Mentoring Relationships Need an "Other" or "Peer Mentor"
onela22 - Sun, 03/25/2012 - 21:30
Forums:
In the program that raised me (the Expository Writing Program at NYU), graduate students mentored each other both unofficially (thickly and always) and officially (with part-time WPA positions). Even in the latter case, however, to mark "WPA" as the relationship does not quite catch the right flavor.
Maybe you want us to use "studied alongside" for our graduate student friends, but it doesn't really honor the relationship properly for many of the people I would add to my tree.
Thanks!
perhaps an update to worked alongside
Hi, onela22 --
I agree that having a "worked alongside" relationship for peer mentors is important, and also that the relationship of instructors in a program like EWP, or the UWP at Columbia where I came up, isn't really a coadministrator relationship.
We had been thinking that this would be covered in part by a future timeline feature -- we'd see by the dates where people overlapped -- but you and the previous poster are helping me remember that there are particular people we feel most mentored by within the cohort, and it might be helpful to signal that.
So I'll poll the audience: would we like to see something like "as a peer mentor" added to the collaboration types of the "worked alongside" relation? Would that be enough to capture the relationship? And if so, would it be easy enough to discern when this is happening to feel confident in marking this reciprocal relation in the data?
We'd debated somewhat internally in developing the categories whether to add "peer mentor"; one reason for hesitating in the first release was the potential muddiness of determining and displaying feelings of mutuality, or lack thereof, so we opted for more objectively verifiable relationships. Another solution might be to add "as a peer mentor" as a subtype of the directed "mentored" relation, rather than or in addition to "worked alongside."
Thoughts?