Mentoring Professional Transitions Through Collegiality, Loyalty, and Friendship

• In Event: Mentoring as a Touchstone for Reinvention, Transforming, and Transitioning

Abstract

Purposes

The purpose of this paper is to provide a deeper understanding of how four women, who are part of a larger global research network of women scholars, frame and conceptualize mentoring professional transitions through the constructs of collegiality, loyalty, and friendship. On the one hand, these constructs can positively and productively nurture the experiences of transitions and if not nurtured productively and positively can undermine or destroy relationships.
We define collegiality as cooperative academic practices that sustain authentic interrogative communities and extend across and beyond discipline, faculty and demographic loyalties (institutions, cultures and countries). Friendship is taken to mean a common, voluntary, self-selected, social relationship between two persons, which lack genetic and institutional ties (Adams & Blieszner, 1994; Bryant & Marmo, 2012). Loyalty is characterized as “faithfulness, promise keeping … honesty and trustworthiness” (Kitchener & Anderson, 2011).
This paper presents the experiences of four women academics that have each navigated defining personal and professional change on career pathways (traditional tenure, independent researcher scholars, and faculty to administration). The women authors are cross cultural and internationally located.

Perspectives

Professional relationships enable people to feel connected and included, help in building a robust identity of self, provide professional and personal support assistance, and facilitate enduring emotional bonds (Bryant & Marmo, 2012). During times of transitions within institutional settings and across career pathways, professional relationships can be a touchstone of support for navigating change.

In a collaborative research network, the ‘doing of academic work’ is practiced by colleagues “not as an idea [but] rather [through their] human spirits in relationships heeding a plea for community, connectedness and recognition” (Urgo, 2005, p.36). Through the processes of scholarly activity and research presentations, organized as actions to advance the cross-cultural experiences of informal mentoring of women faculty, has led to sustenance during career transitions.

Methods

Through narrative inquiry, each of the authors examines how collegiality, loyalty and friendship within the network have mediated their personal and professional changes through the transitions, transformations and reinventions of professional lives. A narrative self-inquiry, self study approach (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000) was used to analyze experiences of professional engagement, which emphasize relational dynamics in collaborative practices. The analysis of narratives provided insights into the ways in which mentoring professional transitions within and across the network impacted collegiality, loyalty, and friendship as constructive and/or destructive elements of experience in mentoring professional transitions.

Findings

The findings have implications for negotiating work-based interactions and the dynamic functions of collaborative relationships inside and outside institutions.

Scholarly significance

An understanding of these aspects of relationships can be the source of personal empowerment for professional gains and transitions. Also, these understandings can impact and transfer throughout professional pathways.

Authors

• Ann Unterreiner, Education Consultant/Independent Scholar

• Antonette M. Aragon, Colorado State University

• Joyanne Beverly De Four-Babb, Caribbean Educators' Research Initiative

• Laurette Maria Stacy Bristol, Catholic College of Mandeville