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In one
sense Mentorship I is a survey course. It meets the usual requirement
of a first course in any program—which is to give entering
students some concepts and a basic outline or survey of their field
of study. The “survey” they undertake, however, covers
many different landscapes:
- academic territory
about mentoring reflected in required readings and in the lectures
of the instructors;
- an interior landscape
of personal culture which everyone brings to communication situations;
- a cultural landscape
displaying the huge diversity of seen and unseen cultural markers
and characteristics of hearing and deaf people alike;
- overview of needs
in the interpreting field and potential routes forward; and
- inventory of
analysis tools mentors may use in their work.
The objective
is not for students to learn mentoring by learning what others know
about it. After starting out with some grounding in the field, students
work with a range of materials and experiences in order to develop
their own deeper personal understanding of mentoring. The purpose
of the survey is to help them produce their own maps for exploring
their future work in the field.
Pedagogy
The content, shape and learning activities in the course are based
on the model of a guided journey of self-exploration. Students,
in other words, put themselves in the position of mentees ready
to begin a process of self-development. Their mentor is not any
particular instructor, but the course environment itself. It is
an environment that offers opportunities to learn, tackle development
challenges and get feedback. The students also take on the tasks
of mentoring each other as learners as they participate in collaborative
learning processes.
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