25 DE Mentoring as Practice
©Marcel Rickli
25
Mentoring as Practice
The project Mentoring as Practice introduces a note-spitting machine (a machine, which spits out small pieces of paper with short text inputs) to people currently engaged as mentees or mentors, as well as to those interested in starting a mentoring relationship. Mentoring is a vessel for learning/teaching, often part of everyday study life at art universities. Students are accompanied by a mentor in developing their projects, with the mentor responding to the topics or projects the mentee brings to each session. The exact way of working is usually left to the individuals involved, making mentoring a format that raises the question of how and in what constellations we want to learn together.
As a mentee, I often was not fully aware that, with each mentoring session, I was actually involved in shaping how mentoring could unfold; instead, I found myself questioning certain interactions in terms of how well they aligned with my preconceived notions of what mentoring is meant to be. I realized that unspoken and undiscussed assumptions about the mentee/mentor relationship may limit how we experiment with different ways of learning as mentees/mentors.
This finding motivated the development of a note-spitting machine that initiates an exchange between various mentee/mentor constellations by circulating statements, questions, gestures, and methods. The machine accompanies mentoring sessions, spitting out notes randomly toward mentee or mentor and prompting both to reflect on and discuss their preconceptions of mentoring. A feeding station invites mentee and mentor to feed the mechanism with findings from their own exchange, which will inform upcoming mentoring sessions.
The project questions whether a structuralization of mentoring sessions might help to hold the openness of mentoring as a learning format and invite mentees and mentors to shape/enact mentoring as a practice.
Kann eine punktuelle Formalisierung von Mentoring-Sessions Gestaltungsspielraum öffnen?
HOW THE NOTE-SPITTING-MACHINE WORKS:
The object is positioned during mentoring sessions between mentee (A) and mentor (B) and spits out notes at defined time intervals (within a random range) in the direction of A/B. The notes contain utterances/questions/gestures/methods. A or B is invited to read the note aloud to their counterpart in several ways: as an offer for interaction; by distancing themselves from it and thereby updating the mentoring setting as it exists; modifying it in contrast to the slip of paper; and so on. A feeding station is crucial for the setting, where the pool of statements and questions from which the object randomly selects is generated. Mentees and mentors are invited to type on a keyboard utterances/questions they would have liked to say/ask in a mentoring session to note actions waiting to be realized within a mentoring session (“I actually wish I had recorded the conversation.”) or to note actions/gestures that could become a method (“I brought strawberries from my neighbor’s garden, just take some!”). The notes are digitally saved and can be assigned to either A or B, or they are saved under the category “A/B”: here the object randomly decides whether the statement/question will be spat in the direction of A or B during upcoming mentoring sessions. The note-spitting machine draws on the digital storage that is generated by mentees and mentors at the feeding station.
Konzept Objekt: Nora Sobbe
Realisierung Objekt: Johannes Reck | Marcel Rickli