Invisible Mentors: British Poetry in Partnership, 1960-2020

有效的指导是创意产业增长、创新和领导的核心，但很少有既定的方法来衡量其价值。艺术和人文研究人员对它对创造性工作的影响几乎没有什么可说的，尽管它涉及跨学科的范围，而且模型和方法主要来自该部门以外的人。该项目以20世纪和21世纪的英国诗歌为例，利用对从业者的采访和迄今无法获得的出版档案，建立了一种特定于艺术的批评语言，用于指导。近几十年来，出现了针对诗人和评论家的新的导师倡议，商业导师服务的激增，以及国家艺术资助者对导师的高度关注，将其作为刺激整个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，一种渴望正式指导的创造性文化，在一定程度上是为了抵消编辑过的杂志、创造性写作计划、老牌出版社或围绕教育特权形成的联谊会的排外潜力。然而，辅导在文学界的悠久历史和实践很少得到承认或探索，在实践、评估和理论之间留下了差距，并限制了现有方案的有效性。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发展，独立诗歌出版社的非正式网络，以及由文学节、出版商和艺术组织支持的计划。它将利用文化、文学和档案史的见解来处理创意产业的建议和报告，以及对该部门的经济和结构批评。它将争辩说，导师隐藏的历史不仅塑造了我们对作者、创造性实践和专业艺术家的概念，还塑造了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来组织和实施：i)评估辅导：PI将与一家文学发展机构和一个全国诗歌节合作，为年轻人开发一个新的“地面”辅导网络：通过该项目开发的框架也将用于评估现有的辅导计划。年轻诗人将与一位专业作家配对，并在一个项目研讨会上分享他们的见解。ii)塑造形式、技术、身份：PI将发表一本专著，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。Iii)改造文化和机构：国际和平研究所将与项目合作伙伴共同编写一份关于创意产业指导最佳做法的国家报告，评估其个人和集体利益。该项目将加深我们对诗歌作为一个社区的、联网的过程的理解，并使商业、文化和志愿部门有机会从具体艺术指导方法中受益。同时，它将加深我们对指导作为一种嵌入和跨学科的艺术实践的认识，汇集社会科学、文化政策、商业指导和创意产业的见解。尽管AHRC领导力研究员计划支持对领导力的广泛定义，但管理培训往往将领导力和指导捆绑在一起，令人不安地搭配在一起，用历时的做法避开了人的能力。通过关注导师在艺术上的生活历史，这个项目有可能重塑我们对这两个术语的看法。更广泛地说，这项研究将证明，指导不仅能为个人实践提供信息，还能推动更广泛的艺术、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.