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Undoing The Dyad: Re-Examining Mentorship With A Feminist Lens, Bailey Wallace, Melissa Dewitt, Elia Trucks

University Libraries: Faculty Scholarship

Academic libraries consistently use mentoring programs to integrate new employees by sharing organizational knowledge and providing support to advance in their careers. Traditional models of mentorship are tools that help support existing power structures and keep in power those benefiting from the associated privilege. One way to interrogate traditional mentorship models and their inherent inequities is to apply a feminist lens in examining the expectations and actions of mentors and mentees. This chapter discusses how the traditional dyad mentoring model does not support everyone equally and explores alternative, inclusive models of mentorship, such as group mentoring and peer mentoring. We …