Relational and caring partnerships: (re)creating equity, genuineness, and growth in mentoring faculty relationships.

Abstract

Mentoring in academia has traditionally and currently been prescriptive and institutionally driven. The purpose of this paper is to deconstruct these current mentoring practices with a critical feminist stance. New understandings are shared and gained through dialogue, relevant literature, and performativity to (re)create and name a caring and relational partnership. This caring and relational partnership is grown through a process of mutuality and reciprocity, and based on relational ethics, authenticity, and solidarity. By embracing ideologies of caring and relational ethics, mentoring blurs the lines of mentor/mentee to a perpetual state of walking beside each other in equity to learn and strengthen each other's insights into our worlds. Material realities become illuminated through our shared journeys growing an appreciation and gift of the other. In turn, engaging in meaningful dialogue informs scholarship increasing our understandings of the human condition.