Mentoring
I’ve been involved in the Open Education for a Better World project, organized by a group under the auspices of UNESCO as an effort to improve educational outcomes for the Sustainable Development Goal #4. I have participated for one cycle, in the second year of their mentoring work. The third year has just kicked off with a round of applications, selection, and introductions. As a result of this mentoring work, I have gained a friend and colleague in open education located in Mumbai, India, with the potential of expanding this network with a new member in Maharashtra, India.
While this mentoring work is not directly related to my PhD research or scholarly endeavours, it is opening opportunities to engage in academic publication and presentations that are global in nature. From my first year working with OE4BW there have been two conference proposals and one article for publication in process. One conference proposal has been accepted, so as a result, I will attend the OER20 conference in London, England in April to present a session titled An ethos of care in a cross-cultural collaborative mentoring project with UNESCO Open Education for a Better World. I will be presenting with Dr. Rekha Chavan, whom I mentored last year through her OER development project titled Designing Collaborative Instructional Design Using OERs. While we continue to co-author a paper for publication, we are now also planning our conference presentation with excitement. We hope to hear that our proposal to present at the inaugural OTESSA conference at the end of May will also be accepted. The focus of this proposal is on the reframing and redefinition of mentoring, the attributes of mentors in cross-cultural digitally supported environments, and the mechanisms that can support global mentoring contexts.
As a direct result of the upcoming presentation at OER20, I have gone back to the research about ‘caring’, specifically Nel Noddings work on the caring relationships in teaching. I will provide an abbreviated annotated bibliography of these readings in a future blog post. I have also dug deeply into research about mentoring in digital, cross-cultural, and fluid mentoring experiences. I will share an abbreviated annotated bibliography of this topic as well.
Mentoring isn’t just happening through my connections through the UNESCO OE4BW projects. Here in Ontario, I’ve been collaborating with the OnEdMentors Connect work crafted by two educators to support open mentoring connections between practicing educators and new teacher candidates in faculties of education. As a result of this work, students in my classes and in the faculty where I work are directly benefitting from these connections. As this project evolves, it will transition to The Mentoree, as revealed in this OnEdMentors Connect ‘radiothon’ podcast where I share the impact of this mentoring program on new teachers to the profession.
References
Map of India https://www.flickr.com/photos/nat507/7458321320
