Book Chapter

From Mentorship to Friendship, Collaboration, and Collegiality

Rong, Xue Lan, Preissle, Judith

2005

Overview

This chapter shows the understanding of how the three relationships-immigrant-host, student-teacher, and demographer-ethnographer and macrosociologist-anthropologist-are tied together. It offers an autoethnography of the experiences of an Asian American scholar, Xue Lan Rong, and her European American colleague, Judith Preissle. Much of the conversation in that initial tutorial focused on the differences between Chinese culture and US culture that required Xue Lan to change her behaviors, perceptions, and expectations of others for friendship and collegiality, teacher-student relationships, and gender relationships. The chapter draws from a contextual-developmental theory defining mentoring as a dynamic, reciprocal association between an advanced career incumbent (the mentor) and a less experienced protege (a mentee) aimed at promoting career development and qualitative identity transformation for both scholars. It speculates about the influences of mentoring across differences on research collaboration, multiple methods research, and what has come to be called interdisciplinarity.

• Publisher: Routledge
• ISBN: 1579221211, 9781579221218, 1579221203, 9781579221201