From Deficits to Possibilites: Mentoring Lessons from Plants on Cultivating Individual Growth through Environmental Assessment and Optimization

Abstract

The specific ways in which humans engage with the plants growing in their environment offer many lessons about mentoring and professional development interventions. Organisms, such as plants, which largely live out their lives in one location, are exquisitely sensitive to changes in their external environment and adapt their growth to environmental cues to increase survival and productivity. Plants maximize their use and acquisition of available resources and limit or ward off danger from harmful factors. Systematic assessment of how plants sense and respond to environmental fluctuations or transitions, as well as the care humans offer to plants, yield key lessons that can inform mentoring practices that promote the sense-driven and mentor-facilitated success of students and colleagues in academic environments. Notably, the relationships between humans and plants offer inspiration for anticipating and employing specific means of nurturing the success of our students and colleagues. This article discusses plant biology-inspired practices for supporting the comprehensive development of a diverse range of students, academic staff, and faculty members as researchers, scholarly thinkers, and independent practitioners. Ultimately, the growth-perspective relationships with plants that humans regularly exhibit indicate vast potential for our capacity for progressive support of diverse individuals in the academy. In this essay, I investigate effective means for planting and cultivating growth-focused mentoring and faculty development initiatives from a consideration of the intersecting perspectives of plant biology and mentoring.