Abstract

This issue of Mentoring and Tutoring: Partnership in Learning includes research from scholars representing Florida, Ohio, and Tennessee in the United States as well as Russia. These international contributors explorementoring relationships in higher education. Mentoring relationship usually evolved between experienced faculty/staffmembers and junior faculty/staffmembers, either informal or formal. Several scholars (e.g. Gardiner, 2005) recommended establishing a formal mentoring program involving different institutional stakeholders, rather than leaving it to emerge as informal, due to the concern for inclusion, diversity, and equal accessibility. For example, studies have reported that women faculty are continued to be marginalized in navigating different resources or gaining access to the informational networks (Rios & Longnion, 2000); women aremore likely to be excluded from the informal mentoring partnerships (Gibson, 2006). However, implementing a formal mentoring program is also challenging in higher education. It is not easy to find competent mentors willing to take additional workloads investing their time and resources to mentees, and there is not enough of diverse faculty pool with different backgrounds to be matched with other faculty of colors. As a result, Boice (1992) indicated that mentoring is available only to about one-third of new faculties in higher education. Moreover, some scholars argued that traditional, dyad mentoring relationship does limit the success of mentees in today’s fast-changing, knowledge society where promotion and tenure systems get less secure (Altbach, 2000; Darwin, 2004). Despite some challenges, many researchers have proved that mentoring relationships are still beneficial both to mentors and mentees, and those benefits include research productivity, networking, professional recognition, increased retention and commitment (Darwin & Palmer, 2009). More research is required to facilitate structuring and building successful formal mentoring relationships, and the M&T editorial board encourages and supports such rigorous studies. In the article Cross-cultural Academic Mentoring Dyads: A Case Study, Daniel, Franco, Schroeder, and Cenkci used a descriptive case study to offer insight into the relationship between diversity and the academic mentoring process. They examined cross-cultural mentoring dyads to determine factors which influence relationship in a cross-cultural mentoring dyad and sought to identify challenges mentors and protégés may face. They also found the models they used were evident in the dyad, though not in the order they had hypothesized. They also MENTORING & TUTORING: PARTNERSHIP IN LEARNING 2019, VOL. 27, NO. 2, 127–130 https://doi.org/10.1080/13611267.2019.1619901