Community of Practice Critical Mentoring Model (CoPCM2) for Doctoral Education: Attending to the Needs of Mentors and Mentees

Context Of The Problem

Graduate student mentoring programs have historically neglected the holistic needs of advanced graduate students within institutions that persist in operating from a predominantly white, male, cis-gendered, neo-liberal, and colonialist perspectives. Attempts to socialize students into the academy and into professional practice are in need of a refreshed set of best practices where a Community of Practice (CoP) (Wenger, 2010;Smith, Hayes, & Shea, 2017;Shacham, & Od-Cohen, 2009; Cronshaw, Stokes, & McCulloch, 2022) mentoring model can simultaneously build and support a network of faculty prepared to enact critical mentoring practices among themselves and effectively engage graduate students in meaningful and productive ways. Our application of a Community of Practice Model moves away from conceptualizing mentoring as only a one-on-one experience only and moves toward ways to nurture networks of people engaged in mentoring acts.