By Carl Burkart, Director of Student Success and Development  

Faculty Spotlight: Alan Mandell and National Mentoring Month

For National Mentoring Month, we spoke with Alan Mandell, professor of adult learning and mentoring about his scholarship, teaching, and the place of mentoring in the college and broader society. Alan holds degrees from the CUNY Graduate Center, New School for Social Research and the University of Chicago. He edits the college journal, All About Mentoring and has written, with Lee Herman, From Teaching to Mentoring: Principle and Practice, Dialogue and Life in Adult Education.  For more than 40 years, he has worked with students and faculty as a mentor in the social sciences. He is an administrator, the first Susan Turben Chair in Mentoring at SUNY Empire State College, and director of the college’s Mentoring Institute.

The interview below has been edited for clarity and brevity.

 

How did you become a mentor?

Alan Mandell: I came to SUNY Empire State College when I was asked to work with one student in a guided independent study. I had never heard of Empire State College, and I didn't understand the relevance of being a mentor. I thought of myself in more traditional terms as a faculty member. One of the attractions of SUNY Empire and something really distinctive about it from the very start was that every faculty member was (and is!) known as a mentor. So, although there are assistant professors, associate professors, and full professors, whether you have been here for a week or for years, you're a mentor! This focus on being a mentor throws into question what we mean by being a teacher, being a faculty member. Serving as a mentor is something that I learned over a long stretch; It’s has been very important to me for a very long time.

Why did the college settle on the mentoring model?

Alan Mandell: SUNY Empire saw itself as trying to establish an alternative. This was a big deal for the State University of New York. The goal of then Chancellor Ernest Boyer was to found an institution that could respond to the needs of students and communities across the state in a way that just did not exist at other parts of SUNY.   And by the way, this founding of the college in 1971 came at a time of a terrific amount of social change in the United States and a terrific amount of questioning of hierarchies of all kinds. In creating SUNY Empire, SUNY was basically saying: “Hey, wait a minute; we want to rethink many dimensions of higher education, and one dimension that we want to question is the role of the faculty. Can you question the role of the faculty as someone who possesses knowledge that is then gobbled up by students? It's what the Brazilian educational social philosopher Paulo Freire talked about as the “banking model” where there's a bunch of knowledge and students take in that knowledge, and in the worst possible situations, regurgitate what they are told. And so in trying to do something different the college tried to imagine another model of teaching and learning that's very different from that.  So the creation of the faculty member as mentor was part of this larger effort to rethink many of these foundational ideas: What is a curriculum? What is a degree? How do students learn? Can experiential learning really be college-level learning? All of these pillars of higher education were thrown into the bucket to be questioned, along with the  faculty role.  The notion of a mentor model grew out of that broader critique of a university education. And here we are, 50 years later!

 

How has the mentoring model developed or changed over the years?

Alan Mandell:  The original notion, the model, was based on the one-to-one dialogical interaction between one student and one mentor. The mentoring model works based on the assumption that over time, a faculty person, a mentor, will learn more about that student, learn more about their past studies, learn more about their present lives, and will be able with the student to craft a degree that is really responsive to that person. The model is really based on getting to know the person. And when I came to the college a long time ago, here's what I learned: I was supposed to meet with every student every two weeks face to face, basically for an hour or so. Every two weeks, that's what I did. I met with people sitting at my little desk in the basement of the Rockland Community College Library and we just sat there and talked and designed learning contracts. Again, really interestingly, the word “course” was one of those horrible words you couldn't use because there was nothing preset; this was a “study constructed by the student and the mentor. To develop a degree program, you would never use the word “curriculum” because the idea—the ideal!—was every single student would be able to design an individualized program that fit that particular student’s needs. Now this is a gigantic promise, a hugely idealistic reframing of school. Just think about this: no courses or course catalog. Forget it. The idea of the course catalog, that very idea was a disaster because you were cementing preset things in a way that lost the flexibility that the college had. Thus, a student might come in to say to me, “I just saw this news article having to do with a man who got a total raw deal. He's been in jail for years; I just can’t imagine how that could happen.” Mentor and student could develop a learning contract based on that, and if a student got really interested in questions of prison incarceration and recidivism rates, she could build her whole degree program around it.

 

I think that ideal of radical individualization has faded. This doesn't mean that a mentor would still not be interested in a student's life and trying to gear studies to that student’s needs, but we are no longer sitting at a table and talking to a student every two weeks about her program. Mentors have more students; students have different needs. And the technologies that have emerged over these years have altered the relationship. One of the hopes of SUNY Empire from the start was that it could provide access that other institutions didn't. You could say that there were two kinds of threads in the college: access to higher education for those who had been denied, and imagination in designing studies and whole degrees that didn't exist before. It's access and experimentation. You could argue that even though I am not sitting next to a student every two weeks talking about her work at the college now, I have more access to more students all over the place than I did before. So, here's another example at SUNY Empire right now. Without a doubt, at SUNY Empire in 2022, there are more predefined programs and, of course, the college has a catalog! Thus, in 2022, there are new questions to tackle: Are we as responsive to students as we wish to be? In what directions do we move that make education more accessible, meaningful, flexible, and academically strong? These kinds of basic questions are alive and kicking. The models have changed over 50 years. The spirit and the mission, I think, remain very much the same.

 

Based on your experience and research, if a student wants to become a mentor in some other context, what qualities or practices should they cultivate in themselves?

Alan Mandell:  Years ago, there weren't many institutions that were talking about mentors. Now, it's hard to think of an organization that doesn't think about mentors, whether they are a law firm, a corporation, or a high school program. Many, many people are talking about mentoring. I think that those mentoring programs have grown up in a similar way that SUNY Empire's mentoring program grew up, which is that people still find many relationships in organizations, communities, and in school to be alienating. In this way we can think about mentoring as a kind of a human buffering of relationships that are more routinized, robotic, and impersonal today.

I’d say there are a number of things that I believe are present in many mentoring relationships, certainly beyond SUNY Empire State College. What does it mean to develop a caring relationship with a person, whether the person is a student or a client or a peer? What does caring refer to? How do you do that? And then there’s the question: What does “being responsive” refer to? How do you carry out being responsive? Here’s another set of mentoring questions: What does it mean to ask questions rather than to give answers? How do you develop a questioning spirit and know when asking a question is more important than giving an answer? And here’s another:  What does waiting mean as a mentor? That is, how does a mentor think about time differently? When do you give somebody directions and when do you let them try to figure it out by themselves? How do you wait? We have a tendency not to want to wait. And I guess I would finally ask: How do we remain as curious as we can? When I meet a student, how do I remain alive, curious, and willing to hear them and to know more about their lives and their understanding of things—not to tell them, but to be curious about them? Overall, many of our relationships with institutions are poor. Many of us feel like I feel when I try to call Con Edison, that it's a very impersonal thing. They don't care anything about me. And I think this is a challenge in any college now. How do you remain attentive to the human side and develop humane models of interaction and teaching and learning that are different from what most of us know in the world now and in previous schooling?

 

What are some of the most unusual independent studies that you have done with students over the years?

Alan Mandell: I think the best experiences that I've had as a mentor is when a student took a question that was on her/his mind, and we made it a learning contract upon which the student could build, for example when a student would come in having difficulties with a child, a high school kid who was going to drop out, and we used that as a starting block for thinking about alienation among high school kids. I have a lot of teachers or paraprofessionals who are students, and I think some of the great studies begin with their experiences and their questions. For example, can you describe what's happening in your class? Let’s take that experience and put it into some kind of context that involves the history, society, and culture—that takes your experience and show that it might not be so unusual.

 

What kind of studies or courses do you typically offer?
 
Alan Mandell: A number of years ago a colleague, Eric Ball, and I created a study called The Pursuit of Happiness in American History and our idea was to do basically two things: to find a way for people to gain a broad view of American history and at the same time to help people actually gain experience looking at primary historical documents and read them with care. Whatever we do, I still think our challenge is to develop studies that give students the opportunity to do their own exploring. So that's what Eric and I thought about; instead of saying here are the American history textbooks you have to read, we said find one. Instead of saying here are the primary sources that you should analyze, we said find your own primary sources. In all of the cases, the idea is how can students gain more experience and become more effective self-directed learners? How can I, as a student, find resources? How can I evaluate those resources? How can I develop my own ideas and arguments?

I’m now working with SUNY Empire graduate students in in some areas having to do with mentoring and with what's called “transformative learning.” But as in the “happiness” study, my effort is to leave room for students to make their own moves, to ask their own questions, to do their own searching. I met a number of students online, synchronously the other evening and asked them: “Now that you have finished this study, what new questions have emerged for you? If you were to continue this, what questions are now on your mind to pursue? Because my sense is, it's this ongoing asking of questions and exploring new areas and thinking that are involved. It’s the “I never thought of that, I'm making connections.” That is what I at least try to do, whether it's one-on-one or in a more formal course. That remains for me the very heart of mentoring.
 

National Mentoring Month is celebrated throughout the month of January. See https://www.mentoring.org/campaigns/national-mentoring-month/