Profiles in Mentoring: A Conversation with Rajashi Ghosh on Identity-Based Mentoring

By Jean Rhodes

I’ve often felt that the there are two (at least) parallel research communities in mentoring–youth mentoring and workforce mentoring. Each has its own leaders, findings, approaches, taxonomies, meetings, and more. Yet we have so much to learn from each other. To this end, the Chronicle pleased to highlight one the absolute stars of workforce mentoring, Rajashi Ghosh. Dr. Ghosh is Associate Professor of Adult Learning & Leadership in the Department of Organization & Leadership at Teachers College, Columbia University, where her research unravels how mentoring, coaching, and leadership development can build inclusive relational spaces and counter workplace incivility in organizations. Her work bridges human resource development and adult learning theory, examining how developmental relationships shape continuous learning and growth for adults across their working lives.

Before entering academia, Dr. Ghosh worked in Human Resources at a mid-size organization in India, an experience that led her to complete her doctorate in Human Resource Development at the University of Louisville. She spent over a decade on the faculty at Drexel University, where she was tenured in 2015 and went on to serve as Ph.D. Program Director and Department Chair before joining Teachers College. She currently serves on the Board of Directors for Human Resource Development International, as an editorial board member for Human Resource Development Review and the Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, and will step into the role of incoming Co-Editor-in-Chief of Human Resource Development Quarterly in 2025.

We recently had the opportunity to speak with Dr. Ghosh here in The Chronicle!

The Chronicle (C): Can you tell our readers about your path into mentoring research and what drew you to study the experiences of students with minoritized identities, particularly those pursuing engineering?

Rajashi Ghosh (RG): My research career really started with a fairly simple curiosity: what is it about mentoring relationships that makes them developmental? Early on, I was especially interested in something the literature tended to overlook, the possibility that mentors learn and change through these relationships too. That led me to think of mentoring less as an expert transferring knowledge to a less experienced person and more as a developmental relationship in which learning can happen on both sides.

Over time, though, another question became harder for me to ignore: developmental for whom, and under what conditions? Relationships do not happen outside identity, power, or institutional context. People enter them carrying very different experiences of belonging, recognition, access, and exclusion. That pushed my work increasingly toward identity.
Engineering became a particularly compelling context for studying these questions through my NSF-funded work with minoritized students. Engineering is a field where professional identity (whether someone can actually see themselves and be recognized by others as an engineer) can matter enormously for persistence. For students whose social identities are historically underrepresented or marginalized in engineering, mentoring may therefore be doing much more than providing career advice. A mentor can become part of how a young person negotiates the question, Can I become this professional without leaving important parts of myself outside the door?
That is ultimately the question that drew me into identity-based mentoring.

C: Across your research, what have you learned about how young people’s identities and lived experiences shape what they need from mentors? What might mentors overlook when they do not consider identity and context?

RG: One thing I have learned is that the same mentoring behavior is not necessarily experienced in the same way by every mentee.
We often talk about “good mentoring” as though there were a universal set of behaviors like listening, encouraging, challenging, providing opportunities. Those things matter. But identity and context change what those behaviors mean.

For example, imagine telling a young person, “You need to speak up more.” In one context, that may be exactly the developmental challenge they need. But what if that young person has repeatedly spoken up and been ignored, stereotyped, or penalized for doing so? Now the developmental question is different. The mentor has to understand not only the individual but also the environment in which that individual is trying to develop.

That is why I think mentors need to become much more curious about the mentee’s lived experience rather than assuming, I know what worked for me, so I know what will work for you.
Our research also suggests something interesting about shared and cross-identity mentoring. Sharing an identity can create powerful experiential understanding, but it can also tempt mentors to over-identify: “I went through this too, so I understand your experience.” They may not. Conversely, a mentor who does not share a mentee’s identity can still be tremendously developmental if they are willing to listen, recognize what they do not know, use their institutional position constructively, and allow the mentee to have interpretive authority over their own experience.
So perhaps the shift is from “How can I be a good mentor?” to “What does good mentoring require for this person, in this context, at this moment?”

C: Your work has led to the development of the Identity-Based Mentoring Model. What does this model contribute to our understanding of effective mentoring, and how can its insights be applied beyond higher education and engineering?

RG: The Identity-Based Mentoring Model grew from listening to both mentors and minoritized engineering students describe what actually happened in their relationships. This research was funded by my National Science Foundation Mid-Career Advancement (MCA) Award.
What became fascinating to me was that effective mentoring was not simply about being supportive. Development often occurred through navigating tensions, particularly between hierarchy and mutuality, and between an individual and systemic focus.

The first tension recognizes that we should not pretend hierarchy disappears in a good mentoring relationship. Mentors often do have more experience, access, status, or institutional power. That power can be developmentally useful. A mentor can open a door, advocate for someone, challenge a stereotype, provide experiential knowledge, or say, “I see something in you that perhaps you don’t yet see in yourself.”

But hierarchy alone is insufficient. Effective mentoring also requires mutuality, the capacity of the mentor to step out of the expert position, become curious, listen, learn, and allow the mentee to influence the relationship. Especially across identity differences, this is crucial: you can have expertise without claiming expertise over another person’s lived experience.
The second tension asks mentors to move between an individual and systemic focus. Of course, mentors need to care for the person in front of them, their aspirations, confidence, choices, and development. But identity-aware mentoring also requires recognizing that a mentee’s experiences are not produced by individual effort or ability alone. Broader systems of privilege, bias, and inequity shape whose competence is recognized, who has access to opportunities and networks, and what barriers different mentees may encounter. A mentor who focuses only on the individual can unintentionally turn a systemic barrier into an individual development problem: You need to become more confident. You need to network more. You need to speak up. Sometimes the more important question is, What is happening around this person that is making it harder for them to be heard, recognized, or given access?
For me, these tensions are at the heart of what I call developmentally responsive mentoring. It is not about choosing hierarchy or mutuality or focusing on the individual or the system. It is about learning to move between them in response to the mentee, the developmental need, and the context.

And I think that insight travels well beyond engineering or higher education. Think about a manager mentoring an early-career employee, a senior executive in a reverse-mentoring relationship, or someone mentoring across generations, cultures, or other dimensions of difference. The particular identities and systems may change, but the underlying challenge remains: How do I use what I know and the position I have while remaining open to what I do not know and how do I support this individual without losing sight of the conditions shaping their opportunities to develop?

C: Looking across your research on identity, developmental networks, and AI, what do you see as the most promising directions for creating more responsive and equitable mentoring for young people? What should practitioners and researchers be especially thoughtful about?

RG: I think one of the most promising shifts is from asking “What makes a good mentor?” to “What does this young person need developmentally, in this context, at this moment?” That sounds like a subtle distinction, but it changes how we think about mentoring. It asks us to pay attention not only to the quality of the relationship, but also to identity, power, developmental needs, and the larger environment in which a young person is learning and becoming.
That thinking is reflected in my work on identity-based mentoring, where we find that effective mentoring involves navigating tensions between support and challenge, hierarchy and mutuality, and attention to the individual and to the larger systems shaping their experience. Importantly, though, responsiveness does not mean that one mentor should somehow become capable of meeting every developmental need.

In fact, I think the future of mentoring requires us to move away from the idea of the “perfect mentor.” Young people need developmental networks. One person may understand a particular lived experience, another may provide technical expertise, another may have the institutional power to advocate or open doors, and peers may offer forms of recognition and mutuality that a senior mentor cannot. Our research with minoritized engineering students, for example, shows how different people within a developmental network can provide complementary forms of support and challenge as students make sense of their multiple social and professional identities.

AI now adds another interesting layer to this developmental ecology. I am interested in whether AI can serve as a carefully bounded developmental resource for reflection, preparation, perspective-taking, or exploring possible future selves without confusing those functions with what human developmental relationships uniquely provide.
I would be very cautious about moving from “AI can participate in development” to “AI can be equivalent to human developmental relationships.” Human mentoring involves recognition, accountability, care, advocacy, vulnerability, and reciprocal learning. Those are not trivial features that we can simply automate away.
Perhaps the more interesting question is not human mentor or AI? It is: What developmental ecology are we creating around a young person, and who or what is best positioned to expand their agency or constrain it?

For researchers, that means we need to study mentoring beyond the dyad and yes, beyond human mentors. We need to understand networks, institutions, technologies, and power together. And for practitioners, I think it means becoming less concerned with having the perfect answer and more capable of asking better questions: Whose perspective is missing? What am I assuming? What can I offer here? What might someone else offer better than I can? And is this young person becoming more able to author their own development through our relationship?

Related Research:
Ghosh, R., & Montogomery, A. (2026). Mentors extending support and challenge across shared and unshared identities with minoritized students in engineering: theorizing an identity-based model of mentoring. Mentoring & Tutoring: Partnership in Learning, 34(1), 6-32. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13611267.2025.2571493

Ghosh, R., & May, T. A. (2025). Validation of Identity-Based Mentoring Scales for Undergraduate Minoritized Students in Engineering. Journal of College Student Development, 66(4), 454–462.
https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10626853

Ghosh, R., & Montgomery, A. (2025). Comprehending multiple identities as minoritized students in engineering: How can diverse developmental networks grow meaning‐making capacity? Journal of Engineering Education, 114(3), e70008. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/jee.70008

Montgomery, A., & Ghosh, R. (2026). Navigating academia as immigrant women: A duoethnographic inquiry into barriers, belonging, and becoming. Journal for Multicultural Education, 1-14.
https://www.emerald.com/jme/article/doi/10.1108/JME-04-2025-0081/1334161

Guo, Y., & Ghosh, R. (2026) Critical Relational Mentoring in Doctoral Education: A Multimodal Artistic Illustration. Teachers College Record, 128 (1), 56-77.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/epub/10.1177/01614681261423296

Ghosh, R., & Nyanjom, J. (2026). Self‐other stances in reverse mentoring for workplace inclusion: mutual relating across differences in hierarchies and identities. Human Resource Development Quarterly, 37(1), 29-47. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/hrdq.21561