Chapter 2: Effective Mentoring for Affirming Mentees’ Personhood

Mentoring has been viewed as a practical means of support during academic, professional, and developmental transitions (Kay & Hinds, 2012). It is an interactive process, most often occurring between two parties with different levels of expertise and experiences: one who is called the mentor and one who is identified as the mentee (Castanheira, 2016). Such relationships generally focus upon furthering the mentee’s personal or professional development and/or career advancement. At times, this relationship may also involve co-mentoring activities in which those involved are focused on fostering growth in one another.

While there are numerous settings in which a mentoring practice could occur, this chapter describes the mentoring process from an educational context. After discussing various general issues of mentoring (such as its format, benefits and key components), this chapter will introduce a new mentoring model based on two dimensions that the mentor and mentee should seriously consider for the wellbeing of a mentee who experiences trauma and adversity. The two dimensions are: (a) personhood blocked or affirmed during the mentoring process; and (b) self or relation actualized as the benefit of mentoring. This chapter clarifies that affirming a mentee’s personhood is a critical factor for effective mentoring and that mentoring should benefit all stakeholders, including the mentee, mentor, as well as the organization to which the mentee belongs. Based on two dimensions, this chapter suggests a new framework of mentoring which consists of a four-phase-mentoring process including (a) norming; (b) negotiating; (c) growing; and (d) integrating along with specific strategies to facilitate each mentoring stage. The chapter concludes by identifying four dispositions that mentors need to posit during the mentoring process in order to effectively proceed.