Cross‐cultural mentoring as a context for learning

Abstract

Cross-cultural mentoring relationships are an important site of struggle for learning and for power. We use the example of one mentoring relationship to illustrate six common issues facing people involved in these relationships.Mentoring across cultural boundaries is an especially delicate dance that juxtaposes group norms and societal pressures and expectations with individual personality traits. Why would you choose to traverse such tumultuous territory, and how do you survive the journey? In our own successful mentoring relationship with each other, the answers are simple. We never approached our sojourn with a consciousness burdened by societal dictates. Of course, there were those invisible knapsacks of privilege and disenfranchisement on our backs (McIntosh, 1995), but more important there were sincere and somewhat naïve beliefs that people are free to act beyond cultural confines in spite of their fears. The common ground of our working-class families, Catholic school histories, leftist political leanings, and love of rhythm and blues lay undiscovered, but our generational understandings of the world, as children marked and forever changed by the civil rights struggle and the Kennedy assassination, afforded a common basis on which to build a relationship.We start off the chapter with individual accounts of our mentoring relationship. In the second section, we use our relationship and the literature to illuminate common issues and strategies of a cross-cultural mentoring relationship. Finally, we discuss implications for assembling the infrastructure of a successful cross-cultural mentoring relationship and the importance of mentoring in building a diverse and strong academy.

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