ABSTRACT

Mentors invite adult students to bring their lives into their learning. From them, as our examples have illustrated, information, questions, and themes emerge which make the academic learning process collaborative and which enhance the significance of the academic content. Further, the distinctive intimacy of the mentor-student relationship all but inevitably means that students will confide to their mentors “personal” concerns – information, feelings, preoccupations, and problems from their private, familial, social, civic, and work lives. Nonetheless, the context of our collaborative work is academic and professional. What then is the appropriate relationship of the personal to the academic? What is the appropriate etiquette of this intimacy between mentor and student? What are the proper boundaries within which we should work?