Who are they? Mentors are volunteers from recent workshops who participate in many of the activities of the workshop, particularly with coaching projects during the three middle "practice" weeks of the workshop.
How do they connect? Mentors form their own household and interact with the rest of the community as community members who are leading and learning at the same time. They sometimes organize events, welcome participants on their front porch for discussions, and have their own private discussions in their own kitchen.
How do they know what to do? Sometimes mentors come back to the workshop to explore or gain more experience in a specific area, but often they participate because of a desire to give back something as a result of having had an especially powerful experience. They are given rather wide leeway to offer their perspective and competence to the workshop community. (From that perspective the role, like a number of other elements in the workshop, is under-designed.) Like the rest of us, mentors make up their agenda and construct their role as they go.
How is the role developed? After the most recent workshop, we held a telephone conference to discuss people's experiences and to consider whether, given the important role that mentors play, they were being supported enough. That led to an online conference for all the mentors to discuss the role and to develop some guidelines for future mentors.
What's most realistic about the Foundations workshop as a community of practice is that the knowledge of what to say, how to produce the workshop, and how to be in the workshop are all distributed through an ever-larger community of people involved in it.
Posted by smithjd at July 19, 2004 09:53 PM
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