Relational Dynamics and Play: Reconsidering Mentorship

• In Event: Performing Mentorship as Reciprocal Relationship

Abstract

In considering my response as discussant to the proposed AERA session on performing mentorship, I will attend to the participants’ language, positionalities, structural biases, and relationship dynamics that inform their research and conceptualization of mentorship. Of particular interest are the relational dynamics and interactions recognized between mentee and mentor, whether or not the relationship is hierarchical and patriarchal, or horizontal and experiential, in which both mentor and mentee draw on their situated and collective lived experiences (van Manen, 1990) as conceptualized by Paulo Friere (1979).

As a researcher outside the field of Education, my research focuses primarily on relational dynamics, play, and emergence within family and organizational settings as well as in research and teaching. I recognize relationships as fluid, negotiable, navigational, suspect, complex, and complicit. Thus a degree of skepticism and attention to relationality must inevitably be addressed in any discussion of mentorship. Patriarchal colonizing practices are inherent in any relationship where an expectation of expertise to be transferred is dominant. It is complicated as each individual brings potentially conflicting relational expectations and creative dynamics. Does “performing mentorship in performative contexts” as conceptualized by these researchers include recognition of mentorship as a liminal space created between and by mentor and mentee as an act of improvisation (Nachmanovitch, 1990) and emergence, within which learning arrives as one moment unfolds from one moment into the next (Milloy, 2007)? Or will such a conceptualization fall subject to the institutional biases and structures within which these particular researchers work to limit what their understanding of successful mentorship may or may not be? Inevitably, a conceptual and applied understanding mentorship in performative contexts need to create expansiveness for the possible (Anderson 1997; Sumara & Davis, 1997) not only of the players involved but also of the play, the anticipated performance. Given my focus on play and relational dynamics (Bava, 2020), I am curious to see how these researchers will attend to the space between mentor and mentee, and what arrives in the liminal space of play (Bava, 2017).

Author

• Saliha Bava