Mutual Mentoring An Editorial Philosophy for a New Scholarly Journal

Everyone reading this editorial today knows that Programmatic Perspec-tives publishes scholarship that theorizes and thereby promotes sus-tained attention to the disciplinary knowledge-making dimensions of technical communication program administration. The idea of mutual men-toring underlies the work that this journal does to help shape a new scholarly space. For a while, Bill, Tracy, and I operated under the illusion that we had in-vented the term mutual mentoring, but in fact, it’s not a new concept. Educators (Landay, 1998), educational administrators (Sorcinelli & Yun, 2009), youth men-tors (Fritzberg & Alemayehu, 2004), enterprise computing specialists (Mader, 2008), and even members of religious orders (Rexing, 2002) characterize their work as mutual mentoring. Some people use the term co-mentoring. Mutual mentoring eschews the labels mentor and protégé or (heaven help us) mentee, preferring instead a more egalitarian relationship that Sorcinelli and Yun term mentor partners (2009). For us, the term incorporates several ideas. Collaboration As Bill, Tracy, and I prepared to propose this journal to the CPTSC executiv