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  • Home
  • Gallery EMS2022
    • Pre-event 18th May
    • Day 1 19th May
    • Day 2 20th May
  • Video Gallery
    • Workshops – Entrepreneurship and world of work
    • Workshops – Education Pathways
    • Workshops – Innovative communities
    • Keynote speakers
    • Keynote day 1
    • Keynote day 2
  • Library
    • Researchers’ Assembly
    • Workshops Slides
    • Press Release 2022
  • Programme
    • Speakers
    • Workshops
    • Pre-Programme
  • About
    • About us
    • Advisory board
    • European Year of the Youth
    • Previous summits
      • Barcelona 2020
        • About us 2020
        • Keynotes 2020
        • Workshops 2020
        • Open Sessions 2020
        • Philanthropic Track 2020
      • Berlin 2018
        • Keynotes 2018
        • Workshops 2018
        • Sessions 2018
          • Documentation
          • Pictures
        • Social Media Wall 2018
        • Picture Gallery 2018
        • About Us 2018
      • Leeuwarden 2016
  • Blogs
Article

Article

Banner EMS2020 Online
09/282020

Registrations Open!

Are you attending the 2020 European Mentoring Summit? Make sure you check your email and begin the registration to the sessions! Check out the agenda, plan your itinerary, edit your profile and you’re ready to enjoy the experience!

What do you need to know?

1. We have sent an email with your username (email) and password.

2. You can access the new website from this link: http://onlinementoringsummit.eu/

3. Attention! You will have to choose a team! We ask you to think about which of these words resonates more with you (more detail in the website!)
Achiever
Philanthropist
Disruptor
Socialiser

4. Choose your Sessions! Make sure you know how this works:

There are different types of sessions:
Ceremonies, Keynotes, Group Discussions, Workshops, Research Debate Tables, Roundtables and two special events: the Researchers Assembly and the Philanthropic Track. Most of them are open to all of you and will be spaces of encounter for the whole community. Others, however, have some limitations, as they would in an in-person event!

  • Workshops: There will be a total of 25 spots per workshop. This means that you will get to choose up to 3 workshops marked with a turquoise tag throughout the week. We recommend you to check out the overall schedule and see which of the sessions you are more interested in before starting the selection.
  • Group Discussions: These sessions are meant for you to actively participate in a topic that concerns mentoring in the current global context. You can only choose 1 session with this tag. They will take place on Monday the 5th and Wednesday the 7th from 11:00h to 12:15h CEST.

All the other types of sessions are completely open, so you can choose to attend as many of those as you want!

5. Stay Connected!

During the whole week, there will be different communication channels. We will be sending daily newsletters with a summary of the day, we will be using social media to make announcements, and we will be available in the new Summit website to assist you if you experience any technical issues or if you just want to connect. You will be able to contact the rest of the attendees directly from the website.

What can you do to stay well connected?
Follow us on Twitter: @MentoringSummit
Follow us on Instagram: @mentoringsummit.eu
Follow us on Facebook: @mentoringsummit.eu

We have also set a LinkedIn group for you to network with all the attendees! Find the exclusive link in the newsletter. This group will also be a communication channel where we will share relevant information through the event.

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Mentoring Summit-jens
12/292017

Risks, potentials and ambivalences in the roles of mentors by Bernd Schüler

One of the main topics of the Summit are relationships between refugees and their mentors. Bernd Schüler from the Berlin Mentoring Network has written an interesting text about the problems that may occur in these relationships

Attention – (too) many tasks! Risks, potentials and ambivalences in the roles of mentors

Whoever helps other people with one problem can encounter many other problems to which the person concerned is exposed. This is true for relationships where mentors accompany a person, as well as in other supportive relationships in which professionals are involved. And it is a great challenge, especially when dealing with refugees – with people in diverse and existential emergencies.

Unlike professionals, who are trained and committed to narrowing their responsibility, and who are more likely to have a framework that protects them, volunteers are more exposed to the risk of expanding their role. Why? Because they have a more personal relationship with the other person. They get into closer contact and are more strongly caught up in the everyday lives of their mentees. Similar to other contacts with friends and acquaintances, it seems to be natural to take on also other tasks. Furthermore, refugees often don’t know exactly what the role of a volunteer is and what not, and express many wishes the volunteer feels he or she has to attend to, no matter what.

Therefore it is necessary to define your role, limit yourself often only to one task, be aware of your limits and listen to your gut feelings, both for yourself and for the other person. However, volunteers in particular often have to work hard to achieve all this – time and again.

Theory and empirical research, however, describe role ambiguities as a special potential of mentorships. For example: A teenager describes his mentor as follows: “By now he is everything to me: a teacher, a friend, a big brother, a father, a mother, all sorts of things.” Astonishing in this presentation: sometimes the young person experiences his or her counterpart as an equal, sometimes as a hierarchically superior person, more like a parental authority.

So the mentor appears in an intermediate position. Mentoring is similar to a “professional friendship” (Philip/Spratt). Or: The volunteers “fill a niche that lies somewhere between professional and kin” (Rhodes). It is clear that even mentoring with refugees can have a hybrid form. Mayseless and Gouldners even go one step further. They consider the mentoring role for children and young people as a kind of intersection between parents, friends, therapists and teachers.

For example, mentors listen actively to their counterparts, just as therapists do. Or they try to provide a secure basis, as parents should do. Only, and that’s the bottom line: In all this, they never replace these roles in any way. But mentors are able to juggle with individual elements from different roles.

This also seems to fit many situations and tasks in which mentors accompany adult refugees. They behave in a more friend-like way, on an equal footing. But the moment they have to explain the ticket machine at the metro station, they act like a city guide, or behave almost as lawyers, when they accompany their mentee to the state authorities.

In the process of their engagement, mentors cannot avoid playing different roles at different times. The fact that roles can expand and merge once in a while is often practical – but it should always be limited.  Preparation and training of volunteering mentors has to make them sensible to these dynamics, while still focusing on the task that is always in the centre. Mentors have constantly to ask themselves which roles and activities are more appropriate at a given situation and which are not. Seeing the diversity of possible roles can also help to understand the position of refugees in mentoring-relations. They act for example as pupils, but also as teachers, for instance, when they talk about their home countries.

Many mentors feel torn back and forth – between the wish to intervene in a problem and at the same time to listen to their inner voice and remain outside. The “concept of ambivalence” suggests to take this and other ambivalent feelings seriously. It was originally developed by the Swiss sociologist Kurt Lüscher in the analysis of family intergenerational relationships. In their interviews, he and his team found “dualities whose poles are at the same time mutually exclusive and nevertheless related to each other”: Unity and diversity; closeness and distance; autonomy and dependence.

The concept suggests that a sensitive confrontation with the ambivalent can also be very valuable in practical social work – for example in the support of mentors. Two aspects in particular can be important: Contrasts and tensions, for instance between conflicting values, are embedded in many relationships. One can feel connected to a refugee in solidarity and at the same keep one’s distance. To be aware of the conflict can be a relief. The challenge remains to both endure and deal with the ambivalence – pragmatically, constructively and creatively.

But if ambivalences are denied or suppressed, this can have a negative effect on the individual as well as on the relationship. This reminds us that the “dissociating yourself” is a complex learning process, which is always necessary and needs to be taken care of.

The full German text can be downloaded here: http://www.der-paritaetische.de/fileadmin/user_upload/Publikationen/doc/patenschaften-fluechtlinge/171011patenschaft-fluechtlinge_A4.pdf

 

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Schwartz_Sarah
12/182017

More notes from Boston: Sarah Schwartz on YIM

Also this blog-entry is a summary of a lecture Gloria and Florian have heard at the “Mentoring Learning Week” in Boston at the beginning of October 2017. It was also published in the professional mentoring publication “Telemachos”, published in German by the “Berlin Mentoring Nework e. V.”. This time we present the summary of Sarah E. O. Schwartz’s lecture “Youth Initiated Mentoring: To select your own mentor”.

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dff1e947-e5cc-42c1-9abc-56ad5ffc2072
12/122017

Notes from the “Mentoring Learning Week”: Timothy A. Cavell’s lecture

Gloria and Florian have summarized some of the most interesting lectures for the professional mentoring publication “Telemachos”, published in German by the “Berlin Mentoring Nework e. V.”. As the first contribution to this blog we present a translation of their summary of Timothy A. Cavell’s research as he presented it during the “Mentoring Learning Week”.

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