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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Bildung
- Sprache: Englisch
With a new introduction and afterword, this revised second edition is a practical, engaging exploration of mentoring and its power to transform learning. Filled with inspiring vignettes, Mentor shows how anyone who teaches can become a successful mentor to students. Topics covered include adult learning and development; the search for meaning as a motive for learning; education as a transformational journey; how adults change and develop; how learning changes the learner; barriers and incentives to learning and growth; and guiding adults through difficult transitions.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title
Copyright
Foreword
Series
Preface to the Original Edition
Preface
Acknowledgments
Dedication
The Author
Part One: Adult Learning as Development
Chapter One: First Shards
When the Thunder Comes
Running Low
Chapter Two: Mentors, Myths, and Metamorphosis
Mentors
Stories
The Journey
The Deep and Savage Way
Virgil as Mentor
Into the Trenches
Chapter Three: Maps of Transformation
Through the Hourglass
Levinson
Midlife and Liberal Studies
Joining the World
Kegan
Venturing Out
The Perry Scheme
Part Two: Learning as a Transformative Journey
Chapter Four: The Deep and Savage Way
Searching for the Rock
Family Ties
Growing Doubt
Looking Ahead
Guiding Principles
Chapter Five: The Dynamic of Transformation
Transformation: The Meaning of Growth
Learning to Swim
Dialectic: The Dynamic of Transformation
Beyond the Other Side
Chapter Six: Returning Home
Somersaulting Backwards
Thinking Something Makes It Real
Living on the Border
A Tender Power
Part Three: Fostering Adult Learning
Chapter Seven: The Ecology of Adult Learning
General Systems Theory
The Holding Environment
Seeing the Connections Among Things
Chapter Eight: The Yoda Factor
Support
Challenge
Vision
Chapter Nine: The Art of the Mentor
Smoldering Questions
Education as Care
Why Mentors Matter
On Painting Naturally
Afterword
Imagining Wisdom
Wisdom as Meaning-Making
Our Shared Humanity
Postconventional Thought
Ethical Intent
Swamp Territory
Interdependence
References
Appendix
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter Three: Maps of Transformation
Figure 3.1 Levinson's Developmental Periods.
Figure 3.2 Kegan's “Helix of Evolutionary Truces.”
Figure 3.3 Perry's Map.
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Mentor
Guiding the Journey of Adult Learners
Second Edition with New Foreword, Preface, and Afterword
Laurent A. Daloz
Copyright © 2012 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved. New Foreword, Preface, and Afterword copyright © 2012 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. This book is a second edition of Effective Teaching and Mentoring, copyright © 1986 by Jossey-Bass Inc., Publishers.
Published by Jossey-Bass A Wiley Imprint One Montgomery Street, Suite 1200, San Francisco, CA 94104-4594 – www.josseybass.com
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, 978-750-8400, fax 978-646-8600, or on the Web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, 201-748-6011, fax 201-748-6008, or online at www.wiley.com/go/permissions.
Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages. Readers should be aware that Internet Web sites offered as citations and/or sources for further information may have changed or disappeared between the time this was written and when it is read.
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Excerpt in Chapter Two from The Return of the King. Copyright © 1955, 1965 by J.R.R. Tolkien, renewed 1983 by Christopher R. Tolkien, Michael H. R. Tolkien, John F. R. Tolkien and Priscilla M.A.R. Tolkien. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers and Houghton Mifflin Co. All rights reserved.
Excerpts in Chapters Two and Four from Dante (Alighieri), The Divine Comedy, translator J. D. Sinclair. New York: Oxford University Press, 1961. Used by permission of Random House UK Ltd. This book was originally published by The Bodley Head, 1949.
Excerpt in Chapter Five from “The West-Running Brook” in The Poetry of Robert Frost edited by Edward Connery Lathem, © 1956 by Robert Frost. Copyright 1928, © 1969 by Henry Holt and Company, LLC. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company, LLC.
Excerpt in Chapter Six from Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous edited by S. F. Morse. New York: Random House, 1957. Used by permission of the publisher.
Excerpt in Chapter Eight from E. Herrigel, Zen in the Art of Archery. Copyright 1953 by Pantheon Books, Inc. Copyright renewed 1981 by Random House, Inc. Used by permission.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Daloz, Laurent A. Mentor: guiding the journey of adult learners / Laurent A. Daloz.—2nd ed. p. cm.—(The Jossey-Bass higher and adult education series) Rev. ed. of: Effective teaching and mentoring. 1st ed. © 1986. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7879-4072-0 (acid-free paper) ISBN 978-1-118-34284-8 1. Mentoring in education—United States. 2. Adult education—United States. 3. Motivation in adult education—United States. I. Daloz, Laurent A. Effective teaching and mentoring. II. Title. III. Series. LC5225.M45 D35 1999 374′.973—ndc21 99-6188
2012 SECOND EDITION
Foreword
In his classic work Mentor, Larry Daloz reminds us that “mentors are guides. They lead us along the journey of our lives. We trust them because they have been there before. They embody our hopes, cast light on the way ahead, interpret arcane signs, warn us of lurking dangers, and point out unexpected delights along the way” (p. 18). With these words I believe that Larry actually describes his own developmental journey. His rich and engaging narrative creates a mentoring hologram for us—a multidimensional laser blending of adult learning theory and practice—in which he indeed “casts light on the way ahead.”
Larry Daloz knows the terrain of the adult development journey well. He has traveled many miles with adult learners, both as a teacher of adult educators and as an adult learning student and practitioner. In Mentor, we are privileged to travel alongside him on his personal odyssey of reflection and heartfelt yearning to understand the developmental journeys of adult learners. In effect, he becomes our mentor—and the consummate mentor at that—empowering us, offering up maps, and pointing out the signposts that illuminate our path through the book.
In Mentor, Larry makes us privy to deep and transforming conversations as he actively reflects on his own mentoring practice in a way that is both familiar and empowering to us as readers. Through a series of vignettes, we are drawn into his professional and often very profound developmental journey. His burning question, “What is my place in the growth of those I care for?” becomes our question as we search for an answer together.
I know of no one in the field who can pen a story the way Larry does. His prose is elegant, poetic, and almost magical. From the very beginning he invites us to join him, making his story our story. We are transported as he guides us through each story, and we forget for a moment that the story is part of a larger book canvas. As we walk with him, we wonder and reflect. He challenges us, supports us, and provides a vision of the possible. We share his angst, his perplexities, and his delights. He gives us maps to use as we listen to the many conversations and interactions that Larry has with himself and with his students.
You will delight in the stories. The dialogue is rich; the conversation, deep and intense. You will follow Emerald and Gladys with great anticipation, worry for Jean and Delores, and want to cheer Eric and Dave on as they each muddle through their midlife crises. You watch the relationship between Sandy and Grace (her mentor) shift as it unfolds over time.
Larry and I have known each other for over thirty years. We share a mutual passion around adult development and learning. When the first version of this book came out (under the title Effective Teaching and Mentoring), I was eager to read it and devoured it from start to finish. What he had to say really spoke to me because it was so thought-provoking and well grounded in reflective practice. Since that time I have reread both editions many times. Coffee stains, dog-eared pages, multicolored underlines, and sticky notes decorate the books' borders and make them stand out on my bookshelf.
Since its original publication, Mentor has been highly recognized as a definitive work in the field. It is widely referenced, often quoted, and regarded by many as the primary resource for understanding the dynamics and developmental pathways that lead to change in people's lives. Its publication has spawned a whole generation of research and inquiry, continuing to make a significant contribution to both adult learning and the practice of mentoring.
It is important to understand the context (what Larry calls “the circumstances, conditions, and contributing forces that affect how we connect, interact with, and learn from one another”) in which Mentor came to be written. The context in which Larry's story is embedded is the 1980s, a time when we were just beginning to grapple with how to coherently apply what we were learning about the dynamics of adult learning. By that time we had come to the realization that most adult educators were practice-rich and theory-poor. Larry's contribution closed that gap and made theory approachable and practical. The theories he draws on lay the groundwork for much of current practice today. The genius of his work is the menu of options he offers us as he applies multiple maps—Loevinger, Perry, Fowler, Kohlberg, Kegan—to guide the journey of adult learners and the work of the adult educator.
The added value of Larry's Afterword in this new edition is pure gold—a gift of “wisdom about wisdom.” His voice in the Afterword is spiritual and at times almost transcendent. This alone is worth the price of the book and clearly demonstrates why he has secured a place as a thought leader in the field of adult learning.
Lois Zachary
The Jossey-Bass Higher and Adult Education Series
Preface to the Original Edition
Happily, it is no longer necessary to argue that colleges must pay special attention to adult learners. Plummeting enrollments of traditional-age students have made the case far more effectively than could those of us who have been in the trenches these long years. College after college has faced the choice: either reach out for these “new learners,” as K. Patricia Cross (1971) called them over a dozen years ago, or hire an auctioneer. Partly as a consequence of this and partly because of broader technological, demographic, and social changes, the proportion of students above the age of twenty-five has billowed from barely a quarter to over 43 percent in the past decade alone. By the turn of the century, fully half of all students in higher education will be adult learners.
Although for younger students the campus is often the central focus of social and intellectual life, this is rarely the case with older learners who often return to school complete with jobs, spouses, children, well-developed roles in their communities, and extensive experience in both love and work. To adapt appropriately to this group, colleges have learned to offer classes in the evenings, to make degree requirements more flexible, and in some cases, to accredit off-campus courses and less formal learning experiences. Such modifications have been important, the changes necessary.
But one program's flexibility has become another's slovenliness. Along with these developments, though by no means solely because of them, have come charges of a decrease in quality, a diploma-mill mentality, grade inflation, and a general failure to achieve a definition of excellence derived from an earlier era. A fresh “educational crisis” is upon us, and words like quality and excellence buzz through media reports like flies after carrion. Something must be done; everyone agrees about that. Critics differ only in the direction of their gaze.
For some, the quality that has fled and the excellence that is our proper legacy will be regained only when the liberal studies are returned to pride of place in the curriculum—and all those “merely applied” vocational subjects and technical studies are consigned to the shop whence they came before those meddling Progressives muddied the clarity of our Platonic vision. If only we could fill again our classrooms with ears eager to quiver at Shakespearean iambs or minds anxious to dance between Hegelian dilemmas, then we could truly call ourselves educated.
For others, education must have immediate utility. If college simply turns out graduates without salable skills, the taxpayer has no business supporting it, and the number of consumers who will squander on so impractical a dalliance the small fortune it takes nowadays is minuscule. Said my farmer neighbor recently, “Anyone dumb enough to want a Ph.D. these days ain't smart enough to get one.”
Yet however vulnerable the argument between purist and pragmatist, it springs from a spurious dilemma. For quality and excellence are to be found neither in some mystical characteristic of the subject matter alone nor in the raw demands of the market but in the behavior and attitudes of the human beings who embody that tension—in the teacher and in the student. We know that the quality of learning is high when students show intellectual, emotional, and ethical growth; we know that teaching is excellent when it fosters such growth, when we have teachers who are willing to care—both about their subjects and for their students.
But it is one thing to say these things, another to do them. What do those fuzzy words growth and care really mean? How do we know them when we see them? What principles underlie excellence in advising and teaching? And how do we incorporate the elements of care into the design of our programs, the practice of our teaching, the everyday work of advising our students? The book in your hands is an effort to provide an answer to those questions in an engaging yet practical way. Using the central metaphor of a transformational journey, it combines a fresh look at the intuitive wisdom of the mentor with an informative introduction to foundational adult development theory. Lacing these with a series of vignettes and conversations with adult students, the book goes on to derive a number of principles for enriching instruction and revitalizing the advising process so that regardless of their age, the growth and development of students can take its place as the proper aim of education.
When I began teaching over twenty years ago, I quickly came to see that teaching was a good deal more than simply asking my students questions, telling them the answers, and asking the questions again. True, they had to acquire certain content, but over the years I felt with increasing urgency that if education were to make any real difference in their lives, my students had to learn how to think for themselves as well. That ability, it was obvious, did not necessarily come with the territory. But it was not until I became familiar with the idea of intellectual development—and later with the whole field of adult development theory—that I began to understand in specific and concrete ways the meaning of the word growth.
I first began to splice the principles I was learning into the design of a “process curriculum” for community college students. Later, as participant in a national project to apply current developmental findings to adult programs, I was able to carry out further research with a number of nontraditional students. This work convinced me of the potential that developmental theory holds for adult and continuing education. Shortly thereafter, I directed a project examining the impact of the liberal studies on the intellectual and ethical development of rural, adult learners. The results made it abundantly clear that higher education can bring about substantial changes in the lives of adults—changes I later came to understand as “transformative.” But one finding stood out with particular clarity. Almost without exception, the students cited certain teachers or mentors as having been of particular importance in the changes they had made. A mentor myself in two different external degree programs, I resolved to look more closely at what good teachers and mentors actually do as they guide their charges along on their transformational journeys. With the help of a Mina Shaughnessy grant from the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education, I conducted a close look at a variety of mentor-protégé relationships over the course of several years. Out of that study, augmented now by some twenty years of direct experience in teaching and advising adult students, have emerged the principles and materials on which this work is based. The story of that study appears in the Appendix. I should note, however, that this book is primarily the story of one person's effort to see his students in a fresher, more promising way. I have tried to share with the reader what I have seen through those theoretical lenses that proved most helpful in my search, but I make no pretense of offering a comprehensive survey of current research. This is neither a textbook nor a technical manual. At the same time, it is my hope that in the pages that follow the reader will hear something familiar, something universal in the words of this tiny sample of the human family.
This book is directed to all those who seek a fuller understanding of the life changes accompanying adult learners as they go on to postsecondary education. But it does more than simply describe or dramatize those changes. It goes on to suggest how we can work more effectively with the new learners to enrich their educational experience and decrease the likelihood that they will drop out. Thus it has special value for student affairs practitioners trying to understand this new population, for graduate students in adult education, counselors and advisers helping adults returning to college, faculty facing the mature students in classes, academic administrators seeking a fresh view of their changing student body, adult and continuing educators working in all settings, adult students themselves, and finally, that growing band of practitioners who actually call themselves mentors and who are by definition committed to making an “education of care” really happen.
The primary purpose of this book is to offer new perspectives for understanding adult learners and to suggest in concrete and practical ways based on current developmental theory how we can work more effectively to improve the quality of their educational experience. At the heart of the work are the interviews and personal descriptions needed to ground the principles, concepts, and theories. For it is in the living tissue of conversations between real students and real teachers that we can best apprehend the meaning of developmental advising and instruction.
But while the perspectives may be new, teachers and learners have been going about their business in some form for nearly as long as they have been walking upright. Mentor figures appear prominently among the earliest written epics, Gilgamesh and The Odyssey. Not surprisingly, mentors abound in children's stories as well. For that reason, I have included material from the great myths as well as from children's literature. For each of us writes with his or her life the story of our species, and in those tales of transformation can be found the maps by which we guide our own lives—and the lives of those for whom we care.
Thus, while I have tried to include ample practical ideas and illustrations, the book is more than simply a how-to manual. It is an effort to encourage all of us in postsecondary education to assess our stance toward our students, to think afresh about the meaning of teaching and the part we all play in the ongoing evolution of life on this planet. Education, it asserts, is not a bunch of tricks or even a bundle of knowledge. Education is something we neither “give” nor “do” to our students. Rather, it is a way we stand in relation to them. The nature of that relationship is best grasped through the metaphor of a journey in which the teacher serves as guide. For that reason, the book itself is constructed as a voyage of discovery, beginning with the appearance of a few shards, questions about our mutual goals on this educational quest.
Arguing that development, continues throughout the life span and that education plays a central part in that process, the first chapter presents a vignette of a meeting between a student and myself at a roadhouse in midwinter Vermont. The conversation is about what is worth learning in our lives, and it sets the questions for the remainder of the book—questions about education, effective teaching, the teacher-student relationship, and our own search for meaning as teachers, mentors, and human beings.
Chapter Two introduces the idea of the mythic journey as a way of making sense of life's changes. Through legends and literature, it illustrates how humankind has used tales of transformational journeys to address the problem of growing both older and wiser. As master teachers, mentors are guides on such journeys, appearing in a variety of forms. Here, The Divine Comedy provides a model of the mentor-protégé relationship as it evolves during Dante's epic journey. The chapter includes a discussion of some principles of teaching embodied in the story and ends with a real-life journey tale.
Three detailed vignettes of conversations with adult students form the basis for Chapter Three. Each highlights a major current theory of adult development that is then described and serves as an overlay for analysis of the vignette. These theories are then used extensively throughout the remainder of the book as “maps” with which to understand the educational journey.
Chapter Four follows several teachers and their adult students on their respective journeys. As before, vignettes of actual conversations with students are interspersed with discussion of the significance of each particular experience. Initially, the journey involves a downward movement from simple “rights and wrongs” into the confusion of a multifaceted world in which authority no longer has the answers. It parallels the descent into Hell, the “deep and savage way.”
It is in the “winter of our discontent” that transformation can most readily take place. Chapter Five, the central chapter, at the heart of both the journey and the book, discusses the meaning of the word transformation in light of developmental theory and shows how much change occurs through the confrontation of opposites, a dialectical resolution of tensions arising from the search for “the truth.”
With the dissolution of former, simpler perspectives comes a need to reconstruct meaning in more complex and inclusive ways. In Chapter Six, the reader accompanies teachers and students as they grapple with new forms of “truth” and construct “reality” in new, more contextual and socially responsive ways. With this evolution, the mentor-student relationship also undergoes a change from the earlier hierarchical form to a more equal one—from “god” to “friend.”
In Chapter Seven, we pull back again and look at what it is that helps or hinders personal growth. Using a lengthy case study, the chapter argues that people live in environments that alternately support and challenge development. To understand who changes and how, we must shift our focus to the whole systems in which people live.
How do teachers and advisers fit into all of this? Arguing that growth is best understood in the context of human relationships, Chapter Eight shows how mentors provide support, challenge, and vision for their protégés, suggesting numerous concrete ways in which teachers and advisers can strengthen their work with students. It includes a discussion of some of the pitfalls in mentoring relationships and concludes with a summary of the teacher's functions as catalyst for development.
Chapter Nine offers a final cautionary tale and discusses some of the limitations and dangers of the mentoring trade. It concludes with a summary of my own educational convictions: education as care and why mentors matter.
Although the book has emerged from the study of one-to-one relationships, it is ultimately about teaching and learning in any setting. For when the aim of education is understood to be the development of the whole person—rather than knowledge acquisition, for instance—the central element of good teaching becomes the provision of care rather than use of teaching skills or transmission of knowledge. And because care is so profoundly human an activity, it is fully within the reach of all of us. Do not be deceived that the setting and some of the episodes described in the book may appear at first to be impossibly distant from the everyday press of your own life and work. Whether you teach accounting to classes of three hundred or psychological anthropology to a seminar of six, whether you are semesterly swamped with a river of advisees or meet individually as tutor for a dozen, the material here is pertinent. For although students do indeed learn differently in groups than alone, and although it may seem that when we enter the lecture hall we are “teaching a class,” always it is individuals who are learning. Each is bound to learn in a unique way. Recognizing this,
We can listen to our students' stories, seeking to understand how their quest for education fits into the larger questions and movement of their lives;
We can view ourselves as guides on our students' journeys, challenging them to their best, supporting them when they falter, casting light on the territory ahead;
We can sense the whole lives of our students, recognizing how the aspirations, relationships, and values of their lives hold them in a web of forces enhancing or inhibiting their movement; and
We can recognize the place our students have in our own lives, in our own attempts to care for ourselves as we care for others.
Developmental theory can help us to do these things. It can teach us to respect each student's uniqueness while we illuminate common questions about meaning in their lives—questions to which, regardless of subject matter, we all hold relevant answers. For the principles of an education of care are no more limited to a lone itinerant teacher in northern Vermont than are the questions that give rise to them. If we are willing to listen afresh to the words of our students, we can help them to make of their education an experience that will meet more than simply their needs to be either knowledgeable or rich. We can help them grow wiser. This book offers a way that we can begin to do that.
It sometimes seems that no one ever reads acknowledgments except the people one inadvertently left out. Still, I think I finally understand why authors write them. For the process of reaching back through the years that grew this book has been an unanticipated delight. I had forgotten how much I owe to so many. What a pleasure to remember!
To the students, of course, goes my deepest gratitude. Yours is the earth from which everything sprang, without which nothing could have grown. There is no naming all of you, but I want you to know that this book came from you, and for that I am grateful. May we never cease to hear one another.
To my fellow teachers and mentors who have so freely offered your words, experience, and wisdom and yet who go nameless, my thanks too. We are brothers and sisters in our work. I only hope this book can begin to repay the gift.
For the planting and care of the seeds, to my own teachers and mentors I also offer thanks. To Jill Mattuck Tarule, Rita Weathersby, John Griffith, Mary Belenky, Bob Kegan, and Zee Gamson, all of whom helped me not only to understand developmental theory but also to respect its place in the lives of real people, thanks. And thanks, too, to Alan Knox, who saw something in there moving and snatched a dying manuscript from the Jossey-Bassian flames, to Lynn Luckow, my editor and now friend, who conspired with Knox, to Ron Gross, whose outrageous enthusiasm kept me alive in the dark, and to the staff and outside readers at Jossey-Bass who spent so many hours poring over draft after draft of the manuscript, helping to produce a work that I have grudgingly come to acknowledge is notably improved. Pat Cross, who has encouraged me for years, has been more than gracious in her contributions. Fred Rudolph, recipient of the first tercentenary Yoda Award, has truly been a mentor's mentor. And finally I owe a special debt of gratitude to Bill Perry, who first suggested that I tape-record my meetings with students, whose work in its simplicity is so profound.
I'm not sure how one thanks the sunlight. I've a hunch that gratitude is not what it's about at all. But, my friends—Kate, Todd, and Judy Daloz, Cyrie Barnes, Bob Duggan, Alice Eichholz, Ella Farrow, Len Foote, Bill Mitchell, Joanna Noel, Sharon Parks, Lyn Sprogell—you read and listened, prodded, suffered, cajoled, and loved me long before dawn, I know that and I'm glad.
Finally, there are the gardeners, those who provided the setting and the concrete help to make it possible: Peter Smith and Myrna Miller, whose vision transformed higher education in Vermont (though it may not know it yet), Carol Stoel, Richard Hendrix, Alison Bernstein, and Leslie Hornig of FIPSE, who leave candles burning in the most unlikely places, and finally (especially!) to Louise Eldred, who listened to weeks of tapes, turning them one after another, painstakingly and brilliantly, into the printed word.
Glover, VermontJuly 1986
Laurent A. Daloz
Preface
I'm often asked how this book got started. What's its story? As with many tales, it's difficult to know just where to begin, much less whether it's worth telling. But this book had a hard birth, and its tale might be at least informative, perhaps even a minor inspiration to those who aspire to write.
I must have run into the name Mentor as a schoolboy reading some housebroken version of The Odyssey, but that remains in the shadows. I do know that the first time I linked the term mentor with education was when I was part of a small team founding the Community College of Vermont in the early 1970s. A model for us at the time, New York's Empire State College was a pioneer of nontraditional education. To distinguish them from conventional professors, the faculty were referred to as “mentors.” At about the same time, Gail Sheehy's Passages and Daniel Levinson's Seasons of a Man's Life brought the term into the public eye. Mentors, it seemed, were an important part of the story of human development. People blessed with a mentor, they told us, do better in life. Meanwhile, corporations had begun to discover their importance in the work world.
But it was not until I was myself dubbed a “mentor” in Vermont's newly formed External Degree Program that I grew curious about the deeper meaning of the word. What did mentors do anyway? That's when I went back and reread The Odyssey, discovering to my delight that Mentor was in fact inhabited by Athena, the goddess of wisdom. I think that must be when I began my search for what Mentor had to teach me. It was the Old Ones, I began to realize, who knew what I needed to learn: Homer, Socrates, Dante. And before long, there I was meandering among the mists of myth and metamorphosis, in the firm grip of an ancient archetype. I found myself reading J.R.R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and the Arthurian legends to my children. As it happened, Star Wars had burst onto the scene, and dinnertime with our children and their friends crackled with talk of Obi-Wan and Yoda, Gandalf and Merlin. By then I had begun pounding away on my trusty Smith Corona portable at the first drafts of a book about the mysteries of mentorship. When the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education announced a series of small grants for independent scholars—wasn't that what I was?—I leapt at the chance. I would study the mentor-protégé relationship in external degree programs for returning adult learners, I wrote in the proposal. On a whim, I called it “The Yoda Factor” and sent it in.
Some weeks later I got a letter back. “Sorry,” it said, but no luck. Uncharacteristically, for I am quick to scuttle into a hole when rejected, I was sure there had been a mistake and wrote back requesting the readers' comments. When they came, I saw that two of the three had been very enthusiastic; one had rejected it out of hand. “That's what I get for trying to be cute,” I thought, and the next year I sent the same proposal back, unchanged.
This time it hit, and for the next year I drove around Vermont interviewing students and their mentors about what they were learning and how they were changing. It was delicious work. The research brought me into contact with a range of scholars, many of whom provided me with enduring “mentoring moments,” offering vital encouragement at just the right times. Ron Gross, who wrote widely and enthusiastically about independent scholars and the “new adult learner,” told me, “If you want to make a mark, find something no one else knows about and become the expert.” Jill Tarule and Mary Belenky, who were drafting what was to become an influential study of women's development, taught me everything I know about qualitative interviewing. Jim Fowler, Bob Kegan, and Sharon Parks served up models of human development that became the conceptual core of the book. All were writing the books that were to make them famous, and all had been influenced while at Harvard by Bill Perry, whose work in epistemological and ethical development among college students remains the most powerful intellectual gift I have ever received.
But as every student knows, it's one thing to do the research and quite another to write it up in a way that holds the truth and engages the reader. When Ernest Hemingway told interviewer George Plimpton that he had rewritten the ending to A Farewell to Arms thirty-nine times, Plimpton wondered what had stumped him. “Was there some problem there?” he asked. In classic form, Hemingway replied, “Getting the words right.” Indeed.
I was discouraged over and over as I tried and failed to get the words right. But it seemed that each time I hit bottom, some little nudge would come from somewhere and I would be back at it rolling the boulders around—moving paragraphs here, inverting words there, combing draft after draft. At one of those points, over a glass of single malt as I recall, Bill Perry suggested that I tape my own conversations with students as well as the interviews. Research is rarely purely objective, we agreed, and it was important that the researcher be part of the story. Besides, it would make it a whole lot more interesting. I tried it and then began to write up the conversations in their context, placing them in their settings, adding the visual and other sensory cues that the tapes lacked. I remember thinking as I reread the first of them, “This may not be science, but it sure is a whole lot more fun!”
A year later I had a manuscript. I knew nothing about how to get published and began sending ream-sized packages out to publishers—seven of them altogether—without even a query letter. One after another they all came back: “Dear Mr. D. We enjoyed reading this, but it is not for us. Good luck. Etc. Etc.” At that point, another mentor, my old college professor Fred Rudolph, suggested that I try his publisher. “Jossey-Bass? I'm afraid my book's not academic enough for them,” I protested. “Well, why don't you give them a try anyway?” he said. “Here's the name of my editor.”
A few weeks later the letter came back. “Dear Mr. D. We enjoyed reading this, but it is not for us. Good luck. Etc. Etc.” It was a week before Christmas. My marriage had just broken up, I missed my children terribly, my life was a dog's breakfast, and my last hope for the book was gone. But there at the end of the letter, after one of those ugly etceteras, was a little note, a tiny thread dangling from the edge of the envelope. “Call me if …” No one had ever left such a thread, so I gave it a tug. “The words are all there,” said Lynn Luckow on the other end of the phone, “but we just can't make the numbers work. No one is interested in reading about mentors. [Long pause]. Still, why don't you call Alan Knox? He's our series editor. He might have some ideas about where you could take this.”
Alan Knox? I knew him as the author of the thickest book ever written on adult development and the current president of the major professional organization in the field. Why would he care about me? But when I had slogged through the holidays, I dialed his number. Through the line came a deep, warm voice: “Alan Knox here.” I carefully spelled my name, but he knew me at once. Yes, he said, this was a fine time to talk. Something in me relaxed, and I began to listen. With exquisite kindness, he explained that there were simply not enough people in the role I had described to buy the book. If I could expand it to address the role of academic advising for adult learners in a developmental context, he told me, perhaps we could make something work. He went on to make a set of concrete suggestions for the still-unwritten final chapter and then offered to review it for me. “And if it doesn't work for Jossey-Bass,” he added, “I have a couple of other ideas we can try.” When we hung up, I collapsed into a chair where I sat sightless, as the tears came. I could never have imagined that the book that grew out of that moment would go on to receive two national awards for writing in adult education.
A lot has changed in the twenty-six years since the book took its place in its original incarnation (titled Effective Teaching and Mentoring), a shy newcomer perched on the edge of a library shelf. At that time there were only a handful of articles and one other book specifically about mentoring. Today mentoring books slither off both ends and the shelf sags under binders fat with newsletters, stacks of journal articles, and piles of slick magazines proclaiming mentors' virtues or sniffing at their defects. Doctorates by the dozen have probed its innards; reams of scholarly articles have analyzed every crease and cranny. Mentors have been discovered everywhere that people need help learning something. Ten-year-olds “mentor” first graders, hard-driving execs mentor earnest wannabes, master teachers mentor interns, senior nurses mentor aides, reformed street kids mentor youths at risk, dying old men mentor curious writers, and thick-skinned politicians mentor idealistic novices.
When I search the word mentor, Google tells me it just got 150 million hits on the word in a sixth of a second. God only knows how many it would turn up if it took its time! There are hundreds of Web sites, endless discussion threads, and list after list of quotes for your next speech on the topic. The term is used for everything from breast implants to condoms. The mind boggles; the hand reaches out for a sturdy desk to lean on.
Just as when a child learns the word truck and for a while everything is a truck, our society seems to be doing the same with mentoring. Fortunately, however, we are beginning to make some long-overdue distinctions—between mentoring and coaching, for instance, or mentors and sponsors. As we learn to peel these apart, I think, we will be better able to focus our attention on the essence of the role that this passionate and fertile relationship plays in the drama of human development.
Fortunately also, we have begun to understand the range and importance of the many contexts that affect the mentoring relationship. In the newest edition of her best-selling book The Mentor's Guide, Lois Zachary (2010) helpfully describes several different configurations in which mentoring can occur, including formal and informal mentoring, reverse mentoring, supervisory mentoring, group mentoring, and distance and virtual mentoring. Weave these with considerations of cultural, gender, generational, racial, and power differences, and we begin to realize how far we have come.
Then there's the microchip. Its impact on mentoring, not to mention the education world, never mind the nature of knowledge itself, has been incalculable—and it's just getting started! In the Preface to the 1999 edition of this book, as the shadow of electronic distance learning was darkening my desktop, I wrote with decidedly mixed feelings of the fantasy of “just-in-time learning” and the illusion of “multitasking.” Recalling Robert Frost's scorn for “speed reading” two generations back, I wonder if it isn't the assigned task of elders to raise bushy eyebrows at what they view as the depredations of contemporary culture, a touch on the brakes of the careening juggernaut that some call “progress.” But my daughter Kate, herself a writer and teacher, issues her own caution. “Dad,” she scolded not long ago when I was replaying a tattered tape about the diabolical nature of the Kindle, “You can keep right on snarling at these things if you like, but we live in the future now. George Washington would have killed to have a cell phone. I happen to love the future, and you can either get with it or rot under a rock somewhere!”
She is right, of course, and it is increasingly clear that, among other things, the Internet has enabled a degree of remote yet interactive experience that daily challenges not only our ways of knowing but also our ways of relating to one another and thus our very understanding of what it means to be human.
I found myself recently in an e-zine discussion thread on the slippery topic of gender that at times resembled a pickup hockey game. Almost all the participants taking their slap shots hid behind monikers. Ducking the flying pucks, I noticed that I was one of the few who had used his real name. The players knew nothing of one another save that they agreed or thought the other stupid or insensitive. The anonymity of cyberspace enables a sometimes shocking degree of coarseness among people. And yet at the same time, it also makes possible a range of connections and a quite unexpected, if paradoxical, intimacy. People bully in cyberspace, but they also fall in love. In the end, as Palloff and Pratt argue in their compelling Building Online Learning Communities (2005), the key to effective electronic learning is the formation and nourishing of a sense of community. A new frontier for mentors is how best to promote such mentoring communities.
As I revised the first version of this book more than a dozen years ago, I was enjoined to address some of its shortcomings but to leave the stories alone. I did that, also updating the references, paring away (I hoped) some of my more sexist assumptions, and adding greater shading to the sometimes sparkly holiday card image of Mentor. In an early critique of the book, Stephen Brookfield gingerly remarked that I seemed to have cast myself as the hero, and what did I think about that? The original Mentor, I knew, may have been part divine, but he was no angel. He returns at the end of the epic and joins Odysseus, his father, and his son in a lurid massacre of dozens of would-be home-wreckers and their hapless handmaidens. Mentors are not all pure light, and as Sharon Parks likes to remind us, one may be as readily mentored into the mafia as the ministry. Still, mentoring is rightly regarded as intrinsically a moral enterprise. We undertake to “mentor” another presumably on the other person's behalf. So in the second edition I added a story at the end that raised the question What right have we to educate, to disturb another's universe, much less to “promote their development”?
Another criticism over the years has been that the book places undue emphasis on the one-to-one relationship rather than recognizing that development is enhanced by our entire environment—by relationships of varying intensity with many different people, by events predictable and unpredictable, by the media, by deep inner experience, and especially by the company we keep. Perhaps we ought to think of a “mentoring environment” or of the role of “mentoring communities” instead? This question was strengthened by our Common Fire study of lives committed to the common good (Daloz, Keen, Keen, and Parks, 1996), and the current edition refers to that. But in the end I hope that what this book has to contribute is simply a close look at the dynamics of the mentoring relationship itself in its most archetypal form—that what happens in the one-to-one relationship informs in fundamental ways what happens in all learning experiences that lead to the growth and development of the learner. In that regard, I have been deeply gratified that the “challenge-support” grid that appears in Chapter Eight has proved useful to dozens of doctoral students seeking a platform for understanding how mentors can promote the development of their students.
In this edition I have added this new Preface and the Afterword. In both, I hope I have said something useful about what I have learned and come to believe over the past thirty years. Because, however, my life has swept me during that time from the bony halls of eastern academia to the cool, green forests of the Pacific Northwest, it has taught me new things, not all of which would contribute to a full update of the references here. For that I commend the reader to Lois Zachary's recent updates (2010), as well as Allen and Eby's Blackwell Handbook of Mentoring (2010); Ragins and Kram's Handbook of Mentoring at Work (2007); Empire State College's superb journal, All About Mentoring; and Ginsberg and Wlodkowski's Diversity and Motivation (2009).
Several years after the book was launched, I joined with Sharon Parks and Cheryl and Jim Keen to undertake the research that was to result in the publication of Common Fire, a study of the lives of over one hundred people who had committed themselves to work on behalf of the common good. What kinds of life experiences, we wondered, had cultivated such people, and what sustained them in the face of overwhelming complexity and moral ambiguity? Among the findings, two stood out: first, almost all described what we came to call “a transformative engagement with Otherness,” and second, over three quarters told of the presence of a mentor or mentoring community in their lives. Obviously, the latter finding was satisfying, but so also was the former in that as educators we had come to appreciate how the power of conflicting and differing perspectives promotes cognitive development and leads to a larger sense of the common good. As people developed, it seemed, they grew more inclusive, more receptive to people different from themselves, more capable of making nuanced distinctions, yet more able also to connect the dots, to see things whole. Paradoxically, they grew more tolerant but more critical, more open-minded but tougher to fool. In short, they became fuller human beings more capable of dealing adequately with the growing complexity of their worlds. All this helped me better understand why it was so important for teachers and mentors to recognize the deep importance of their work. Mentorship was about a good deal more than simply getting people into good jobs; it was about helping them become better thinkers, more compassionate actors, and just possibly, wiser human beings.
As that book made its way into the world, with one more good professional chapter in our lives and the children safely tucked into college, Sharon and I headed to the Pacific Northwest to join with colleagues in founding the Whidbey Institute. Suddenly finding myself wandering amid forests that held almost mythic power in my New England imagination, I began soaking up everything I could about forest ecology, nurse logs, mycorrhizae, mosses, and lichens. Invariably what I was learning made its way into my writing and teaching. We are, after all, a part of nature, and a knowledge of how things grow in the beyond-human world has much to offer our understanding of how human beings grow as well. It was impossible to understand how the natural world works, I realized, without encountering the reality of interdependence. On every scale, from gravitons to galaxies, interdependence is at work. To recognize this, however, demands a profound transformation in our own ways of knowing. Truly grasping the radical interdependence of all things is itself a developmental achievement. Theory, they say, is biography writ large. We come to see the world through an imagination evolving over a lifetime. As our vision grows larger, so also grows the world. In the Afterword, I have endeavored to explore the implications of this realization for our own ongoing evolution as mentors.
I have responded to the invitation to issue a new edition because I believe that much is at stake today for the quality and practice of higher education. Pat Cross was right when she wrote in the original Foreword that “to Daloz it is inconceivable that an excellent education would not make a profound difference in a person.” But I would add now that it is my conviction as well that if education does nothing more than make the trains go faster and the ovens burn hotter, it is not just failing but is actively contributing to the downfall of our society. To the Daloz writing now, education must make a profound and positive difference in the world as well. Committed, caring, ethically informed mentoring is a vital part of that, and it matters not just for our students' individual lives but also for the life and well-being of our planet and all its inhabitants. More than ever, we need mentors who work to promote their students' development from fundamentalistic, authority-bound, and tribal worldviews to critical, systemic, connected, and committed ways of knowing in a radically interdependent and profoundly endangered world.
I am sometimes accused of being a bit apocalyptic. But whether we choose to accept or deny it, the looming tsunami of climate change has cast its shadow of fear over our planet, and as Franklin Delano Roosevelt famously said, our greatest fear is fear itself. For when we are afraid, at best we stop thinking, and at worst we lose hope and turn cynical. We long for an authority who will comfort us with simple answers. We lunge after the reassurance of religious, economic, or social fundamentalisms; we lurch toward the company of those who share a familiar world; we recoil against those who don't. And in so doing, we fail our world and betray our future.
This is why our education must do more than address our rational minds alone, must be more than the transmission of knowledge. It must transform not only the contents of the mind but also its very structure. It must change the way we think—and not just the way we think but the very way we make meaning; and more yet, it must inspire us and give us hope in these dark and challenging times. Finally, education must change our minds, charge our hope, and transform our souls, for in the end, real mentors care about our souls. I would like to think that this is why the value of this book persists—that it reminds us that mentorship is finally about living and cultivating lives of depth, compassion, and wisdom for ourselves, our students, and the world.
Acknowledgments
I am staggered, as I look back, at the numbers of people who have been a part of this work over the years. Truly, nobody does it alone; we need each other, and what a joy it is to remember! In addition to all those whom I have thanked in the original Preface, I owe first gratitude to the students I have been privileged to work with since then, particularly at Lesley College, at Columbia Teachers College, and at the many mentoring retreats that Sharon Parks and I have led at the Whidbey Institute and around the country. They have continued to propel me along a steep learning curve. I am particularly grateful to my colleagues at Lesley whom I hold in a very special place after years of close and largely joyful work together: David Bennett, Mary Bettley, Charlie Clayman, Patsy Cobb, Judith Beth Cohen, John DeCuevas, George Flavin, Bard Hamlin, Lynn Kass, Anita Landa, Kate Marrone, Deb Piper, Olive Silva, Sarah Sutro, and Frank Trocco. In addition, as the book drew me into a wider world of discourse with people vastly more knowledgeable about my field than I had known in my tiny corner of Vermont, some of the critics and many of the defenders of developmental theory became valued colleagues, and some have completed their legacy and moved on. In particular, I thank Stephen Brookfield, Rosemary Caffarella, Carolyn Clark, Phyllis Cunningham, John Dirxx, Ellie Drago-Severson, Leona English, James Fowler, Morris Keeton, Malcolm Knowles, Victoria Marsick, Sharan Merriam, Jack Mezirow, Cheryl Smith, Kathleen Taylor, Libby Tisdell, and Lyle Yorks. I am also grateful to my former editor, Lynn Luckow, as well as David Brightman, Gale Erlandson, and Tom Finnegan at Jossey-Bass. And special thanks go to Sheryl Fullerton and my longtime colleague Lois Zachary, whose Foreword now graces this volume, for conspiring to bring this new edition into life.
My children, Kate and Todd, have now grown into full adulthood, loving well and living committed lives. I am blessed and grateful beyond telling for them, their loving spouses, and the dazzling little ones, Maeve and Hannah, they have given the world. They continue to hone me on a fine stone. And Sharon Daloz Parks, one of the “shafts of sunlight” whom I acknowledged in the earlier Preface, is long since a cherished spouse and treasured colleague; what we have continued to learn together has swept far beyond the scope of any mere curve.
Whidbey Island, Cascadia BioregionAugust 2012
Laurent A. Parks Daloz
To my granddaughters, Maeve and Hannah:
May they and all their generation be blessed with the wisdom of good mentors.
