Re-thinking Mentoring Relationships

In this paper, the authors view mentorship not as the traditional one-to-one relationship between mentor and mentee, but "from the next scale up " as a large systematic collection of mentor-mentee pairs. This concept, borrowed from the graphic arts and called "macro-mentorship, " is adopted as a means for obtaining new insights about traditional mentorship; this new view has a transformational effect on the lives of artists and academics. Three examples of macro-mentorship are discussed: Neo-Impressionist painters, a family of scholars with a shared academic lineage, and a research group organized around a military command framework. Recommendations from analysis of these exemplars include recognizing existing and new mentoring roles, increasing the awareness of one's academic lineage, and participation of mentor and mentee in meaningful joint activity. (Contains 32 references.) (Author/NAV