Mentoring Up, Down, and Sideways: Reciprocity and Care in the Museum Education Field

Abstract

ABSTRACT Recent literature on mentoring revises the long-held notion of a dyadic, master-apprentice affiliation to better reflect the fluid, flexible, and even non-hierarchical dynamics that occur between mentors and mentees today. Relational mentoring, intersectional mentoring, and co-mentoring models offer frameworks for reconsidering the role of mentoring in the museum education field, both for newcomers and for museum professionals with many years of experience. Centering four mentor-mentee conversations about the role of mentoring in their professional lives, this article captures the crucial, though rarely documented, importance of mentoring, and also enumerates various ways that mentoring shows up for museum education professionals at various points in their careers. In doing so, it makes space for mentoring as part of the larger discourse around how we navigate the profession and care for one another in the process.