On Mentorship, Sponsorship, and Collaboratorship

I am writing this blog this week with a heavy conflicted heart, having just come back from a great conference experience to have to make a difficult life decision which was sadly absolutely necessary (more on this in the coming weeks). I am focusing this week's blog on something I have been thinking so much about lately which is mentorship and leadership models that allow for mentorship opportunities of different kinds. I am also thinking about where mentorship can happen, and how it can support social and disability justice framing as praxis. 

As I get older and continue to more deeply refine my career focus and what is a sustainable practice for me that fulfills my morals, values, and heart, I keep coming back to mentorship models and the need to see more of them in the world in different ways. And I am sure to call it mentorship and not coaching because what I feel is the most rewarding for all involved is the building of sustainable relationships, and not necessarily a more highly structured model in coaching that may not work for all people. I am more invested in fostering the kinds of support structures for folk and those support structures can change, grow, and go in completely different directions. It can also be reversed in that mentors become mentees and vice versa depending on the situation.

I created a short video and slide deck about what I see are accessible mentorship principles for the Accessible Canada conference. Most of my conferencing this summer is highly grounded in mentorship, either as a topic, or tangentially in the way I am presenting. At the SALTISE conference this last week there was a lot of talk of sponsorship models as well which I am hearing more and more about. Sponsorship often happens when someone with more connections or power in a space, will sponsor a junior colleague, peer, or learner towards applications for awards, grants, presenting at international conferences, or anything where having the support of someone who has more name or title recognition can help someone who is newer to a space get grounded and connected in the space. 

The priority placed on these opportunities to mentor are few, especially in today's academe driven by scarcity models and budgetary cuts. How can one justify the time to mentor they say, when we have all these KPIs and ROIs to worry about? And that sort of framing suggests that mentorship has no impact on those acronyms and budgetary lines, when it absolutely does. A person who feels they have someone or a group of folk to support their work, will absolutely work more to meet whatever goals their space is asking of them. 

I can also see the other side to this fear of mentorship from certain spaces, because often in mentoring the mentee gains skills, confidence and ideas that they will want to explore further and maybe cannot be used to their full potential in the spaces they find themselves in. Therefore, they move on to different roles, different work places so that they can expand these new found passions and skills. Places that are invested in keeping people exactly where they are because they fulfill the cog in the system role they want for them, will really not want to foster or give space to any kind of mentorship work. 

Collaborating within a mentor, mentee relationship is probably the more synergistic (I cannot believe I just used this word) way of combining mentorship and sponsorship. Working on facilitating workshops together, conference papers, posters, journal articles, editing books, and anything of that nature helps both mentor and mentee grow. It also opens both to other people, connections, and ideas that can inspire subsequent work and further collaborations.

Having opportunities to work together in a class on an Open Educational Resource (OER) where the learners contribute as does the instructor is a perfect example of that collaboratorship at work. There are different ways that these mentorship and collaboration models can work pedagogically, alongside sustainable and accessible resource creation as part of learning. I am sure to reinforce this here because I don't want folk to think that mentorship is something that cannot happen outside of eduspaces, it is rather something foundational to transformative learning opportunities and the opportunity to build awareness of community needs.

I am going to be focusing the majority of my energies towards accessible mentorship practices in the next while. What that looks like as workflow I am not sure yet, but I do know that the opportunity to mentor others is something that absolutely gives me the most deep heart and soul affirming feeling; the kind of feeling you get when your values align as praxis. 

I would be curious to hear of any of your positive mentorship experiences, either as a mentor or mentee. What are you doing in your spaces to allow mentorship growth? What are some examples you have seen the systems put in place to make sure mentorship does not happen? I think the more we have these kinds of conversations, the better prepared we can be to foster the kinds of open mentorship models that are sustainable and powerful.