The student-staff mentoring project at the University of Hertfordshire

Abstract

Peer mentoring has been used by some institutions in order to help those who are less able at something to improve, by pairing them with a mentor of a similar background. Mentoring has been used in academic milieus, where one student will help another, and in more professional milieus where one colleague is paired to help another colleague. Mentoring of both types is already widely used at the University of Hertfordshire (UH) in the UK. However, the current project has a twist to it. What if we were to take the former part of the student mentoring example and the latter part of the colleague mentor example – reverse mentoring? In this paper, we share the results of this question, what happens when you mix it up and a student becomes a lecturer’s mentor?