particular magic in this process; all it requires is a recognition that everyone is a wise advisor, a Mentor (Odysseus' counsellor) in the odyssey of a shared voyage, a builder of community.
Let me provide another example. I have been in my current position within this university environment for just a little over two years. Any credibility that I might have established, in this new province with its own unique approach to education, is owed, in large part, to the mentoring of me by my colleagues and by my students. They tell me about their work, their life, and I can construct content for and teaching methods within academic courses based on the knowledge that I have gained from them. Recently, I developed a new approach to a graduate course that was guided by a direct, planned, and purposeful mentoring by school division stakeholders. Students, those who are enrolled in the courses, report that they are receiving the most benefit from the opportunity that the gathering together provides for the mutual mentoring process. Each learns from the others about the challenges and celebrations experienced in their schools. The process is symbiotic in that the knowledge gained helps further to guide the charting of our administration and research in areas that will mutually support and mentor. In that fashion, we all remain engaged, vibrant, excited, challenged by this new community, as genuine teachers-as-students and students-as-teachers.
My colleagues, thus, help to define who I am; they affect my focus, their concerns are part of the tapestry of my life. For my part, I challenge, require explanations for why things are done the way they are. In the subsequent explanations, we all examine our practice, transform our ways of thinking about and practicing the administration of our schools.
In this manner of approaching mentoring as community-building there are many choices. Engagement, or participation in the process, is non-negotiable, however. Passivity is not an option. Nourishing mentorship is an active process that primarily concerns itself with exposing and enabling people's gifts.
What provides us with the most satisfaction, I believe, is never the taking, but, rather, the giving; always the giving. Everyone wants to know that they have gifts to offer, that their gifts are needed and valued by the community. While physically, we may leave this place, it is the gifts that we give that provide our legacy, that assure immortality. We have only to observe what happens when our gifts are negative -- for example, the Aboriginal residential school system -- to know that our contributions last far beyond the time of their initial presentation. On the positive side, the same is also true: my Mother, for example, inspires with her gift of engagement with life. Here is a woman who has lost three of her four children and a husband, and who has struggled to recover from a debilitating stroke, who still married my step-dad when he was scheduled for open-heart surgery, and who still commented, upon seeing her garden and her fruit trees, and hearing the birds sing, "Isn't life just paradise?"
In truth, then, the only unique gift we have to give is our autobiography. Material possessions can be obtained in a variety of ways; the compilation of such goods provides little satisfaction, at any rate, other than the momentary intoxication that may accompany the process of acquiring. But our autobiographies -- they, alone, are ours to give. Our lives and the lives of others interweave; it is through this experience of reciprocal creation that we give, that we generate ideas; meaning and knowledge do not exist apart from the experience of our auto/biographies. That does not mean that we give up our individuality, for each of us makes sense of and translates our experience in a unique manner, and so the gift of our experience is unique, as well. The point is that the practice of mentoring as community-building assists us in our efforts to evaluate our experience, to give significance to that experience as we organize it. This is the essence of reciprocal creation, that the giving of our autobiography is a social matter. Given that, mentoring as community-building is an essential aspect of what we all do as teachers-as-students and as students-as-teachers, and needs to be embraced, but also to be scrutinized, given its power of social influence. It is the community that provides the nourishment, or the toxin, for the growth, the release, and, thus, the experiential effects of our gifts.
Mutual mentorship is the essence of the participating citizenry of a community. Simple consent, or even disagreement for that matter, is dangerous; ballot box voting, real or metaphorical, most certainly does not constitute the practice of community. Progress rests in our ability, in our power, to seek out and nourish our gifts, to honour them in a community that finds its meaning, not in coercion, not in sameness, but in the process of uniting in a tapestry of sense-making that invites, nourishes, and honours our contributions. That process does not succeed with an assumption of similarity; when people come together, what is at first apparent is difference. It is when we use that difference, that friction, to construct a new "pulley" -- a new experience, a new way of looking at things -- that the adrenalin of creativity flows. The excitement of the mentoring process lies, thus, in the practice of evocation. As educators, I believe that there is no autobiographical legacy that is more powerful, in a positive sense, than our participation in the sustenance of a forum that enables everyone's gifts to be created, evoked, celebrated, and shared. Such a process nourishes mentoring-as-community-building, the practice of freedom.
References
Donne, J. (1975). Devotions upon emergent occasions. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press. (Original work published in 1624).
Follett, M. P. (1919). Community is a process. Philosophical Review, 28, 576-588.
Freire, P. (1997). Pedagogy of the oppressed (M. B. Ramos, Trans.). New York: Continuum. (Original work published in 1970).
Postman, N. (1993). Technolopy: The surrender of culture to technology. New York: Vintage Books.
Shaull, R. (1997). Preface to Pedagogy of the oppressed (P. Freire, Author, M. B. Ramos, Trans.). New York: Continuum. (Original work published in 1970).
Taylor, C. (1991). The malaise of modernity. Concord, ON: Ananasi.
Toqueville, A. (1904). Democracy in America, Volumes 1 & 2 (H. Reeve, Trans.) New York: D. Appleton & Co. (Original work published in 1835, Vol. 1, and in 1840, Vol. 2)