In Mentoring Matters, we introduce a definition of mentoring relationships and explore the mentoring constellation model in higher education. Here we consider the important question, how do mentoring constellations operate in practice? From our comprehensive analyses of multiple data sources,…

In our 2020 institutional survey on mentoring, fourth-year students identified on-campus student employment as the fifth most common experience that prepared them to connect with potential mentors. Supervisors of student employees offer a dynamic example of meaningful relationships that can…

Recently I had the opportunity to think about mentoring in the context of a semester study abroad program with undergraduate research (UR) mentors working with DIS, Study Abroad in Scandinavia. Before talking with the mentors, I had asked their students…

What kind of development and/or support do your mentors provide? It was necessary at some point to figure out how the knowledge I was obtaining at university could be applied. Therefore … I worked at a biotech company where I…

Recent scholarship emphasizes the essential role of mentoring to support student engagement in undergraduate research (UR) and global learning and highlights the potential of blending these high-impact practices (HIPs) for enhanced learning and relationship-building (Allocco et al. 2022; Whitehead et…

As we explored in a previous post, if we take mentoring relationships seriously, as recent mentoring scholarship compels us to, our orientation shifts. It calls on us to understand mentors and mentoring – those sets of meaningful relationships – within…

As we have earlier explored, recent mentoring scholarship argues that our definitions of mentoring should move away from role-based orientations towards a relational-orientation that defines mentoring “in terms of the character and quality of the relationship and in terms of…

As scholarship on mentoring moved away from roles and actions towards processes and relationship development, definitions of mentoring have developed greater commonality not only around a shared focus on relationships, but also a shared focus on the general functions and…

If mentoring matters, what is meant by mentoring, and what does high-quality mentoring entail? Despite over four decades of research on mentoring, there is no universally accepted definition (Mullen and Klimaitis 2021). Ubiquitous use of the term has not only…

Mentoring relationships develop in relationship-rich environments (Vandermaas-Peeler and Moore 2022). In higher education contexts, they might evolve from other meaningful relationships like teaching, advising, supervising, and coaching, but they require time to become more reciprocal and mutually beneficial (Mullen and…