Editorial overview: becoming a good, effective mentor in academia

Abstract

This issue of Mentoring & Tutoring: Partnership in Learning Journal includes scholars from around the globe, particularly from Switzerland; South Africa; and Michigan, Nebraska, California, Virginia, and Massachusetts in the United States. The editorial team included six articles for this issue, and four of them were related to this overarching umbrella question: how to be a good, effective mentor in academia? It is a well-established notion that a faculty mentor can influence a student mentee greatly, and most higher institutions expect faculty to mentor students as a part of their job responsibilities. However, no one is born to be a natural mentor nor do these relationships happen naturally. That is, it is not an easy task to build and sustain a successful, strong mentoring relationship, and it requires hard work combined with strategies, knowledge, and skillsets (Templeton, Jeong, & Pugliese, 2021). Unfortunately, most faculty do not start their career well prepared or trained to perform as a mentor, and it is not so common that the institutions provide them with some structured guidance of a mentoring assignment (Montgomery, Dodson, & Johnson, 2014). As a result, the majority of faculty learn by doing, through trial and error, which is often bound to involve some bitter lessons, errors, and mistakes. Moreover, the high-performance standards for the promotion and tenure in higher education often shape a climate where most faculty set their priorities for activities related to research, teaching, and other committee-related works. Often times, it becomes a burden for faculty to mentor students because doing so takes investing substantial effort and time. Indeed, building a strong, deep mentoring relationship with students involves great works such as understanding each mentee’s strengths and weaknesses, identifying ‘a glimmer of potential’, and helping the student improve and excel (Griffin & Toldson, 2012). In universities, only 2–6% of faculty time is spent working students one-on-one, and mentoring is often low on the faculty agenda (Olwell, 2017). Thus, as this issue of mentoring and tutoring focuses on how to be an effective faculty mentor, it also hopes to give you some food for thought on this peripheralized and less acknowledged, yet important, area of faculty work and a motivation cue to ponder on it. MENTORING & TUTORING: PARTNERSHIP IN LEARNING 2021, VOL. 29, NO. 5, 495–499 https://doi.org/10.1080/13611267.2021.1986798