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Mentoring: The process of change and growth brought about by the interaction of two people* Print E-mail
Tuesday, 19 June 2012 12:41

 

wementor_logoΑ Grundtvig project of EDEM 

4th Workshop 22-23 June 2012,
9am-4pm TCG, Athens. Free entrance Workshop Programme.

Mentoring: It looks like an English term but comes from the Greek antiquity. The term is inspired from Mentor, character of Odyssey. Mentor was a friend of Odysseus. Odysseus placed Mentor in charge of his son Telemachus, when Odysseus left for the Trojan War. In Odyssey, Athena often took the figure of Mentor to advice Telemachus.

Mentoring is a tool to promote equal opportunities in employment based on the voluntary participation of experienced women who act as 'mentors' discussing career issues with female students or young women at the beginning of their working life.

EDEM is active in mentoring, and specifically in mentoring in the educational/professional/social sector using it as a method to support by counseling girls and women in order to empower and help them to  overcome stereotypes and barriers in their career and in their social life. 

LLP_Logo_JPGEDEM participates with partners from Austria, United Kingdom, Germany and Romania in the program 'We:mentor': Gender equality through Mentoring' from August 2010 until July 2012. The program aims to exchange experiences, methods and best practices in the implementation of mentoring programs for girls and women. Through the program we: mentor, the five above mentioned partners will provide an opportunity to their members, with relevant experience and expertise to meet, exchange views and experiences and discuss applied mentoring practices with positive results for girls and women. The result of the program, at its completion, will be the sharing of knowledge, experience and pluralism among all partners.

For this purpose, the program includes four transnational meetings. The first three meetings had taken place in Germany (Munich), Romania (Constanza), in the UK (Sheffield) and the fourth which will take place in Athens on June 22nd-23rd 2012, organized by EDEM, with the final conclusions and the best practices for the implementation of mentoring programs to achieve gender equality in education, work and society.

Specifically, the 4 transnational meetings-workshops of the program are:

  • Workshop #1: Sharing Experience: ICT, web 2.0, Communities and Mentoring, January 2011 18-20th, Kochel (near Munich). Organized by dib (deutscher ingenieurinnenbund e.V., German Association of Women Engineers).
  • Workshop #2: Sharing Experience Workshop: Volunteer Mentoring as an Efficient and Effective Adult Learning Strategy - Lessons Learned and Best Practice from the Romanian Experience, June 1-4th 2011, Costanza, Romania. Organized by CENTRAS Constanza.
  • Workshop #3: Sharing Experience: How to Develop A Mentoring Programme for Women- Lessons Learned and Best Practise from UK Experience, February 10-11th 2012, Sheffield, UK, Organized by Inova Consultancy
  •  Workshop #4: Sharing Experience: Final Conclusions & Good Practices, June 22nd-23th 2012, Athens (4, Nikis str., Technical Chamber of Greece, Syntagma), Organized by EDEM

The key points of the first two workshops are presented in an earlier article in EDEM’s website of EDEM with the title 'Equal opportunities through Mentoring in girls and women'. In this article, the key points of the 3rd meeting-workshop with the title "Sharing Experience: How to Develop A Mentoring Programme for Women-Lessons Learned and Best Practise from UK Experience" will be presented. This workshop was based on the experience of the UK partner about the implementation of mentoring programs mostly for professional development:

To start the dialogue and communication between mentor and mentee, modern volunteer mentors-not advisory professionals- are selected to have common interests with their mentees (young men and women). In this way, they either have similar educational background, or professional field, similar social origin, hobbies, life-philosophy, experiences, similar or complementary characters, etc. The process of 'matching' mentor and mentee, is the first and perhaps the most important issue for the success of this procedure. Matching must be done by the organizers of such a program. The more experienced and qualified they are in this field the more successful will be the mentoring process.

Beyond any professional profile, the mentors must have certain characteristics that help interpersonal communication as they are the ones who will carry  the workload and the planning of the mentoring process:

  • Mentors should be good listeners and simultaneously good interviewers and move the discussion to the next level by asking questions, always with politeness and discretion, giving examples, mentioning similar situations, bringing into light what has been achieved and leading his/her mentee to express problems, weaknesses, obstacles and share his/her plans and aspirations.
  • Mentors should possess organizational skills, because the timetable and the duration of the meetings must be kept sharply and support and guidance must be provided according the detected needs of his/her mentee (websites, postgraduate programs, research centers, companies for training/work etc).
  • Mentors should also have the emotional maturity/stability not to raise their aspirations and frustrations during the discussions instead they should guide them to search for their own answers. Besides, as they have the initiative to start and move on this interpersonal relationship, they should know how to stop it when mentoring process is completed.

Participation in a mentoring program must not be dealt as “easy” or “superficial” neither from the mentor nor the mentee. Before starting the meetings, both the mentor and the mentee will attend a brief introduction to mentoring and they will be given relevant material. The project coordinator must  be informed about the progress of the meetings (a written report at the end of each meeting is advisable).

As far as it concerns a mentoring program for girls and women, its implementation by women mentors offers an advantaged beginning as women mentors have their own experiences for the particular difficulties encountered by girls and women and they have common codes of communication and behavior. Of course not all problems are solved when mentors are women because they have to pay attention not to reproduce stereotypes based on their own experiences. Certainly this is a fact that can happen even when the mentors are men.

 

As it has been previously mentioned, the last transnational meeting will take place in Athens on June 22nd-23rd 2012 and during this meeting, conclusions from previous meetings and best practices for mentoring for girls and women will be discussed. The meeting will be hosted by the Technical Chamber of Greece (TCG). The entrance is free for all engineers, women and men and for all those who are involved or intend to be with mentoring, training etc. You can see the program of the transnational meeting in Athens (Workshop 4).

Findings from this last transnational meeting will be refined by EDEM in order to implement them and organize mentoring programs for women engineers and girls who are keen on science and technology.

EDEM’s participation in this program has many additional benefits because the experience and expertise gained from the transnational meetings will be used in the implementation of a 2-year action plan, from June 2012 and on entitled 'Women claim their role for the environment protection-The gender view in the environment issues'.

The action plan includes counseling support for women engineers in terms of their professional choices (mainly for specialization in environmental protection issues, energy saving etc.) and counseling support for female pupils at high schools, who are keen on science and mathematics, in order to be informed about the environmental dimension of the engineering studies and profession. The counseling support, which will be based on the conclusions from previous EDEM’s mentoring programs, apart from the information given to female pupils and engineers on the role of engineers in the protection of the environment, aims to empower them and boost their confidence to deal with the subject of environment beyond professional and social stereotypes, discrimination and social exclusion.

The conclusions of the Athens workshop about Mentoring, as a tool of promoting equal opportunities and the good practices/techniques for its implementation, will be presented in the 1st meeting (25th June 2012) of women engineers who will participate in the implementation of the above mentioned action plan for the promotion of environmental engineering studies and professional occupation.

 The program 'We:Mentor' is financed by the EC program Grundtvig.
 
*"The process of change and growth brought about by the interaction of two people"
D. Clutterbuck and D. Megginson