By Richard Wu

Let me tell a story of how “contract” comes to be used in student peer mentorship. 

In theory, university students could form stable, mutually beneficial relations to help each other succeed. In such peer mentoring relations, more junior students are mentees who could benefit from the guidance and support of more senior students who act as mentors; reciprocally, the more senior students could benefit from the opportunity to practice leadership and interpersonal skills, and perhaps to also learn from the junior mentees. In practice, however, these relations can often depart from this ideal. Mentees may be unclear or confused about what kind of help mentors can offer them: Can the mentor help me with my assignments? Can I tell my mentor all my deepest secrets for emotional relief? Where mentees have found the relation useful in concrete ways, there is also the risk that they may become overly dependent on their mentors, forgoing their individual responsibility for their own development. Mentors, on the other hand, may not always have the availability to commit to the task of mentoring. Where mentors are committed, there is also the risk that the burden of mentoring may stand in the way of their own development. Perception of these risks inherent in student peer mentorship may prompt the view that peer mentorship is something that needs rational management. 

At the University of Toronto’s Student Life, the division of Mentorship and Peer Programs exhibits such attempts at managing student peer mentoring relations. The division promotes the use of several techniques by both mentors and mentees; prominent among these techniques is the use of contract-like “agreements”. On its online resource library, the division hosts a series of well-designed documents for guiding students on forming productive, mutually beneficial mentoring relations. The PDF file “Developing a Mentoring Partnership Agreement”, for example, focuses on the construction of a “learning contract (or learning agreement)” between a mentor and a mentee; its main purpose is to help participants to “set boundaries and define mutual learning expectations”. Another file, “Template: Mentoring Agreement,” is a generic template that scaffolds several contract-based micro-practices that aim to clarify and regiment the concrete, minute details of social interaction: “If a text message, email or voicemail is received, we will get back to each other within: [options:] 12 hours, 1-2 days, other”. 

This practice of contract-drawing is a technique for delineating the bounds of student peer mentorship. It contributes to an understanding of “peer mentorship” as an institutionalized form of social relation overseen by the university’s Student Life administrative structure. In conversation, several student mentors who have been trained to use the contracting technique shared that they appreciate the structure provided by a clearly defined mentorship agreement, but the explicit use of the agreement stands in tension with their attempts at maintaining organically formed interpersonal bonds with mentees.  More generally, while the use of such techniques as contracts may help to manage peer mentorship for the purpose of keeping the relation beneficial for student development, it also risks transforming the meaning and experience of peer mentorship into a less spontaneous mode of student interaction.