Unlearning Ageism: Expanding the Definition of Mentorship in Arts & Cultural Education

As someone who has oscillated between the roles of artist, educator, and researcher, I have traversed up and down the power scale, experiencing firsthand the phenomena of power and status as social constructs. Mentors were everywhere and everyone had valuable life experiences and knowledge to share regardless of their position or age. 

A high school student who raised her younger sibling knows things about youth development that a program manager might not. An intern who has a following on TikTok is knowledgeable about branding and audience engagement within a social media team. A student in an afterschool arts program has brilliant ideas for increasing enrollment, but the board has never considered a youth representative. Why don’t we honor their unique wisdom and life experiences?

As I thought more about the power structures we subscribe to and how we might break through them to eradicate ageism and adultism, my work expanded into a research paper that will be released in the upcoming issue of the Creative Generation Journal. 

Asking and Answering Questions

In this quest to understand how we as a field share the wisdom of our elders while uplifting young people to catalyze change, I explored two main questions:

  1. How can the field modify its approach to mentorship to better reflect the value of each individual’s innate creativity and intrinsic worth? 

  2. What are some best practices, if any, currently being used in the field to break down this hierarchical structure of mentorship that ultimately limits personal and institutional growth?

Within this research, an array of related issues surfaced: questions around racial equity, exploitative unpaid internships, youth voice, and more. This work primarily centers on the idea of an expanded model of mentorship or, to reuse a phrase that was proposed at a 2017 national conference, “Cyclical Mentorship.” 

In this model, each individual’s experience is honored from their own lived experiences. As an asset-based approach to mentorship, focus is placed on individual strengths and the diversity in thought, culture, and traits. We must ask ourselves, is that not essentially what arts education aims to do: amplify creative practices and embolden the perspectives of young people for the benefit of communities?

To visualize this model, I created this graphic to explain the relationships between youth, emerging, mid-career, and veteran leaders in the arts and cultural education field:

Proposed Changes

Based on my discovery process, I propose five changes that must happen in order to break down barriers for leadership development in the field. Individuals and organizations must:

  • Hold space for authentic intergenerational conversations. 

  • Change the structure of who gets to ask the questions and who answers. 

  • Promote intergenerational relationships as meaningful methods of capacity-building and as the norm for mutual knowledge-sharing. 

  • Include autonomous youth voice in governance structures during program design, implementation, and reflection. 

  • Interrogate organizational structures, institutional practices, and hiring procedures that limit “experience” to title and/or seniority. 

I go into more detail on each of these points in the full paper, which will be released in our inaugural issue of the Creative Generation Journal. Along with this writing, we will feature a series of papers that disrupt and interrogate long-held ideas of mentorship and promote youth-centered, multilateral, intergenerational, and/or cyclical mentorship models in arts & cultural education. 

Contribute to the Dialogue

If you or a colleague are working on similar research, we encourage you to submit your abstract for consideration for this upcoming issue. We also welcome artistic entries. In an effort to democratize knowledge and break down barriers of scholarly authorship, we actively seek entries from groups that are underrepresented by major publishing houses including students, teaching artists, educators, and arts administrators. With any questions, please email jordan@creative-generation.org. For more details, check out our Call for Papers here.