Throughout my career as a university educator, I have mentored dozens of college students during a concentrated and intentional season of their vocational discernment, specifically young women interested in the vocational possibilities of literacy, storytelling, and advocacy. Many of these are students of literature, writing, and education, but they are also students of film, theology, social work, psychology, physical therapy, chemistry, and engineering. Sometimes we meet for an official meeting in my office, but more often mentorship looks like a quick hallway chat, a wave across the library, a text message update, a walk around campus, catching up over coffee and then more coffee, an internship program forwarded by email, comments on a class assignment, or advice on a job application. In my experience, mentoring these students involves a series of tiny and ordinary moments that can sometimes stretch out over several years but that usually end, often abruptly.
Students graduate, and then come the reliable pangs of guilt when I lose track of them so soon—when they are pulled into new jobs, new graduate programs, and new lives. I wonder about them. We check in at first, but eventually we lose touch aside from an occasional update, a recommendation request, an invitation to Zoom into class as a guest speaker, or a rare dinner. The word mentorship often evokes the traditional image of one person, typically older or more experienced, inspiring and supporting another person, typically younger or less experienced, over a long period of time. It does for me, and if mentorship requires this deeply intimate, deeply individualistic, and deeply committed relationship, then usually I fail to live out the call to support and advocate for many of these incredible young women. Thus, the pangs of guilt. I fear that I am a version of the failure that Rachel Adams recently described: one of those “powerful women” who “speak the language of feminist solidarity while failing to sustain women coming up behind.”
Recently, however, with the help of Nancy K. Miller and Tahneer Oksman’s edited collection Feminists Reclaim Mentorship(2023), I have started to redefine, reunderstand, and reclaim my own mentorship practice. In their introduction, Miller and Oksman describe mentorship as an “intellectual and emotional project” that is often manifest not in “one-to-one relationships” but in “communal ways of connecting.” Lasting mentorship is, in their view, most often a community of mentors who step in and out of our lives. This communal approach to mentorship relieves the pressure to maintain long-term relationships with an impossible number of students. (I quite literally sighed in relief when I first read this!) It also, I suspect, better supports, sustains, and counsels young people through the varied experiences that will mark their personal and professional lives. There is value in the constancy of a single, life-long mentor, but what incredible ego to think that I—and I alone—can or should play such a singular role in any person’s life. There is another kind of value in a mentorship community made up of diverse voices, experiences, and perspectives—a community made up of people who come and go, who agree and disagree, who give different kinds of advice, who model different choices, and who collectively open up all kinds of ways to think, do, and live in the world.
Since encountering Miller and Oksman’s ideas in Feminists Reclaim Mentorship, I have looked again at my own mentorship practices. My approach to mentorship is an expression of my relational personality and the attentiveness to story that defines my discipline and my scholarship. As many of my academic advisees can attest, I simply cannot have a short conversation about course registration because I want to know what each of them is learning, asking, navigating in their inevitably complex lives. I want them to tell me their story, and I often share pieces of mine. In many ways, I do this as an outpouring of my own longing for mentorship and a response to my own experiences, both good and bad, with mentors throughout my academic and professional life.
But my practice has also been shaped by my institutional community. I work at an institution that places a high value on mentorship, evidenced by small class sizes, high standards for advising, and institutional support for faculty-student collaborations in research and teaching. However, the most ordinary institutional practice is, perhaps, the most significant. Every semester, faculty members receive mentor funds that can be used to take students to coffee or a meal on campus. While mentoring relationships with advisees, honors project students, and research and teaching assistants are often long-term and intense, the incidental opportunities supported by faculty mentor funds—the occasional conversation over a meal, often with a student who is not in my academic department—can become a sustaining, encouraging, and clarifying moment in a student’s trajectory through a class, a semester, or a season.
As I finish this post, it is a Monday morning, and my weekly calendar includes teaching courses in literary research and American women’s writing, an honors research project, a department meeting, an academic council meeting, writing time, and grading time. Of course. But it also includes coffee with an engineering student who recently loaned me her favorite Agatha Christie novel, lunch with an applied health science major whom I rarely see but who took a general education writing class with me three semester ago, and a walk, if the weather allows, with a senior nursing student with whom I have met every semester since we read The Book Thief together in a first-year seminar. These are moments of connection, of continued relationship, and intimate mentorship, but they are also part of a larger community of mentorship that these students are already receiving and will continue to receive.
As I look forward into my own life and work as a mentor, I am convinced by the truth and value of three interconnected ideas rooted in Miller and Oksam’s concept of a mentorship community:
- Mentorship can and should extend beyond the individual relationship to connect students intentionally to a complex and diverse community of other mentors.
- Mentorship requires endings to make space for other mentors who can journey with these students as their lives and needs continue to change.
- Mentorship should actively help students find and foster new mentors, some short-term and others life-long.
Mentorship should prepare each student to move beyond our small relationship, to reach out to the other mentors around them that they may have failed to see as mentors, and to wait for the mentors yet to come.
For other posts on vocation and mentoring, see Rachael Baker’s “Mentoring for the Cultivation of Virtue in the Sciences, David Crowley’s “Sometimes It’s the Small Things: The Power of Chats,” and Rachel F. Pickett’s “Lessons from Humanism: Mentoring that Fosters Vocational Discernment.”
Kerry Hasler-Brooks is an associate professor of English at Messiah University, where she also serves as chair of the Language, Literature and Writing Department and the Gender Concerns Committee. Her essay “Antiracism as Vocational Practice: Reading with Alice Walker, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Edwidge Danticat” appears in Cultivating Vocation in Literary Studies, and her current project on imagination as part of vocational preparation is supported by a NetVUE Grant for Reframing the Institutional Saga. For other posts by Kerry, click here.