Mentoring Special

Editorial: 

The Choutari Team is delighted to greet you with the September issue of ELT Choutari! This issue is focused on mentoring, which  has remained one of the core values of Choutari since its inception.  We began the Choutari Mentoring Project (CMP) as a new initiative  to enhance a collaborative learning environment among our readers seven months ago. We are excited to receive love and feedback from the students, teachers, and professionals in Nepal. The continual academic support from both the  international and local community of ELT/Applied Linguistic scholars has further encouraged us to develop other news projects in future. We are glad that many of our colleagues are enjoying the benefits of the mentoring project. We would like to thank you all who signed up and participated in this project. In the meantime, we have also received much feedback from those engaged currently in the mentoring relations. We are encouraged by your feedback and do look forward to making this project even more accessible and productive in the days to come.

The September issue of ELT Choutari was originally planned to be a forum to celebrate the mentoring relations and to formally recognize our mentors and mentees contributing to the project. However, based on the feedback we received, and with due respect to the contextual ramifications, we have decided to maintain confidentiality of the participating mentors and mentees. This has been an important learning experience from the critical mass of participants, and we are determined to move ahead with a giving spirit to our field.

This issue of ELT Choutari, however, has come out to be a special one for a special reason. We have posts from Choutari’s key personalities including founding members and past editors. We have an interview with two successful Nepali ELT mentors Ganga Ram Gautam, Reader at  Tribhuvan University, and Laxman Gnawali, PhD, Associate Professor at Kathmandu University, focused on mentoring. Their mentoring stories not only unveil mentoring culture in Nepal, but also present existing perception and attitude toward this in our context.

In the second reflective blog entitled “This is How Mentoring Worked for Me,” Bal Krishna Sharma shares his personal learning experiences from the mentoring activities — both as a mentee and as a mentor. Bal has included the names of his mentor (Elaina) and mentee (Tankia) in his story to give a real story that gives insight into how those relations are developed and sustained. Moreover, this sets a great example of how one individual can benefit from both roles.

Sajan Kumar’s take on mentoring is highly philosophical in third blog entry-“You are, therefore I am: Reciprocity, Metamorphosis, Mentorship and Beyond.” Here Sajan shares a model of mentoring that describes the mentoring process as a cyclical developmental and growth involving contemplation, meditation, mediation, and action — all converging into a transformative process. Sajan describes his mentoring journey stemming out of his intimate collaboration with his guru and the quality time he had with him during his stay at Kirtipur but then goes on to add a theoretical dimension arguing that the whole biosphere may act as the mentor for an explorer of self, such as Sajan himself. His conclusion is powerful: “One repays a teacher badly if one remains only a pupil”

Prem Phyak in the fourth blog post “Not a fix-it shop: Making mentoring productive”  is full of practical insights. Prem has offered some strategies that can be helpful to make mentoring more productive and goal-oriented. Drawing on his own experience working as a writing consultant/tutor for the Writing Center at the University of Hawaii at Manoa for two years, Prem’s post focuses on how to make mentoring more interactive, grounded/bottom-up, and collaborative rather than top-down and authoritative.

The fifth blog entry ‘Bal Ram Adhikari’s Sharing, Caring and Daring in Mentoring’ is a remarkable story of transformation whereby the writer finds himself as a deliverer of something that he had been longed for in the beginning of his teaching career. Adhikari’s experience paints a not-so-good-picture of mentoring in the context of Nepal, but is an eye opener. Having witnessed and been trampled by the “lopsided” practice of power, dominance, and authority, Adhikari’s writing is a call for an action toward a truer mentoring regime in Nepal’s ELT sector.

Finally, we have a photo blog that covers the news from Choutari’s monthly writing workshop facilitated by Hem Raj Kafle, one of founding editors of Choutari.

Here is the list of articles we have included for September Issue, especially focused on mentoring in ELT:

1. ELT Chat with Nepali Mentors on Mentoring, by Praveen K Yadav  
2. This is How Mentoring Worked for Me, by Bal Krishna Sharma
3. You are, therefore I am, by Sajan Kumar
4. Not a fix-it shop: Making mentoring productive, by Prem Phyak
5.  Sharing, Caring and Daring in Mentoring, by Bal Ram Adhikari
6. Choutari Writing Workshop #3: Photoblog, by Choutari Team

Together, these stories, coming straight out of the experiences of successful people in the field, serve as models to be built on. As can be seen, these stories reveal that mentoring is not about following prescriptive norms and rules — it is largely shaped by what goal, passion, philosophy and background that mentors and mentees share with each other. I believe that these stories are my stories, your stories, and everyone’s stories.

P.S.: I would like to urge all our valued readers and contributors to please share these stories among your social network and leave comments.

Enjoy the readings!