Abstract

This issue of Mentoring & Tutoring: Partnership in Learning includes articles from authors representing Australia and the United States (Arkansas, Connecticut, Idaho, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, Texas, and Virginia). The authors of each article describe peer mentoring programs for students, faculty, and university programs that are helpful in transitioning students from university to professional settings and supportive of faculty at different points in their academic career. Mentoring programs and informal mentoring relationships commonly exist in academe to assist students at all levels, junior faculty members, and part-time faculty members in their development of personal and professional goals (Borders et al., 2011). Mentoring in academic settings centers on the mentee’s sense of anxiety and uncertainty in meeting professional performance objectives. Many university programs and administrators have recognized this issue for students and faculty and have established mentoring programs and encouraged informal mentoring relationships. Traditionally, individual mentoring relationships and mentoring programs in an academic setting follow a topdown format in which the older, more experienced person (the faculty member mentor) guides and supports the more novice person (the student or junior faculty member) in his or her development. Peer mentoring groups and programs are another avenue that may help mentees develop support networks and gain greater self-confidence. In the first paper, Academic Life-support: The Self Study of a Transnational Collaborative Mentoring Group, Bristol, Adams, and Guzman Johannessen describe the development and outcomes of a transnational, collaborative faculty mentoring group (CURVE-Y-FRiENDs [C-Y-F] network). In the author’s narrative of the development of the peer mentoring group and the exploration of the member’s experiences allows the reader to identify the benefits of a transnational, multiple discipline mentoring network that can benefit women faculty at different stages of her career. The focus of the peer mentoring group is on personal and professional support of each member and collaboration in teaching and publication tasks. How faculty professional developers at St. Norbert University have responded to the changing demographics and needs of new faculty members. In this study, Bristol, Adams, and Guzman Johannessen emphasize the benefits of the C-Y-F network for women in different academic settings and at different stages in their careers. These researchers encourage women to engage in peer mentoring groups as a way to decrease isolation, learn from one another, and collaborate on mutual goals. In the next article, Characteristics and Correlates of Supportive Peer Mentoring: A Mixed Methods Study, Holt and Lopez explore the benefits of student peer mentoring relationships from both the mentor and mentee perspective. Peer mentoring among undergraduate students is commonly used to develop positive relationships among peers and provide an additional level of academic and psychosocial support to the students. In this mixed-methods study, the authors classified each mentor’s supportiveness of the mentee and how it corresponded to the mentee’s perception of the supportiveness of the mentor and overall relationship. The authors discovered the student mentors reported