Take good care of my baby: Exploring mentoring in a computer-mediated poetry guild.

Abstract

The focus of the dissertation is a computer-mediated writing project called the International Poetry Guild that brings together middle school and high school writers. These young writers exchange their poetry with peers, and with a group of mentors---University of Michigan students---who offer support to the poets, and who seek to engage them in ongoing discussions of their poetry and other aspects of the creative process. The research focuses on the mentors, and centers on how they determine their responsibilities, how their past and present educational experiences inform these determinations, and how the social dimension of their weekly mentor seminar discussions affects their reflection on, and their decision-making about their mentoring work. The research questions are: how does the mentors' understanding of their role and responsibilities evolve, how do they enact these understandings in their practice, and what are the considerations that inform their reflection-in-action (Schon, 1983)? This work portrays the challenges faced by the mentors as they bring what they are learning about poetry in the university setting to their interactions with younger writers. As the mentors encounter angry and intensely personal poetry, they wrestle with the conflict between the vision of poetry as craft and that of poetry as a vehicle for emotional release. Engaging with this conflict in a text-based environment, the mentors also experience the power of language in new and challenging ways, and engage with questions of what it means to provide care in a manner that productively complicates their ideas about teaching and learning. This work illustrates the richly complex mixture of philosophical, interpersonal, pedagogical, and personal issues that are evoked for the mentors as the abstract notion of mentoring becomes a concrete encounter with real kids, with each mentor's beliefs about poetry, and with their sense of who they are.