A Final Rport By Richard Wu

First-year students of a course required for entry into the Statistics Major/Specialist degree programs trickle into a conference room to learn about academic writing, in a workshop organized by upper-year student mentors hired by the Statistics Department at the University of Toronto (U of T). Tony, a peer mentor, sits by the reception desk to welcome the arriving students, checking off their names on the registration list. Wearing a warm smile and speaking in a cheery voice, Tony greeted several students on a first-name basis. “Hey Sarah! Good to see you here! How is your semester going?” Making sure he checks her attendance, he then asks: “By the way, could you remind me of your last name so I can register you in?” He finishes the small talk with a personal touch: “Don’t forget to get some Timbits. I know you’ll like the new coconut flavour – at least I really like it”. One by one, most of the registered students arrive. Sitting down, they take out their laptops ready to take notes. Tony moves from the reception desk to join a team of mentor presenters gathered at the front of the room, where a large screen shows the sleek slideshow titled “Steps to Writing Your Final Research Paper”. When it is his turn to speak, Tony enthuses confident authority. As if giving a Ted Talk, Tony strolls about as he shares tips on how he aced his final research paper when he took the course two years ago. “To succeed, you should find a topic you are really passionate about.” In the background, the screen shows his LinkedIn account, and he elaborates: “Because my group was passionate about using real data from the World Bank to tell real things about developing countries, not only did our report get an A+ but I was able to use this report as part of my resume – in interviews, every single employer asked me to say more about this report as I was applying for summer internships. You are welcome to find the report on my LinkedIn account and use it as a model for your project”. Finally, he ends by bestowing further words of wisdom: “Make sure you start your project early. Cramming never works for a good research paper”. 

Seamlessly switching between a convivial, caring attitude and a didactic, authoritative voice, Tony conveys professionalism in performing his role as a peer mentor. Yet, this professionalism does not stem merely from innate talents. As part of the requirements for qualifying as a paid student mentor, Tony had to complete a series of mentorship training workshops designed and hosted by the division of Mentorship and Peer Programs (MPP) at U of T’s Student Life. Professional staff in the division have developed “peer mentorship” into a highly institutionalized set of discourses and practices involving a surprisingly high degree of professionalization. Discursively, the division offers a cornucopia of documents that technically define the meaning of “peer mentorship” and thereby render peer mentorship into a specific set of traits, skills, and techniques that aspirant peer mentors can endeavor to develop. Practically, the division’s workshops offer opportunities for peer mentors to practice these technical skills. Presupposing that student peer mentorship was mostly an organic, casual social relation, I was puzzled by this. I thus set out to ethnographically investigate the conditions under which such professionalized mentorship discourse and practices are produced and how this production impacts students’ peer mentorship experiences.

My investigation is guided by Michel Foucault’s theory of power. In general, Foucault argues that distinguishable modes of power operate through the subject formation of individuals in modern societies (Li 2023: 217). In the particular context of professionalism, Foucault’s analysis has inspired anthropologists to view professions as a site of “social control” (Hull 2020) – that is, a site that delivers “governmental power” whereby heterogenous practices are used in the service of controlling the conduct of a population. For me, this view motivates an initial analysis that, through professionalizing students into institutionally recognized “peer mentors”, peer relations are appropriated as a site for the university’s delivery of governmental power. However, as I will describe in more detail below, this hypothesis was soon complicated by the observation that both the MPP staff and their trained peer mentors regard their work as delivering care towards other students’ wellbeing as well as supporting other students’ developments. This observation would support an alternative analysis, of “peer mentorship” as a site for the delivery of “pastoral power”. For Foucault, pastoral power refers to the power of a caretaker (e.g., a pastor) in caring for the wellbeing of individual persons, and to this end inherently involves accounting for the complex social and psychological conditions of the receiver of care (Li 2023: 218).  In light of these conflicting initial analytic tendencies, my research puzzle may be theoretically formulated as follows: How are governmental power and/or pastoral power delivered and experienced through the professionalization of “student peer mentorship”? 

The ethnographic puzzle is interesting for at least two reasons. First, empirically, addressing this puzzle may contribute to an understanding of how mentorship is incorporated into the power matrix of the university. Second, theoretically, the puzzle provides an ethnographic case study for modeling how Foucault’s different modes of power interact with each other – how, in particular, pastoral power and governmental power interact in a professionalizing setting. 

In this report, I argue that professionalization is the general process whereby student mentoring relations are incorporated into U of T’s regime of governance. More specifically, I argue that, from a subjective perspective and at the discursive level, “peer mentorship” tends to be experienced by its practitioners as an exercise of a professional negotiation between pastoral and governmental powers. However, from an objective perspective and at the practical level, “peer mentorship” is in effect a technical management of student social relations: Student peer mentorship is rendered a technical object used as a solution to a host of problems perceived by various administrative units in the university. 

The rest of the paper proceeds in three sections. In §1, I provide brief accounts of the context and setting of my research site, the methods I used to obtain data for analysis, and the nature of the data. In §2, focusing on the professional staff at Student Life, I describe and analyze the conditions under which the “peer mentorship” discourse is produced as a technology for managing student mentoring relations. Then, in §3, focusing on the professionalization of peer student mentors, I describe and analyze their experiences of learning and implementing the “peer mentorship” discourse. 

§1. Context, Methods, and Data

Context/Setting: Mentorship and Peer Programs is an institutional division of the Student Engagement department in Student Life, a highly organized professional bureaucracy funded through tuition to serve student needs and well-being. In addition to providing expert advice on how to organize specific on-site or online mentorship programs across various academic and extra-curricular units in the university, the division’s core and general responsibility is to design, organize, and implement textual resources as well as interactive workshops for training student mentors. 

Data Acquisition Methods: I used three ethnographic methods for acquiring data. First, I closely read and analyzed the training documents and related textual materials. Second, I carried out semi-structured interviews with MPP staff and several student mentors who have participated in the division’s training programs. Third, I also conducted participant observations in student mentoring events and activities. 

Data Sources: (1) Textual data: training documents published on MPP’s online resource library, training documents distributed exclusively within training workshops, and relevant external online mentorship-related videos and resources. (2) Interview transcripts and notes from participant observations. In acquiring and interpreting the data, I used Foucault’s critical framework on power and subject formation as a toolkit. Although guided as such, I made efforts to ensure that my analysis remained inductive, i.e., that the analysis emerged primarily from on-the-ground observations rather than being merely driven a priori by theory. To the best of my abilities, I sought to develop critical insights through iterative exercises of reading the theory in light of the data and – vice versa – the data in light of empirically-informed theoretical analysis. 

§2. The Professional Production of “Peer Mentorship” Discourse

The staff at MPP regard themselves as professionals, even as they cannot easily give a label to their domain of work specialty. In contrast to such well-established professions as “lawyers” or “doctors”, they tend to see themselves as working in an “emerging profession”. This self-image as professional stems from at least three factors. First, situated within an institutionally centralized Student Life, the distribution of labour within the division mimics that of a typical profession: It is hierarchically organized. The division’s director presides over the assistant director, whose authority in turn presides over a lead coordinator, who in turn oversees the work of a student life coordinator. Second, staff members point to the existence of professional-development programs, conferences, and certificates in the emerging field of “Student Affairs Professionals” (see, for example, the Canadian Association of College and University Student Services). Third, they refer to a growing body of research literature that produces academic knowledge about “student peer mentorship” in higher education (see, for example, Terrion and Leonard 2007). In addition, the staff are quick to offer rationalizations for regarding their work as professional. In conversation, the director points out that running mentorship programs at a large university, especially one with a large and diverse student population, is a highly complex endeavour which requires professional expertise. The assistant director sees herself as working in a non-profit profession with a mandate to use the institutional resources to offer students opportunities to feel like they belong. These narratives reveal not only a self-image as professionals but moreover a sense of professional ethics. That is, in their capacity as “peer mentorship” professionals, the staff appear to harbour visions of an “utopian order” about how their work may contribute to the betterment of the lives of students at U of T (Bear & Mathur 2015, cited in Hull 2020). 

Motivated by such professional-ethical commitments, the MPP staff spend much effort on the production of the “peer mentorship” discourse and on its circulation within the university.  The discursive production occurs through a complicated iterative process. For simplicity, I analyze this process into three components. First, in a knowledge-acquisition process, staff participate in professional training workshops and conferences to learn and develop knowledge and skills in designing and implementing mentorship programs. They also research the relevant academic literature to gather scientific theories and concepts that frame student peer mentorship into a technically represented object of inquiry. Second, in a knowledge-translation process, the staff apply the acquired knowledge to specific contexts at U of T. Here, the translation process attends to both the specific problematizations that call forth mentorship programs as solutions at U of T and the particular characteristics of the U of T student population.  Third, in an inscription process, the applied knowledge is rendered into various informational documents, training worksheets, as well as e-courses, which are publicly accessible through the division’s online resource library. While the online library constitutes a passive way of disseminating the produced “peer mentorship” discourse, MPP also actively hosts regular workshops that recruit and train students into peer mentor roles. The discourse thereby comes to circulate among U of T’s more than seventy-five mentorship programs run by diverse administrative and co-curricular units. 

A central feature of the “student peer mentorship” discourse is the representation of mentorship competencies into an “inventory” of  technical skills that, with sufficient practice, can in principle be developed by individual students (see “Mentoring Skills Inventory”). More specifically, I analyze the discourse as consisting of three components, each representing a set of technical mentorship competencies. The first set of competencies is undergirded by a pro-social orientation in that they are supposed to help the student mentor cultivate interpersonal connection with the mentee. For example, the workshop titled “One-on-One Communication and Building Relationships” trains aspirant student mentors to cultivate the emotional skills of “empathy” and “compassion”. Here, the notions of “empathy” and “compassion” are represented as technical competencies with specific meanings and attendant practices. While “empathy” refers to an “affective response that acknowledges and attempts to understanding suffering through emotional resonance”, “compassion” is an even higher-level skill that motivates the mentor to go beyond a mere “emotional response” but to generate “a desire to help” through “a virtuous response that seeks to address suffering and needs” (Workshop handout on Communication and Building Relationships: 5-7). Practically, while “empathy” can be achieved through such pragmatic skills as “empathic listening”, defined as “paying attention to another person with empathy”, “compassion” moreover requires the mentor’s “proactive and targeted response…aimed at understanding and ameliorating suffering” (Workshop handout on Communication and Building Relationships: 5-7). In preaching the skills for helping to alleviate another student’s suffering, the pro-social component of the “peer mentorship” discourse arguably expresses what Foucault calls “pastoral power”. That is, this pro-social aspect of the discourse requires that student mentors act like pastors who care for individual mentees, embracing their “uniqueness and distinct paths towards salvation” (Li 2023: 218). 

The second component concerns competencies for setting mentor-mentee boundaries. In an attempt to render “boundary-setting” into a technical skill, the notion of “boundary” is technically differentiated into seven types: emotional boundaries “separate our own feelings from the other person”; material boundaries “protect your financial resources and possessions”; internal boundaries are about “self-regulation and how we manage our own energy levels”; conversational boundaries set limit on “topics that you do or do not feel comfortable discussing”; physical boundaries “protect your space, privacy, your body, and your physical needs such as eating, taking bio- or meditation breaks”; time boundaries “dictate how much time you would like to spend with people or even certain tasks”; and, finally, mental boundaries “suggest freedom to have your own thoughts, values, and opinions, and respect the right of the other person to have their own perspectives as well” (Workshop handout on Boundaries in Your Peer Support Relationship: 3-4). In training such boundary-setting techniques, the “peer mentorship” discourse’s second component expresses what Foucault identifies as “governmental power”. Specifically, the second component can be analyzed as an attempt at governing the “modes of social interaction” between mentors and mentees (Li 2023: 219), by delimiting the conducts of the student population participating in mentoring programs. The governmental rationality of this aspect of the discourse is reinforced by MPP director’s candid opinion about the importance of setting boundaries in student mentoring relations: “Student mentors are supposed to offer help to those mentees who need help. But if they cannot set boundaries and get bogged down by mentees’ demands, now we get two students who need help. And that becomes an even bigger problem”. 

In the “peer mentorship” discourse, the first pro-social component and the second boundary-setting component appear to stand in tension. For example, the aspirant student mentor is expected to cultivate and practice establishing “emotional resonance” with the mentee, but they are also taught to establish and maintain “emotional boundary”. And, although the mentor is encouraged to generate a “proactive and targeted response” to help with the suffering of the mentee, they are also advised to “not always try to solve the problem” (Workshop handout on Boundaries: 9). A third component of the discourse, then, functions to reconcile the tension. The workshop titled “Maximizing Mentorship” clearly exemplifies this reconciliatory effort. Here, the skill of negotiating a reciprocal relation is rendered, again, as a technical competency. “Reciprocity” is defined as “the practice of exchanging things with others for mutual benefit and in relationships it can be the mutual exchange of energy and support between partners” (Workshop handout on Maximizing Mentorship: 3). In practice, it requires the mentor to use negotiating tactics to develop “mentoring partnership agreement” with mentee. Ideally, such an agreement would function as a concrete contract that specifies expectations on how the mentor and mentee are to engage with each other. For example, the document “Template: Mentoring Agreement” asks the mentor and mentee to specify the frequency of meeting as well as the timeline for replying to messages. Yet, in actual engagement, mentors are taught to balance “spontaneity with planning” by being “less task-oriented and more focused on building trust with our mentees”, for “[e]xpressed flexibility is important to balance with an environment that is not void of structure and giving yourself room to switch gears as the need arises” (Terrion and Leonard 2007, cited in “Emotional Intelligence, Intuition, and Mentoring Relationships”). Such reconciliatory narratives give the impression that expectations are established through the mutual agreement between the mentor and the mentee. 

Indeed, by appealing to the narrative of “reciprocity” as “mutual exchange”, the reconciliatory aspect of the “peer mentorship” discourse might appear to provide a balance between pastoral power, expressed through the discourse’s pro-social component, and governmental power, expressed through the discourse’s boundary-drawing component. The handout for the Boundary workshop reminds, for example, that “[b]oth mentor and mentee should come into the relationship not as experts, but as equals” (6). 

A closer analysis of the practical dimension of the “peer mentorship” discourse, however, suggests that the discourse is designed to deliver more governmental than pastoral power. The practice of negotiating a reciprocal learning agreement, for example, presupposes an asymmetrical distribution of governmental power between the mentor and mentee. The mentor is assumed to be the one who initiates the use of the governmental apparatus of a contract. Likewise, the mentor, rather than the mentee, is supposed to possess the technical wherewithal – knowledge and skills – for framing the parameters of the boundary (mental, physical, emotional, etc.) as well as the agency for assessing the “developmental needs” of the mentees (“Characteristics of Student Peer Mentors in Higher Education”: 2). Mentors are moreover ascribed the power to develop a targeted compassionate response toward the mentee, a response that is already circumscribed by the institutionally designated role of a mentor. Thus, the handout from the Boundaries workshop defines the role of a mentor in contradiction to “tutor”, “mental health professional”, and even “friend”. Finally, the governmental power distributed to the mentor is also reflected in the teaching that a mentor should have the power to “not let a mentee become inappropriately dependent on you” (Workshop handout on Boundary: 10). In rare occasions, this governmental power asymmetry is reflexively articulated in the discourse. As a final tip on the practice of drawing boundary, the Boundary workshop handout reminds that the mentor should “[r]emember the power dynamics in this relationship, and the fragility of the mentee” (10).  

Overall, then, the “peer mentorship” discourse, as produced and circulated by the MPP staff, wields more governmental power than pastoral power. Even as pastoral power constitutes a key element of the pro-social component of the discourse and is reflected in the staff’s subjective experience of a professional-ethical commitment to improving student wellbeing, the discourse is effectively designed as an instrument of governmental power. More specifically, it is designed as a technical solution to myriad problems perceived by the university’s administrative units. According to the MPP director, more and more administrators are seeing mentorship programs as a “panacea” for addressing a diverse range of problems and have reached out to MPP for guidance. As a sample, the perceived problems include: new students who are  adjusting for the first time to university life; international students who are struggling to find a sense of connection or belonging; students who experience general academic issues, students who are particularly struggling with academic integrity issues, or students who simply want more help with research; graduating students who need help with finding a sense of what to do with their degrees and help with career navigation, etc. According to the MPP director, for each of these perceived problems, “there’s someone on this campus who has said, we can have a mentorship program for that”. MPP provides help in setting up these mentorship programs aimed at solving the perceived problems, even as, subjectively, the staff do not always think that such “problem-solving” programs reflect the most successful mentorship approach.  

§3. Students’ Professionalizing Practice of “Peer Mentorship”

Corresponding to the MPP staff’s self-presentation as professionals, trained student peer mentors recognize the knowledge conveyed through the “peer mentorship” discourse as professional. To them, the textual resources and workshop training offered by the MPP provide specialized theoretical knowledge as well as best practices about peer mentorship. Sandra, a recent graduate with an energetic presence, had been involved in both casual and formal mentorship activities throughout her university career at U of T. With much verve, she tells me that the MPP’s training equipped her with “theories”, which are highly helpful not only in her own role as mentors but also in shaping her career trajectory – she is now working as a mentorship professional in one of U of T’s colleges. Jackson, a third-year Psychology specialist who chooses his words carefully, says in a sobering voice that participating in the MPP workshops made him realize that there is mentorship expertise one can develop. He moreover likens the development of such expertise to “learning to juggle” – while initially concepts like “compassion” or “reciprocal learning” may appear to be abstract, the more you practice the more they become automated skills for interacting with others. For him, MPP teaches students “techniques” that can be generally applied to manage many kinds of social relations. 

Much of the practice of trained peer mentors involves translating the professional knowledge conveyed in the “peer mentorship” discourse into concrete actions; and, in doing this work of translation, students use diverse cultural lenses. For example, Jackson, of Egyptian descent and raised in a Coptic Orthodox family, likens the notion of “compassion” to a religious concept expressed in the Arabic word “Ghaiban”, which he understands roughly to convey meanings of “pity, sympathy” with a more general connotation of “altruism, love” as a response to human suffering. Jackson’s cultural understanding of “compassion” can be distinguished from Tony’s. We encountered Tony in the opening vignette. Self-identified as a white person, Tony grew up in a middle-class Toronto family. He translates “compassion” into a secular attitude of “love and openness” that, if successfully expressed, can help mentees overcome their “fears of failure”. 

Despite the culturally diverse ways of translating MPP’s “peer mentorship” discourse into concrete understandings and practice, the students’ mentoring experiences exhibit a general pattern. On the one hand, students generally experience an other-focused, pro-social orientation whereby they aim to establish interpersonal connections with mentees. Many students are drawn to the mentor role because they have personally benefited from being mentored by peers at some point in their life, so that becoming a trained mentor is their way of paying forward this benefit. Thus, for Sandra, who had received valuable mentoring help from her residence don, engaging in the work of mentoring is her way of “giving back” to the community. For Tony, who has been receiving constant guidance from his older sisters on navigating university life, the work of mentoring is a way for him to fulfil the “duty” of repaying the benefit. Analytically, this experience of other-focused orientation corresponds to what I have analyzed as the “pro-social” aspect of the “peer mentorship” discourse, as a channel of pastoral power. 

On the other hand, student mentors also experience a self-focused orientation whereby they aim to delineate a protected space for their own personal, academic, and career development. For example, Jackson sees his participation in mentorship training as a key part of his own “self-discovery” and “self-transformation”, through the internalization of leadership as well as interpersonal skills. As a Psychology specialist, Jackson seeks to one day become a mental-health professional. In this light, he emphasizes the importance of establishing professional boundaries with his mentees so that he does not get psychologically overwhelmed by mentees’ demands. Analytically, this experience of self-focused orientation corresponds to the “boundary-setting” element of the “peer mentorship” discourse, which I have argued to act as an instrument of governmental power. 

The self-focused orientation and the other-focused orientation are contradictory; together, they give rise to a fundamental tension in student mentors’ mentorship experiences. Successful performance of mentorship thus requires the mentors’ use of trained negotiation skills to manage this tension. For example, Sandra emphasizes that, acting as a mentor, she spends much effort to establish a space of “reciprocal learning”, where both her and her mentee can feel like they are contributing to a “transformational relationship”. And this, in turn, requires the use of communication and negotiation skills so she respects the unique expectations of each individual mentee without sacrificing her own wellbeing. Likewise, Tony, while mindful of his boundaries, strives to pay detailed attention to his mentees, including their unique cultural contexts. For him, successful mentorship thus depends on a case-by-case negotiation that aims to balance the practicing leadership with showing “humility” toward his individual mentees. Moreover, students experience this effort at negotiating a balance between the other-focused and the self-focused orientations as the practice of professional ethics. Thus, for Sandra, a major difference between the formalized mentoring roles supported by the MPP and the more casual, informal mentoring interactions is that the former incorporates a professional ethical commitment to using well-researched theories and techniques to figure out what is reciprocally beneficial for both mentors and mentees. 

Likely, it is in practicing this ethical commitment that the students form and consolidate an identity of themselves as professionalizing peer mentors. This identity-as-professional, I argue, has the effect of masking the ways in which their peer mentorship work contributes to the institutional dispensation of governmental power through mentorship programs. The students’ experience at negotiating the inherent tension in mentorship thus corresponds to what I have analyzed above as the “reconciliatory” aspect of the “peer mentorship” discourse, the major effect of which is to mask the prominence of governmental rationality that underlies the design of peer mentorship as a technical solution to the myriad problems university administrators perceive to exist in U of T’s student population.    

Conclusion

In this report, I described and analyzed the institutionalized production and circulation of a “peer mentorship” discourse by the professional staff of the Mentorship and Peer Programs division of Student Life. Analytically, I argued that the discourse contains three power-laden components: a pro-social component delivers what Foucault conceives as pastoral power, a boundary-setting component delivers governmental power, and a reconciliatory component that masks the delivery of governmental power. Consequently, in student peer mentors’ development and practice of mentorship competencies within the institutionalized space of mentorship programs, students absorb and reproduce the three discursive components and are thereby recruited as agents of the associated power dynamics. In particular, in student mentors’ uptake of the discourse’s reconciliatory component, they come to form a professionalized identity as “peer mentor”. It is this subject-formation process that obscures the proportionally heavier weight of governmental power inhering in the “peer mentorship” discourse and practice. 

Theoretically, viewed as a case study on how power operates, this report may contribute to an elaboration of a particular configuration in which different modes of power interact in what Foucault calls the “witches’ brew” (Foucault 1991, cited in Li 2023: 224). The professionalization of peer mentorship at U of T’s Student Life forms a witches’ brew of powers in which the main ingredients are pastoral and governmental powers, and the container of this brew is the professionalized discourse of “peer mentorship”. In the final analysis, the discourse has a subjective and an objective layer: Subjectively, agents who internalize the discourse may encounter pastoral power and governmental power as a balanced dialectic manifesting as professional-ethical negotiations. Objectively, this subjective impression of a balanced dialectic obscures the prime practical effect of the professional discourse, namely, to render the student population (i.e., mentors, mentees, and potential recruits) into a target of technical problem-solving under the university’s governmental rationality.   

References

“Characteristics of Student Peer Mentors in Higher Education,” Mentorship and Peer Programs Resource Library, Student Life at the University of Toronto. Accessed: December 10, 2024. https://studentlife.utoronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/Characteristics-of-Peer-Mentors-1.pdf

“Developing a Mentoring partnership agreement,” Mentorship and Peer Programs Resource Library, Student Life at the University of Toronto. Accessed: December 10, 2024. https://studentlife.utoronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/Developing-a-Mentoring-Partnership-Agreement.pdf

“Emotional Intelligence, Intuition, and Mentoring Relationships,” Mentorship and Peer Programs Resource Library, Student Life at the University of Toronto. Accessed: December 10, 2024. https://studentlife.utoronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/Emotional-Intelligence-Intuition-and-Mentoring-Relationships.pdf

Hull, Elizabeth. 2020. “Professionals”. In The Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology, edited by Felix Stein. http://doi.org/10.29164/20pros

Li, Tania Murray. 2023. “Foucault Foments Fieldwork at the University.” In Philosophy on Fieldwork: Case Studies in Anthropological Analysis, edited by Nils Bubandt and Thomas Schwarz Wentzer, 214-30. Abingdon: Routledge.

“Mentoring Skills Inventory,” Mentorship and Peer Programs Resource Library, Student Life at the University of Toronto. Accessed: December 10, 2024. https://studentlife.utoronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/Mentoring-Skills-Inventory-1.pdf

“Template: Mentoring Agreement,” Mentorship and Peer Programs Resource Library, Student Life at the University of Toronto. Accessed: December 10, 2024. https://studentlife.utoronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/Template-Mentoring-Agreement-1.pdf

Terrion, Jenepher Lennox, and Dominique Leonard. 2007. “A Taxonomy of the Characteristics of Student Peer Mentors in Higher Education: Findings from a Literature Review.” Mentoring & Tutoring: Partnership in Learning 15 (2): 149–64. doi:10.1080/13611260601086311.