All About Mentoring Spring 2011 - SUNY Empire State College

2
e d i t o r i a l
The Expertise
of Humility
“Nobody sticks a finger in an electric fan
to see what will happen. Conversely,
we have all we can think about.”
John Ashbery, “Zymurgy,”
in Planisphere, 2009
We depend on our expertise.
Indeed, we calibrate the degree
to which, in any given situation,
our expertise is acknowledged, exercised,
deepened. And we worry, with good reason,
about the myriad ways in which what we
think we do best is ignored, denigrated or
just plain thinned out. Why learn all that
we have learned if we’re not even given the
space, the time, the encouragement to strut
our stuff
Yet, from the very start, Empire State
College has been confused about what
legitimate strutting should be all about.
What kind of strutting, if any, is appropriate
for mentors to do We didn’t come to
this place, did we, to become the kinds
of experts we would be if we were on the
faculty at a Research I institution, or even
at a more conventional four-year liberal
arts school But, at the same time, did we
expect to be mired in what some feel to
be the daily drudgeries of a new fangled
version of Melville’s famous scrivener Yes,
of course, we appreciated Boyer’s revision
and expansion of what is “scholarly,” but,
bottom line, even as so-called “mentors,”
we just didn’t want to give it all up. We’re
scholars – of some sort – damn it!
We have learned that the qualities and
expressions of meaningful mentorial
expertise at our college (and at other
colleges with core values similar to ours) are
incredibly hard to articulate and, for sure,
to regularly practice. And our difficulties
are only made rougher by the slippery
terrain of taken-for-granted assumptions
about the glow of the professor-as-expert.
It’s just not so easy to surrender, especially
when confronted by the not so distant fear
that such a scholarly construction is all
that stands in the way of the loss of any
kind of academic identity. When we’re
frightened, we desperately grab onto a more
conventional ideal.
The question, however, shouldn’t go away:
How, every day, sitting face to face with
a student or being online, or working with
a group, or taking a call – how, in any
of these forms, can we – should we, as
mentors – display what we know As an
experimenting college, shouldn’t there be
an experimenting expertise
I’d say this: The professorial strut is
tantalizing. Faculty pass along what they
claim to know, develop curricula and
whole programs based on their authority,
produce research that assures their pedigree,
and are rewarded for their single-minded
commitment to their scholarly vocation.
Professors are deemed authentic; they take
pride in and expect recognition for their
labors and fight for their time.
And I’d also say this: The mentorial strut
is harder to recognize let alone act on,
exactly because the lure of the professorial
is so strong. Can it ever be that responding
to a student’s difficulty in organizing her
thoughts, or confusion about what new
studies he should take up, or worries about
how her kids are responding to her many
hours in front of the computer – that we
truly believe that attention to these matters
has real academic significance How about
searching for an article with a student on a
topic with which we’re not familiar because
that student mentioned in passing that he
had a question about it, or trying to just
hang in there to find the learning we sense
is lurking somewhere in a student’s work
experience, or going back and forth, and
then again, with a group of colleagues in an
effort to revamp some procedural matter,
or staring at a screen struggling to find just
the right phrase to capture our judgment
about the outcome of a student’s work
Do we genuinely take these activities to
be part of our scholarly lives Do we ever
imagine in our heart-of-hearts that they are
appropriately academic and carrying them
out is an expression of our expertise
Our challenge is not to draw ever-finer
distinctions between teaching, service and
scholarship because even within such an
ingrained tripartite model, we know that
there is already a tacit hierarchy. Our
dilemma also cannot be reduced to one of
workload, although without doubt, we have
been bitten by this menace and its legacy
of unfairness for years. I’d argue that the
expertise of mentoring (in as much as we
honor it at all) plays second fiddle because
it is our own version of “care work,” a
fantastic blend of the cognitive and the
affective, a kind of experiential-emotionalintellectual
labor that has been historically
demeaned (so often as “women’s work”),
but is personally enriching, socially valuable
and intellectually complex.
Yes, of course, deskilling continues to occur
in many areas of labor (teaching at all
levels included), but we shouldn’t confuse
deskilling with the true skills necessary to
carry out a complex and difficult faculty
role and the deep learning demanded to
do it well. We shouldn’t use our fantasy
of the professorial strut as the criterion to
judge an on-goingly experimental mentoring
expertise that rests much more on our
nuanced responses to not knowing, to our
commitment to listening, and, overall, to a
tradition of strong academic caring, than to
the arrogance of claiming “I know it and
you surely don’t.” Our distinctive mentoring
strut is one that, in a most intricate turn,
embeds our expertise in humility – a
humility that we have to nurture together.
Alan Mandell
suny empire state college • all about mentoring • issue 39 • spring 2011