Hand-drawn map of relationships supporting students' development. Text overlay reads, "Mentoring Matters. Mentoring in a Constellation."

Mentoring Constellations in Global Contexts

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…

Image of Relationship-Rich Mentoring Map, illustrating the importance of supportive context and other meaningful relationships to foster mentoring relationships. Text overlay reads, "Mentoring Matters: Defining Mentoring Relationships."

Mapping Mentoring Relationships and Constellations

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…

Three people sit at a table, talking while looking over documents by a computer. An overlay reads, "Elon University Center for Engaged Learning. Mentoring Matters. Defining Mentoring Relationships."

Taking (Mentoring) Relationships Seriously

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…

Three people sit at a table, talking while looking over documents by a computer. An overlay reads, "Elon University Center for Engaged Learning. Mentoring Matters. Defining Mentoring Relationships."

Defining Mentoring: Towards Mentoring Constellations

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…

Three people sit at a table, talking while looking over documents by a computer. An overlay reads, "Elon University Center for Engaged Learning. Mentoring Matters. Defining Mentoring Relationships."

Defining Mentoring and/as Mentoring Relationships

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…