Navigating Service in Untenured Waters: What it Means to be a Service-Learning Mentor

Abstract

This article describes how a university’s community service initiative helped facilitate a mentoring opportunity between a pharmacy student and an education professor. The professor takes up Boyer’s (1990) call to reconsider the priorities of the professoriate and addresses his question “What does it mean to be a scholar”? She explores her emerging identity as a scholar amid the competing obligations of the tenure track and applies a narrative form to relate and describe the service-learning study she undertook with the pharmacy student. She found that with institutional and collegial support, “service” can become personally and professionally transformative, offering benefits to the self and the community and figuring deeply in one’s emerging identity as an engaged scholar.