Mentoring Changes Lives

How I’ve Become a Fierce Advocate for Mentoring

This week I finished assigning mentors for four graduate teaching assistants and nine adjunct instructors in my program. Each one of those 13 instructors will work with an experienced full-time faculty in a one-on-one mentorship for the duration of the fall semester.

One adjunct was confused at why she was being mentored after having taught in the department for years. She was afraid she was not performing well in her teaching and that was the reason I assigned her a mentor. At first, I was not sure how to answer her without telling her my long story with mentoring. Then I thought I would give her the comforting answer she needed, which was still the truth, and to save the long version to this post.

My short version was we all need mentoring to continue to learn, grow, improve, think differently, and do our job with renewed energy and passion. Mentoring is not for poor-performing instructors, or anyone in whatever profession to that matter. It’s true that mentoring is crucial when there are concerns about performance, but mentoring should be available for everyone regardless. Mentoring should be a right for junior, mid-career, and senior faculty.

We all need adjustment of our professional and academic compass.

We all need rekindling of our passion and enthusiasm for what we do and what we aspire to do.

We all need to explore our capabilities and continuously (re)define who we are as scholars, academics, and professionals.

We all need the support and compassion of a good mentor who can truly make a difference in our life and our perspective of our academic work.

How did I become that fierce advocate of mentoring?

Here’s the long version.

When I finished graduate school in 2014, I did not have a job lined up. Not a tenure-track job, not a non-tenure track job, not a part-time adjunct job anywhere. NONE. ZERO. That was a natural outcome of the absence of mentoring in graduate school on so many things, but mostly the academic job market. Add the traumatic experience of one senior scholar in my program telling me I was not PhD or researcher material to the equation, and you can start to imagine how I was thinking and feeling.

I thought I was not cut for academic work.

I thought I was a big failure and would never land a decent academic job.

I thought that I had dragged my family across the world from Egypt for nothing, and that I had wasted our lives pursuing a mirage of an academic career.

I thought I was better off leaving academia and finding another job to put food on the table and support my family.

One month after graduate school, I landed a Visiting Assistant Professor job at Miami University of Ohio. My initial thought was OKAY … I can use my time on this job to figure out my next step and whether I should continue pursuing an academic career or find a non-academic job. Not that there is anything wrong with alt-ac jobs; it simply was not my original plan or dream.

Little did I know that the two years I was about to spend at Miami would change my academic life forever.

I was hired to teach in the ESL Composition Program. During my first few days on campus, I met Jason Palmeri, Director of Composition at that time. I was starstruck! But I was also taken back when Jason said that he knew me from Computers and Writing conference. It was a surreal moment to feel seen by an outstanding scholar like Jason.

That short introduction meeting was the first of so many to happen over the course of my two years at Miami. Without any formal arrangement or expectation, Jason took me under his wing and became my mentor. It happened so seamlessly and smoothly that I was not even aware that I was being mentored by him.

Through numerous conversations about my research interests, Jason helped me find my academic voice and define my scholarly identify. Our conversations always helped me think clearly about who I was and who I wanted to be as a scholar. His ongoing mentoring helped me find my footing in a field that felt mysterious and unkind to me at that time. His solid empowering mentoring helped me dig my long-lost self-confidence out and recognize my research passion and interests in clear terms and goals.

His unwavering support encouraged me to design and conduct some of my best research projects on multilingual students and multimodal composition. He was always there to offer guidance and ask the questions I did not consider, thus helping me finetune all my work and cluster my work to showcase my newly identified scholarly identity. I collected data for a total of four projects, all of them have been published in great edited collections with wonderful editors.

Near the end of my first year at Miami, I was intrigued by the growing research on writing transfer. I started reading a lot about the topic and wanted to experiment with writing transfer across modalities of composition. I took advantage of a three-day assignment design workshop that Jason co-facilitated at the end of the spring semester to re-envision my first-year composition course for multilingual students. I designed that elaborate assignment that would allow students to shuttle between alphabetic and multimodal texts with built-in moments of reflection on writing transfer. Jason provided intricate feedback that resulted in streamlining the assignment. He encouraged me to use that assignment in my following year of teaching to see how it would work then to revise it based on that pilot semester. That was my first lesson and experience in curriculum (re)design, an experience that I used later as a WPA. Eight years later, I’m getting ready to lead my second curriculum redesign endeavor, this time at UAB.

Speaking of WPA work, Jason’s mentoring was not limited to our mind-stimulating conversations about my research interests or my innovative teaching ideas. He saw my potentials as an administrator, ages before I believed I had any, and gave me opportunities to explore those potentials, opportunities to practice them, and opportunities to improve them. One of those opportunities was during the only summer I spent at Miami when Jason offered me the opportunity to mentor teaching assistants (TAs) on teaching multilingual students in first-year composition courses. I designed a mentoring program for those TAs with readings and resources on teaching multilingual students. I met with the TAs one-on-one to go over their syllabus and assignments to discuss ways to make their teaching documents and materials more attuned to multilingual students’ needs. Jason gave my work the nice title “Multilingual Composition Mentor” to position my work as administration rather than service.

In a very early conversation with Jason, I was uncomfortably shocked when he said that I shouldn’t spend more than two years at Miami, and I should get back into the job market during my second year. My contract was for five years, and I had planned to spend all of them there. Well, Jason had other thoughts. He said that spending more years on a non-tenure-track position would limit my chances to get a tenure-track one. I remember him say that I should use my time at Miami productively to build my resume and to be ready to leave soon.

The trauma of my previous job market experience was still fresh in my mind, so that was not a pleasant conversation to have. As I was starting my second year, I thought I’d give the job market another shot. Without me even asking, Jason offered to write me a letter of recommendation. He also said that he’d like to come visit my class so he would address both my teaching and research in his letter. As job ads started rolling out, I had to think carefully about the kind of jobs I was interested in and wanted to apply for. I surprised myself with having a clear and focused idea of what I wanted to do or not to do. I wanted a job that would allow me to continue to pursue my research in multimodality and multilingual composition, and possibly writing transfer.

Jason was pushing me to apply for WPA jobs as well. I was so reluctant to do that simply because I couldn’t see myself as one. I believe having him as an exemplary WPA was enough intimidation to never think I was capable of doing that kind of work. He said what later became my mantra as an administrator. He said, “Lilian, you know your field and you have ideas. That’s what we need in WPAs.” I didn’t budge and decided not to apply for WPA jobs. Jason didn’t budge either and wrote a long paragraph in his letter on my capabilities to become a WPA. I thought he was just being his nice complimenting self and brushed off that idea.

It was not until 2017 when I was asked to step into the WPA role at my previous university that I remembered Jason’s words. Recalling his words encouraged me to consider the WPA role more seriously. I used his two thoughts, knowing the field and having ideas, as my benchmarks to determine whether or not to accept that role. I realized that Jason Palmeri knew me better than I knew myself and that I did have potentials to be a WPA. His insightful words helped me two years later to make the decision that changed my academic trajectory as I accepted the role and became the Director of Composition in January 2018, and the rest is history.

This is the power of mentorship that can literally change lives. My life has changed in more ways than I can put in words because of one extraordinary human who believed in me when I didn’t believe in myself.

One human who saw the real hidden me not the broken and self-doubting me that others saw that year.

One human who mentored me and guided me to find the right path for myself as a scholar and administrator.

One human who modeled empowering mentorship to me and converted me to that fierce and firm believer in the value and power of mentoring others.

One human who did not need to preach because he practiced mentorship, setting the bar so incredibly high for me and my practice of mentorship with graduate students and junior colleagues.

One human to whom I’m forever indebted for so much.

THANK YOU, Jason Palmeri, for being that extraordinary human and mentor.