This commentary continues a dialogue which began among literacy teacher educators attending an alternative format session about mentoring in the academy at a national conference. Literacy teacher educators participated in an informal discussion centered on the nature of mentoring in the academy for doctoral students, untenured professors, and tenured professors. Doctoral students focused on their changing identities and roles in the academy, their concerns about navigating the political infrastructure of academia, and the importance of assuming a proactive stance towards obtaining mentoring, especially for part-time doctoral students. Untenured professors focused on the ways they were inventing and reinventing themselves within the power and politics of academia and their need for more holistic mentoring during these turbulent times. Tenured professors were able to embed mentoring experiences into their scholarly work and find ways to benefit or learn from mentoring experiences. These mentors also found comfort in more informal mentoring that included self-initiated endeavors centered on mutual interests. Our commentary draws on these discussions as well as the professional literature on mentoring to describe the importance of mutual trust and reciprocity in mentoring throughout all stages of academia with attention to cultural and linguistic diversity.

S ociocultural theories provide a useful lens for interpreting behaviors as individuals enter contexts requiring social interactions. These theories help us understand that learning is stimulated and nourished by interactions with others, supporting a view that learning is essentially a socially inspired process. This emphasis on the social and cultural origins of knowledge, however, often minimizes dynamics related to individual development that influence how we respond to others and how others respond to us. Most relevant to this argument is information related to the influence of (a) the child's history of relationships, (b) the child's understanding of others and others' behavior, and (c) the child's cognitive perspective on the world. To account for these influences, the authors propose a model of collaborative literacy events (CLEs). The model merges understandings related to a sociocultural theory and individual development to broaden interpretations of children's behavior during socially mediated literacy events.Attention to how young children become literate has shifted from looking at an individual's preparedness for reading to consideration of the larger social and cultural milieus within which literacy develops. This shift came in part as a reaction to what many believed was a simplistic view of literacy development. Attention to the individual was prominent during the first 75 years of the 20th century and evident in such terms as "reading readiness" and the use of readiness tests to determine classroom placement. In effect, the child's potential for literacy development was placed primarily within an individual's cognitive and developmental infrastructure. Supported by growing evidence from ethnographers such as Heath (1983) and Street (1984), many researchers began