Mentors, Muses, and mutuality: honoring barbara snell dohrenwend

Abstract

I describe feminist community psychology principles that have the potential to expand and enrich mentoring and that honor Barbara Snell Dohrenwend, a leader who contributed to the research, theory, and profession of community psychology. I reflect on the affect that Barbara Dohrenwend had on life and on the development of feminist community psychology. Examples of peer mentoring between Barbara Dohrenwend's research assistant, John L. Martin, and me are used to illustrate radiating effects of mentoring and interrelationships among forms of mentoring. Feminist community psychology principles discussed in relation to mentoring include mutuality, the power of contexts, and the importance of recognizing and affirming stigmatized and oppressed aspects of identities. The concepts of “muse” (Sullivan, 1996), “public homeplaces,” and “developmental leadership” (Belenky, Bond, & Weistein, 1997) are used to illustrate qualities of feminist community psychology mentoring. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

A Relational Approach to Mentoring Women Doctoral Students

“…). Additional models include a muse and mentor model enlarging the Greek metaphor to include the nine sister goddesses in addition to Mentor (Mulvey ), and relational mentoring (Fletcher and Ragins ; Ragins ). All these models seek to re‐define the power imbalance, hierarchy, formality, objectivity, directionality, and limited focus of traditional models.…”

“…This body of work invites readers to review traditional definitions, to address the limitations of hierarchical structure (Blumer et al 2010;Chandler 1996;Ellingson and Sotirin 2008;Hammer, Trepal, and Speedlin 2014;Moss et al 1999) and to consider alternative models of mentoring such as: co-mentoring (Bona, Rinehart, and Rolbrecht 1995;Hansman 2012;McGuire and Reger 2003;Mullen 2000), peer mentoring (Ryan et al 2010;Tarr, 2010), multicultural feminist mentoring (Benishek et al 2004), and feminist pedagogy (Buck et al 2009;Humble et al 2006). Additional models include a muse and mentor model enlarging the Greek metaphor to include the nine sister goddesses in addition to Mentor (Mulvey 2012), and relational mentoring (Fletcher and Ragins 2007;Ragins 2013). All these models seek to re-define the power imbalance, hierarchy, formality, objectivity, directionality, and limited focus of traditional models.…”