Invisible Mentors: British Poetry in Partnership, 1960-2020

有效的指导是创意产业增长、创新和领导力的核心，但几乎没有既定的方法来衡量其价值。艺术和人文科学研究人员几乎没有说它对创造性工作的影响，尽管它的跨学科范围，模型和方法主要来自该部门之外。该项目使用20和21世纪的英国诗歌作为案例研究，建立一个艺术特定的指导关键语言，借鉴从业者和迄今为止不可用的出版档案的采访。 近几十年来，诗人和评论家都有新的指导计划，商业指导服务的激增，以及国家艺术资助者对指导的高度关注，以此作为刺激英国创意和经济发展的一种手段。这些项目的活力和成功表明了一种渴望正式指导的创造性文化，部分原因是为了抵消编辑杂志、创意写作项目、老牌出版社或围绕教育特权形成的小圈子的排他性潜力。然而，导师的悠久历史和实践在文学界很少被承认或探索，留下了实践，评估和理论之间的差距，并限制了现有计划的有效性。 该项目将揭示自1960年以来英国诗歌指导的历史，记录其发展以及高等院校创意写作课程的增长，独立诗歌出版社的非正式网络，以及文学节，出版商和艺术组织支持的计划。它将利用文化，文学和档案历史的见解来解决创意产业的建议和报告，以及该行业的经济和结构性批评。它将争辩说，导师的隐藏的历史不仅塑造了我们的作者，创作实践和专业艺术家的概念，而且我们对支持他们的机构和资助者的期望。该项目将通过三个主题工作包组织和实施：i）衡量指导：PI将与一个文学发展机构和一个国家诗歌节合作，为年轻人开发一个新的“从基层开始”的指导网络：通过该项目开发的框架也将用于评估现有的指导计划。青年诗人将与一位专业作家配对，并在项目研讨会上分享他们的见解。ii）塑造形式，技术，身份：PI将提供一本专著，开发一种新的语言来描述指导及其方法，并创建一个关于诗歌和指导的播客系列，探索未被承认的指导文化如何塑造流派，传统和文学社区。三）转变文化和机构：PI将与项目合作伙伴共同撰写一份关于创意产业指导最佳实践的国家报告，评估其个人和集体利益。该项目将进一步加深我们对诗歌作为一个社区，网络化过程的理解，并允许商业，文化和志愿部门有机会从艺术指导的具体方法中受益。同时，它将加深我们对指导作为一种嵌入式和跨学科艺术实践的认识，汇集来自社会科学，文化政策，商业指导和创意产业的见解。虽然AHRC领导力研究员计划支持领导力的广泛定义，但管理培训往往将领导力和指导结合在一起，并不容易搭配，从而忽略了人类的能力和历时性的实践。通过参与指导艺术的生活史，这个项目有可能重塑我们如何看待这两个术语。更广泛地说，这项研究将展示指导如何不仅能够为个人实践提供信息，而且能够推动更广泛的艺术，社会和组织变革。

Effective mentoring is central to growth, innovation, and leadership in the creative industries, yet there are few established means for measuring its value. Arts and humanities researchers have had little to say about its impact on creative work, despite its interdisciplinary scope, and models and methods are primarily drawn from outside the sector. This project uses 20th and 21st-century British poetry as a case study to establish an arts-specific critical language for mentoring, drawing on interviews with practitioners and hitherto-unavailable publishing archives. Recent decades have seen new mentoring initiatives for both poets and reviewers, an upsurge in commercial mentoring services, and a heightened focus by national arts funders on mentoring as a means to stimulate creative and economic development across the UK. The vitality and success of these projects suggests a creative culture eager for formal mentoring, in part to offset the exclusionary potential of edited magazines, creative writing programmes, established presses, or coteries formed around educational privilege. However, mentoring's long history and practice within the literary community is rarely acknowledged or explored, leaving a gap between practice, evaluation, and theory, and limiting the effectiveness of existing schemes. This project will uncover the history of mentoring in British poetry since 1960, chronicling its development alongside the growth of creative writing courses in HEIs, the informal networks of independent poetry presses, and schemes supported by literary festivals, publishers, and arts organisations. It will use the insights of cultural, literary and archival history to address recommendations and reports from the creative industries, and economic and structural critiques of the sector. It will contend that mentoring's hidden history has not only shaped our notions of authorship, creative practice, and the professional artist, but our expectations of the institutions and funders that support them. The project will be organised and delivered through three themed workpackages:i) Measuring Mentoring: the PI will work with a literature development agency and a national poetry festival as they develop a new 'ground-up' mentoring network for young people: the framework developed through the project will also be used to assess existing mentoring schemes. Young poets will be paired with a professional writer, and share their insights at a project symposium.ii) Shaping Forms, Techniques, Identities: the PI will deliver a monograph, developing a new language to describe mentoring and its methods, and create a podcast series on poetry and mentoring, exploring how unacknowledged mentoring cultures have shaped genres, traditions, and literary communities. iii) Transforming Cultures and Institutions: the PI will co-author a national report with project partners on best practice in mentoring in the creative industries, assessing its personal and collective benefits. The project will further our understanding of poetry as a communal, networked process, and allow the commercial, cultural and voluntary sectors the opportunity to benefit from arts-specific approaches to mentoring. In parallel, it will deepen our knowledge of mentoring as an embedded and interdisciplinary arts practice, bringing together insights from social science, cultural policy, business mentoring, and the creative industries. While the AHRC Leadership Fellow scheme supports a broad definition of leadership, management training often yokes together leadership and mentoring in uneasy collocation, eliding a human capacity with a diachronic practice. By attending to mentoring's lived history in the arts, this project has the potential to reshape how we consider both terms. More broadly, the research will demonstrate how mentoring has the power not just to inform individual practice, but drive wider artistic, social, and organisational change.