Through this project, we understood that Mentors need to know that students would have different views and perspectives about what home is, and what a community is, thus they need to not treat African students as a broad category, but understand that each student may need different strategies on how to build relationships and form a “home”. Some strategies that can be adopted include:
1. Active listening and radical listening
This includes –
• Being fully present in the conversation and showing interest
• Asking open-ended questions to encourage further responses.
• Paraphrasing and reflecting back what has been said.
• Listening to understand rather than to respond.
• Appreciating silence.
• Withholding judgement and advice.
2. Empathy & Authenticity
Validating the mentee’s emotions and,
Balancing emotions with actions
3. Learning from scholars and mentees
This means instead of approaching the mentor-mentee relationship as a top-down relationship where one is an expert, it can be approached as a linear relationship where the mentor genuinely learns from the mentee by asking genuine questions to understand their experiences and reflect on them