Inventing Situated Mentoring: A Feminist Rhetorical Analysis of Workplace Culture extends current research and scholarship around mentoring, learning theory, and gender identity performance. In this project, I investigate the mentoring practices of eight executive-level employees at a Midwest medical manufacturing company and four Michigan State University alumni. The purpose of the study is two-fold. First, I explore how participants enact mentoring as a mode of learning in both informal and formal ways. Second, I highlight how a participant’s gender identity greatly impacts the invention and sustainability of mentoring in their respective workplaces. My project’s findings show that mentoring, like writing, helps a person convert information into useable and transferrable knowledge. In short, mentoring is a rhetorical skill, one that, over the course of an individual’s career, acts as a powerful means to professional success. I enact this theoretical framework and explain the methods I used for data collection. I situate this project in three connected activities: 1) examining the relationship between teaching and mentoring; 2) acknowledging the rhetorical invention of mentoring, and; 3) recognizing the intersection of gender identity and mentoring. These activities begin to build a framework for seeing and inventing value-added approaches to research and teaching practices in Rhetoric and Composition. I continue to frame these activities by extending the work of Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, and Lev Vygotsky calling attention to the social discourses and practices that constitute learning and identity development for participants in this study. Central to this study is the focus of how mentoring acts as a rhetorical tool for building and maintaining moments of experiential learning. I end this study by pointing to implications for my project’s theoretical framework in other workplace and academic contexts.
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