Editorial overview: mentoring to support professional space

Abstract

This issue of Mentoring and Tutoring: Partnership in Learning Journal includes research on mentoring to support professional space across various disciplines and service settings. The authors represent scholars from Spain, Turkey, Canada, and the midwestern and southeastern parts of the United States. Reported findings from the collective studies support the value of mentoring as a process for enabling growth in self and others. Often, personal growth has a targeted period or timeframe for specific growth measures to be realized. One such example surfaces in educational circles; specifically, in the tenure processes of the professorate, educator preservice development, and transdisciplinary adult education programs. Andragogy, or the method and practice of teaching adult learners has become a topic of great interest in recent years, especially as more professionals migrate between second and third careers. Contrastingly, the teaching of young adults has become increasingly more problematic as the stressors created by the immediacy of technology often create spaces of isolationism (Templeton, 2021). Within this context, understanding mentoring as the acquisition of clarity necessary to develop and hone specific skillsets is a phenomena worthy of continued empirical consideration. In the purest interpretation of empirical, the term experience is likely a less popular representation, although a necessary connotation for the intentional learner. Hence, experience becomes less about what is known and more about ‘how’ the transfer of knowledge is to occur. To better understand the extent to which knowledge is distributed requires the creation of new understandings based on shared learning spaces. It is within this space where changes in mindset occur and clarity becomes apparent. Hence, clarity brings meaning to how we interact in professional space, thus merging experience with knowledge to enact a new paradigm of self development. It is this self development that undergirds intentional mentoring. Mentoring, as a process, involves the deeper development of the individual (Irby, 2012). When this development occurs in professional space, the benefits are not mutually exclusive, as mentor, mentee, and the organization establish a symbiotic relationship rooted in shared values (Templeton, 2021). While not