Helping Adults Learn: Mentoring and the definition of a good education

Helping Adults Learn:
Mentoring and the Definition of a Good Education

Dr. Laurent Daloz teaches adult education at Leslie College, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The main focus of this interview is upon Dr. Daloz's book, Effective Teaching and Mentoring: Realizing The Transformational Power of Adult Learning Experiences, which has broken new ground in the area of mentoring. Dr. Daloz's analysis has also provided useful material for those who are in the business of helping adults learn.

Dr. Daloz has been involved with adult education for many years, and he was instrumental in founding the nontraditional Vermont community college system. In his book, he has drawn in some depth from his personal experiences working with traditional and nontraditional learners who were seeking a higher education. He has combined that experience with his psychology background in developmental theory.

Photo: courtesy of Teacher College, Columbia University

Aurora: Larry, what is mentoring?

Daloz: A quick response is that mentoring is what mentors do, and what they do varies widely with the particular context they are in. Pat Cross, who is a distinguished researcher on adult learning, says, "Mentoring is a slippery concept." I think that is true. The word is used frequently in the business world, particularly by women who recognize that men seem to make it up the industrial ladder more readily than they do. One of the reasons for this seems to be that men have mentors, usually other males, who help them up the ladder. Hence, women have been wondering if there is any way they can construct similar kinds of old boy/old girl networks. So the business world has been keenly aware of mentors.

In the academic world, some research has been done on how mentors help professors provide role model support for students or for younger faculty members working their way toward tenure. I think that most people, as they reflect on their own lives, will find that they have had mentors at various points in their lives, although they may not call them mentors. The term has been bandied about for about 15 years, but it has only recently become popular. Many of us are old enough to have had mentors before we knew what to call them. A mentor is someone who embodies our own dreams, who is doing what we hope someday ourselves to be doing. In that sense, mentors are "keepers of the promise," to use Sharon Parks's term.

Mentors manifest the dream that many people have in their young twenties. Mentors are a kind of archetype. In fact, Carl Jung talks about that. He refers to the wise old man and the wise woman. The archetype is a figure deep in our psyche that represents the possibility of realizing our dreams. Of course, when we sit down to talk with a student about the next course that student is going to take, this deep archetypical analysis may seem pretty distant and abstract. But for many students, we can hook into that archetype. We are for some of our students someone who shows them the way through what is often a very confusing and frightening jungle in the academic world . So I think that it is worth recognizing that we are doing work which hooks into deeper levels of the psyche even though we may not be consciously or deliberately carrying out work at that level.

Aurora: What you are talking about is almost indistinguishable from good counselling, Rogerian counselling in some sense, which is part of teaching. Do you make any distinctions at all in those terms?

Daloz: I don't make a sharp distinction, but I also don't consider mentoring and counselling to be the same. Here is a way to see the distinction.

Draw a rectangle, and then draw a line from the lower left-hand corner of the rectangle to the upper right-hand corner so that you divide the rectangle into two right triangles. If you write the word "teaching" in the upper left triangle and write "counselling" on the lower right triangle, you will get a sense of the continuum in which these two attributes are blended. If you then draw a circle right in the middle, that would blend the interpersonal and the academic, and you would come out with something like the semantic field of mentorship. On the left-hand side, largely concerned with knowledge acquisition or the passing on of knowledge, is the traditional faculty role. On the right-hand side, largely concerned with process, with coping skills, or perhaps with interpersonal growth of a client, is the counsellor. I think that mentors are necessarily concerned with both these sides.

Our job does not involve simply helping students to solve their own interpersonal problems extraneous to their schoolwork. Nor are we in business solely to pump information into students' minds. Our job is to help students to integrate what they are learning in the academic world with how they process knowledge and how they are growing in an epistemological way. So mentorship is firmly grounded in an interactionist perspective. It is firmly grounded in the notion that we develop through the way in which we make use of knowledge in the environment and also through the way that is concerned with the growth in process and in the form of our thought. You can't simply separate process and content.

Aurora: To me, the mentor modelling that you are talking about is a very ancient model. It's associated with many traditional societies.

Daloz: Yes, I'm glad that you mentioned that. One of the things that I have discovered is that in substantially earlier cultures, and perhaps in some so called primitive tribes, the roles of teacher, healer, and priest are largely wrapped up into one. In a certain sense, the deep understanding of mentorship finds us dropping back to that level where we are talking about a role or work that involves shepherding the soul. This is in the sense that psychology is the study and caring of the soul, although the word soul has to be handled delicately in these scientific times. But there is no harm in recognizing that we are engaged in soul work, and our work is serious work indeed.

Aurora: It's ironic that in a postindustrial age we are rediscovering ways that are very old.

Daloz: Yes. We are asking questions that are no more simple and no more complex than, "What do we really want in our lives? What do we really believe is true, and how do we know what's true is true?" Those are questions that people have asked since the birth of humankind, and I suspect they will always need to be reasked. That's a wheel that has to be reinvented continually.

Aurora: Do we have better answers for those questions now than we did before?

Daloz: I suspect that our answers are becoming more universal. Perhaps the best among us are constructing worlds which may be more adequate to hold the greater complexity and the greater interdependence of the world that we are living in now. But I'm not given to quick optimism this week. All of us remember in our own lifetimes a period when we entered as darkly into human nature as we ever have, so I'm not sure about progress.

Aurora: What are some of the difficult aspects of mentoring?

Daloz: Sharon Merriam, a professor of adult education, has said rather gently that mentoring seems to look a little too much on the bright side. She wondered if there ever had been any disasters.

I think that the most challenging aspect, to answer your question, is doing the work well and compassionately I had a wonderful revelation while working with a student who got all tangled up in a final term paper. She had terrific trouble separating one idea from another in order to put down anything coherent. We talked for hours on a number of different occasions, with me patiently listening and then suggesting this and suggesting that. Finally, when every suggestion didn't work, I simply had to tell her that I couldn't help her any more. I didn't want her to feel as though I was abandoning her, but I just didn't know where to go from there. She then went to talk to several of her fellow students, and now she says she has some things cleared up and she will get the paper to me shortly.

If it turns out that in fact she has cracked the problem, it would be wonderful because it would show that she has broken the dependence on her mentor. I don't know whether that will happen or not. I'm hoping that it will. It does cast some light on one of the darker sides of mentoring and that is the whole question of dependence and the degree to which a mentor can inadvertently, or otherwise, create dependence on herself or himself.

Aurora: Is that the largest problem in mentoring?

Daloz: Yes, it is, if you see mentoring as I do, as a process of helping students to move on with or without you. Now, I say that with some hesitation given my more recent experience with the work of some women developmentalists, such as Carol Gilligan and Belenky et al, the authors of Women's Ways of Knowing. They talk about the difference between separate and connective knowing. Not surprisingly, women tend to be connective knowers rather than separate knowers. That means that they carry out the business of developing or growing up by staying in relation to others rather than breaking relationships with others.

As a male, I have always assumed that the only way to grow up is to leave home, to leave the feminine or at least to leave the paternal. These ideas make things more complicated than I and a lot of other developmentalists ever thought.

Aurora: So dependency might not be as a bad as it looks?

Daloz: It may be. Gilligan is very clear. She says that autonomy is a male invention and that for women, it has very little to do with maturity. The whole idea of autonomy, which until a few years ago was assumed to be the pinnacle of development, is now called into question. Along with that is the question of whether separation from a mentor represents maturity in all cases for everybody.

It may be that we need to think in terms of transformation of the relationship rather than separation from it.

Aurora: Larry, isn't there another appropriate situation between dependence and independence, and that is interdependence?

Daloz: Yes. A good book that gets at the whole question of the evolution of dependence is called The Critical Years by Sharon Parks. She comes out of the faith-development literature and writes about maturation as the evolution of forms of dependence. So she talks about moving from dependence to counterdependence through to interdependence.

To summarize, I think that if a relationship is working well, it moves from a hierarchical mode to a symmetrical mode, which was a notion that I took from Gregory Bateson. If we are able to work well as mentors, the relationship with our students becomes more level. It becomes more collegial. This happens as the student develops toward greater "contextual relativism," in Bill Perry's terms, or toward a developmental stance which understands the mentor's position.

Aurora: Why do some people ask questions about the universe and about their purpose in it, and others don't? Why do some people question authority and others don't?

Daloz: How come one person comes back to higher education and another one doesn't? Well, I don't have a quick answer, but I do have a place where I would begin to look. I would look at the quality of the community and the quality of the relationships in which a person lives, or what Bob Kegan calls the "holding environment." I suspect that we live in a number of different holding environments or different worlds of relationship. When a person begins to question, for example, hierarchical roles in a work setting or an oppressive marriage, we could learn a lot by looking at where that person is getting support and encouragement. Very few of us are able to do this kind of questioning alone.

One of the shortcomings of developmental theory so far is that we aren't very good at looking at the communities which hold us as we grow. We haven't been looking at the role of peers for adult students as they go through their education. To whom are they talking? Who sympathizes with them? Who encourages them? What is their home situation? What kind of relationships are going on with spouses, children, relatives, and old friends? One of the tragic things that I see happen with adults who return to school is that as they begin to grow, most of their other relationships undergo stress - in some cases the relationships break.

Aurora: How do you relate your work on mentoring at the level of the individual to the wider social and cultural dimensions of society?

Daloz: Not very well. I am just beginning to recognize the importance of that question. For the last sixteen years of my life I have returned to a kind of hermit's existence living in the woods. Yes, with a family, wife, and children, but not directly involved in a wider social world, at least not since I left my work with the community college system of Vermont. I've spent ten or twelve years of work largely focusing on the individual without much of a broader context. I'm recognizing now the broader context of development and the notion of a mentoring community. Mentorship is a powerful idea if it is understood as the manifestation of the vision of possibility in the world and if we think of the mentoring of a whole community or indeed if we think of a mentoring culture.

I believe that we are headed for a new burgeoning of social awareness and social conscience among young people. Part of the reason for this is that the mentoring community, that is the people who are increasingly in positions of power to offer a vision of possibility, are increasingly people of the sixties. Young people now going into high school and college are the children of the sixties generation. Many people in positions of authority have also come out of that world. So I feel very optimistic about the next few years. I think that we will see mentorship on a much larger scale fulfilling its promise in the next ten to fifteen years.

Aurora: Colleagues in sociology often accuse those of us in psychology of operating too much at the level of the individual. They claim that you just can't have an effect at that level. How do you respond to this issue?

Daloz: Well, I must say that I tend to favour that position more than the loneranger position. I'm not a hippy who says all you've got to do is change your head and everything else will change. One of the vulnerabilities of Marxism or of collectivism as a sole motive for social change is that you run into situations such as with the new left in the sixties, when the rhetoric outran the change of consciousness on the part of the rhetorician. Talk was cheap. For example, many women in the sixties were still being oppressed by new left men.

We cannot leave out our own individual responsibility to live fully, richly, and responsibly, but that is not enough. We also have a responsibility to join with others and to support collective social action aimed at profound reform.

Aurora: There is also a question of process throughout all of this. Whether you are interested in changing structures or interested in having an effect with individuals, I think the question of how you do it has an impact on the outcome.

Daloz: I think you are right. I was just rereading Frantz Fanons Wretched of the Earth, and I was struck by the absolutist and, in some sense, inhuman stance. There was no question about ends and means being integrated there. I find someone like Paulo Freire [see Aurora, Winter '89] much easier to work with, much easier to sympathize with because he is so sensitive to the importance of the process being a part of the entire change that we are trying to bring about. He writes so beautifully about praxis, the interaction of grounded practice with reflection.

Aurora: How would you describe a good liberal arts education?

Daloz: A good liberal arts education is pretty synonymous with good education, period. By that, I mean that good educations ought to help people raise profound questions about why they are living the way they are living, and it ought to offer them choices about how to live in presumably humane and compassionate ways. Any education ought to do that. We ought to be doing that in elementary schools just as surely as in colleges.

Art Chickering has a nice distinction between education and training. He says that at the end of any given training sequence, everybody can perform the same tasks at the same level of skill. In effect they all can do the same thing. At the end of any educational sequence, everybody should be doing different things in accordance with their own capacity and vision. It is an interesting distinction.

Education should lead to an enrichment and not a uniformity. A good education ought to promote people's growth toward being able to understand a complex world in a more complex way; toward a more inclusive vision of who they are on the planet; toward a more compassionate capacity to empathize with others and to see the world though the eyes of others in a way that is not simply a matter of curiosity but a matter of profound respect.

Aurora: Are there ways to get that kind of an education besides going to a formal school?

Daloz: I love that question. My quick answer is yes, there are. The outcome of good education is something like wisdom, it's a wise and caring stance in the world. And to think the only way one can achieve a wise and caring stance is by attending classes for a given period of time is nonsense. However, a wise and caring stance doesn't come free. Some kinds of experience must be undergone to bring that about. The question is, what kinds of experience hone awareness of one's complexity in the world and increase one's capacity to see through different perspectives.

You can go anywhere and find some people who you could define as wiser than others, but one thing that strikes me is that these people seem to almost always have left home and travelled. It may have been vicariously, through a great deal of reading, but one common factor is leaving home, at least symbolically if not physically.

A while ago, I wrote a piece called "Beyond Tribalism," which argued that as teachers we are helping people to leave the tribe. People need to come back and retribalize, but they can only come back after they've been out because there are certain things that need to be learned by leaving home. People have to look critically at the assumptions underlying their upbringing, their own culture, and their values in order to reown them and come back to the tribe reborn.

Aurora: A lot of parents with nineteen year olds would like to hear you say that.

Daloz: Well, it's a tricky one. It's the whole question of whether one can evolve at home. Sharon Parks says it beautifully when she takes a critical look at the assumption that because the metaphor for spiritual growth has conventionally been a journey or a pilgrimage, that you have to leave home in order to grow. She says that maybe it is possible, especially for women, to grow spiritually at home through the process of care.

Aurora: Would you describe your involvement in programs of prior learning assessment at the university level? For example, why you became involved, what you did, and how it worked.

Daloz: In the seventies, I was one of the founders of the community college system in Vermont. We designed a system of higher learning which had no teachers, no curriculum, no campus, and no credits. It was very much a counter-cultural institution and a fascinating experiment.

Aurora: No credit, no teachers?

Daloz: No credits, no teachers, no campus, and no curriculum. As it turned out, in order to become as successful as it now is in Vermont, it now has all four of those components, but they are not there in the same form as they would have been if we had set out to invent a traditional college.

Aurora: What was the motivation for people enrolling in the original system?

Daloz: You mean why would anybody do it if they don't get a degree? We wanted to create a structure which would bring together people who wanted to learn things with people who wanted to teach the same things. It was essentially an effort to bring resources and learners together. That was why we had no campus. It still has no campus. It is essentially a storefront operation all over the state.

Aurora: What things would people want to learn and what kind of people?

Daloz: Well, everything from auto mechanics to rural sociology and almost everything in between. In the early years we didn't distinguish between "academic" and "nonacademic" courses. We didn't have to because we weren't tangled up with credits. So we had garage mechanics teaching auto mechanics to low income people.

Aurora: Were they all doing it for free?

Daloz: Initially, it was free. We had a federal grant. Subsequently, the college has begun charging tuition and paying teachers, but it still pays very little. Teachers are hired to teach one particular course. They are presumed to have regular jobs so they are not dependent on the college for a substantial income.

Aurora: Larry, what does this have to do with prior learning?

Daloz: What that has to do with prior learning is that at the same time we built in a system for assessing prior learning and for assessing it against competency.

Aurora: Why? If you aren't giving credit or degrees.

Daloz: Because as the program developed, we did give a degree but it was a competency-based rather than a credit-based degree.

Aurora: Could you indicate the difference between the two?

Daloz: A competency-based degree spells out the outcome and level of performance necessary to attain a degree. Grades are not given, and neither are students ranked according to them.

Aurora: How important is something like a prior learning assessment?

Daloz: I think that it's very important as long as it is seen as an educational process rather than a credit-accumulating process. If the assessment of prior learning is understood as being an integral part of the college program that encourages self-awareness and enhances self-esteem then looking back at one's prior experience and taking credit for what one has learned from it is an important part of the kind of growth that the college wants to see anyway.

This becomes dangerous when people look at assessing prior learning as a way to get quick credit. It is dangerous when people use it as a way to cut down the amount of money they have to spend or to cut the amount of time, which is a big factor with adult learners. The university can counter this by being very clear that the purpose of assessing prior learning is an educational purpose and it has to do with the enhancement of the overall goals of education.

Aurora: I think that's still a new attitude in terms of faculty consciousness.

Daloz: It's important work, and faculty have to be respected in their concerns around that as well. It really is a careful and important dialogue, but it does get at some of the questions about why people are coming back for education. As you develop a clear sense of your deep objectives as an educational institution, assessing prior learning is very much in accord with that.

Article originally published Spring 1990

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