Mentoring in Intercultural and International Contexts

Acknowledgments

We want to acknowledge people who contributed to our journey that we started three years ago.

Ahmet wants to thank his family for their continuous support.

Diana wants to thank her family and friends for their support and guidance.

We also want to thank Erika Hendrix, Michael Gibson, and Niall Kennedy, our past and current editors, for supporting us throughout this project.

Finally, we want to thank our former and current mentors for their guidance, and our former and current students for inspiring us. Our discussions helped us to conceptualize the vision for this book.

Introduction

Academia can be a lonely place, especially for those people who are members of marginalized communities. Although at its core institutions of higher education are supposed to be places for knowledge production, exchange and transformation, they can also be the source of anxiety, confusion, and hurt. Regardless of who we are when we arrive at any university as an undergraduate or graduate student or faculty member, we hope to belong, and we also hope to be part of a community that is supportive. Some of us arrive on our college campuses from different locations within the U.S. Some might be coming from urban areas and others from rural places. We all have different experiences, backgrounds, and hopes. On top of all of this diversity within the U.S., some others come from different countries with yet again differing expectations, needs, and hopes. No matter who we are or where we come from, when we arrive, we all look for friends for social support so we can cope with homesickness or loneliness and celebrate our successes and achievements. In the process, some of us begin looking for mentors who could help us navigate the culture and the system we must operate within. On the one hand, this sounds viable and even easy for some, but on the other, finding a mentor for historically marginalized or international students and faculty can be more challenging. While some students, faculty, and staff members encounter few challenges when identifying mentors, others aren’t as lucky and are left behind without effective mentors or no mentoring at all.

←1 | 2→As scholars, teachers, and former students who graduated from the same doctoral program, we spent a lot of time during the last several years thinking and talking about mentoring, informally and formally, in our institutions and on various panels at different conferences. Over the years, individually and together, we also wrote about mentoring and what it means to be supported (or not) as we built our academic trajectories. In the introduction to the co-edited volume Mentoring and Communication: Theories and Practices (Atay & Trebing, 2021), we discussed the role and importance of mentoring in higher education, especially in the field of Communication. Using ideas from communication pedagogy and critical cultural scholars (Calafell, 2007, Calafell & Gutierrez-Perez, 2018; Chrifi Alaoui & Calafell, 2016), we argued that “mentoring as a commitment and practice builds on the ideas of critical dialogue, embodies critical love and intercultural and transnational sense-making, and promotes a web of community that cultivates care and commitment” (p. 11). This current project builds on these earlier arguments and focuses specifically on international and intercultural contexts. We are not certain if we came to this project to make sense of how we mentor students and junior faculty or reflect on our mentoring experiences as international scholars. In some ways, we stumbled upon our mentors in the same way we stumbled upon this project, half accidental and half deliberate. Regardless, focusing on international and intercultural contexts, we wanted to explore how people think about mentoring, their experiences with their mentors and mentees, and challenges and joys they might face. We also wanted to explore new and different mentoring models and relationships that could be especially helpful in diverse settings. Hence, this book is about personal and academic curiosity regarding mentors and mentees in international or intercultural settings, and their ways of finding support and community to survive, and hopefully thrive, in academic settings.

Neither of us thought much about mentoring and its importance in one’s academic life prior to starting our doctoral program. This is partly because we are both international scholars, and mentoring was not something that was discussed openly at our undergraduate institutions at the time. We also did not experience mentorship or did not know that we were being mentored before our arrival in the U.S. We both studied intercultural communication in our doctoral program and were interested in the experiences of international students in academic settings. However, as graduate students, we did not take classes that generated discussion about mentoring and its importance. We also did not critically discuss or interrogate the value of mentoring until after we graduated and began working as junior faculty. We were not naïve by any means. However, based on our experiences, it was not as easy for international students to find mentors who would understand their needs or life challenges in addition to what they might have been facing academically. We both survived, but our academic journeys pushed us to think ←2 | 3→critically about the importance of mentoring as an act and as a way of building a support system to not just survive but thrive.