Peer mentoring in the educational context provides support, creates challenges and assists mentees in developing approaches to help make meaning of their experiences (Daloz, 1999). Nora and Crisp (2007) have broadly classified these experiences into four general areas that include the following: psychological and emotional understanding, role-model specification, academic and disciplinary support, and career and professional support. Peer-mentoring interactions also allow for critical and reflective dialogical encounters to occur in any of these four areas and others unique to the mentor-mentee context, such as teacher-student, boss-employee or learner-learner dyads, for example.
In the context of our peer-mentor programs, the focus is on breaking the hierarchical relationship between mentor and mentee in order to promote a form of engagement and critical dialogue where both can “become jointly responsible for a process in which all grow” (Freire, 2002). However, the focus on the mentor-mentee exchange has mainly focused on the experiences of the mentee and not on the experiences of the mentor. Kram (1985) and Allen and Eby (2003) reflect similar sentiments about needing to evaluate the experiences of the mentor when they examined mentoring relationships in organizations and the workplace. Therefore, this session will focus on the (transformative) nature of the mentor experiences that occur in academic-related peer-mentorship exchanges.
Our current work utilizes the framework proposed by Nora and Crisp (2007) and goes on to demonstrate that a sustainable mentoring experience can be developed when a mentorship program provides opportunities for engagement in psychological and emotional understanding, role-model specification, academic and disciplinary support, and career and professional support. In this presentation we examine the nature of the mentor experiences in these key areas outlined by Nora and Crisp (2007), and differentiate between experiences that are beneficial versus experiences that are transformative.