Digital Bibliography

In my last post, I introduced the concept of mentorship and intimacy. I’m talking about the type of intimacy that emerges from a relationship characterized by trust, honesty, risk, and safety. For both participants.

Looking back at this previous sentence, it occurs to me (“I write to know what I’m thinking”) that my own ideas of mentorship are tied to an only-one-on-one type of relationship. I’m not sure why that is. I  guess that has to do with my own ideas about intimacy and trust. Maybe I’m working on the idea that there’s some sort of continuum between teacher and mentor. And that spectrum varies according to number. For each teacher, one student or many students. If a teacher works at establishing a relationship with one student, I see that as mentorship. If several students, I see it as a classroom. But that’s over-simplified. Can a teacher be a mentor, say, to a relatively small group of students in the journalism club? Or the wrestling team? I guess so. But I have a pretty serious impulse to call that something other than mentorship. But now I feel like I’ve digressed. Back to the idea of intimacy.

So here’s the basic idea: in order for a relationship to be a mentorship to happen, there needs to be an intimacy. (Really, I’m just working through this idea as provisional, so bear with me.) There seems to me to be something “off the record” about mentorship. Read the rest of this entry »