Reconceptualizing Faculty Mentoring within a Community of Practice Model

Abstract

Despite the growing knowledge base on mentoring in academia, providing effective mentoring for faculty presents several complex dilemmas for academic units charged with facilitating mentoring. How do we institutionalize voluntary and spontaneous mentoring interaction? How do we support a collaborative climate in an inherently individual and competitive reward system? How do we design for trust? This study proposes a community of practice (CoP) model for faculty mentoring that emerged from the practical and conceptual dilemmas we faced as a professional graduate school trying to facilitate mentoring for its faculty. We share our rationale and process in moving toward a CoP model for mentoring and propose a structural–functional model for what it might look like in academia.