Earlier this year(2025), Bookworm launched the Alums Mentoring Program – an attempt to build, foster and sustain a community of librarians so that library practices grow and deepen. Like all our programs, this one too birthed because of a felt need on ground, at Bookworm libraries. In 2024, our libraries in Goa were expanding and our small library team was growing fast. We realised that we needed to strengthen and build capacities in a systematic way in an environment of trust and care. In this article, we look back at why we piloted a mentoring program on ground in 2024, what we learnt from the experience and how it grew into an offering for alumni of Bookworm’s professional development program in 2025 whilst also strengthening Bookworm.
Some aspects of Mentoring
The word mentoring usually carries the connotation of a more experienced person guiding and helping a novice enter a new domain of study or work. It invariably also signals a unidirectional relationship between the more experienced mentor and the novice mentee. But all our learning in the library is contrary to this notion. John Dewey in Education and Experience (1938) spoke of how education is essentially a continuous reconstruction of our experiences. Some experiences can be miseducative, when it arrests or stunts growth of further experience. However, “The quality of any experience has two aspects. There is an immediate aspect of agreeableness or disagreeableness, and there is its influence upon later experiences.” The mentoring support we hoped would give all of us opportunities to reflect on our experiences and help us learn new things about ourselves and the library. For the two of us who held the mentoring support group, early on we realised that this would be a bidirectional relationship – we had much to learn from the experiences of our mentees as they might from us. We also learnt about ourselves – in how we listened, responded and moved along with our mentees.
Components of the Pilot
The pilot mentoring program which began in May 2024 ran for nine months and included three participants – Diksha and Milika from Bookworm, Goa and Pooja from Parivartan, Bihar. This program came on the back of years of library practice and rich collaborations fostered by our Founder-Director, Sujata Noronha. Her ideas and guidance shaped our work with the three librarians all through 2024. Members of Bookworm’s Professional Development team (ProD), regularly met with our participants, initially in fortnightly meetings, and later in monthly meetings over a ninety minute online session. The library elements gave us a framework to plan and deepen work on ground. Everyone was expected to come to these meetings with preparation – reading books, preparing book talks, sharing updates from the libraries, especially what they heard, observed and learnt about children through their responses. The sessions were designed to strike a balance between theory and practice – and included exciting games but also reflective discussions and engaging explorations. In addition to this, they also filled in a monthly reporting form which captured various aspects of their work. We hoped this would add another dimension to reflective practice by becoming more aware of which books they were taking to children and activities they were planning. For example, all three librarians became more aware of footfall in the library and consciously started tracking this and ensuring diverse programming to bring more children in. Supervisors / reporting managers were also invited at critical points in this journey, to listen to the progress presentation of our mentees. This turned out to be a very useful exercise. As mentors, we got a sense of what was going well and what could be better supported. As participants, it gave them a platform to share their work and it added to their sense of who they were as library professionals.
What did it do for our librarian-mentees?
Librarianship can be a lonely journey. Pooja, who works in the Parivartan Library showed us that a virtual community of practice can make a difference in one’s thinking and practice when one is far away and alone. As a solo librarian who takes the library to schools and villages around Narindrapur, Bihar, we learnt about persistence, and keeping faith. The regular meetings and planned approach to organising library work created an accountability system as well as a framework for self growth and learning. Changes in her library were evident when we met Pooja almost a year later at Parivartan Library. Now there was a sweet reading corner, a library calendar of events and children’s work on display. There was also a curiosity and confidence in Pooja indicating that she was keen to learn and do more. Would this happen if there had been no consistent mentoring support? The mentoring support also enabled Pooja to form collegial ties with Milika and Diksha, who work far away in Goa in another library context. For us, as mentors, we realised that being more available to Pooja beyond scheduled calls was critical. Somewhere we fell short of being perceptive of her needs and being more accessible via phone-calls. That is where having a direct line of communication with her peers, Milika and Diksha, was helpful for Pooja. We also cannot underscore the value of a physical visit to the library by the mentors. Though we were already in a professional relationship with the Parivartan library, the visit at the end of the mentoring period alerted us to some facets of library work that we had overlooked.
For Milika and Diksha, who work with the larger team at Bookworm, the mentoring support group helped us realise that dedicated time and space for reading, reflection and sharing is essential in forming oneself as knowledgeable and well read practitioners. This is usually not something that is privileged in the everyday-ness of work life. As colleagues, we became more aware of their skills and abilities and also became more sensitive to their professional needs. They also showed us how much is possible when there is mutual trust and respect amongst all of us. It has been wonderful to watch Milika’s interactions with children grow and deepen in the space that she holds at the Vinay & Jean Kalgutkar Community Library, Saligao. The mentoring sessions enabled us to support Milika to read more widely and deeply, and become more alert to various library elements and care for the library with more attention to detail. Over our many interactions, Diksha gained confidence in talking about texts and asking questions when she was not sure about something. The activities we had planned also helped her become more aware of aspects of interacting with children, setting up displays and being more organised as a librarian.
What did it do for me as a mentor?
It was a journey of growth and learning. I experienced many feelings at various stages – impatience, surprise, joy, worry – only to be buoyed on by hope. I could not have held the program by myself and I am very grateful for the constant support I received from my colleague Priti and the thoughtful oversight from the ProD team coordinator, Anandita. During some months, I felt I was not bringing my best self to my mentoring role and I was grateful to have Priti supporting participants via Whatsapp, phone calls and translations over email. In hindsight, it would have been better if we had split mentoring responsibilities for each participant clearly between us – beyond the online time.
The trust that I received from the participants was reassuring. All three participants read many books and self-reported that they felt more confident as readers themselves. Seeing them grow into readers (reading widely and deeply) was very rewarding. What was the result of this mentoring journey you may ask. Very tangibly, all three libraries reported an increase in footfall that came as a result of regular programming and interactions. When I shared this article with our mentees, Pooja reminded me that she felt her understanding and execution of library displays had strengthened over the course of the mentoring. Milika shared that she became more aware of the importance of maintaining her own library card and in turn, paying special attention to children’s acts of maintaining library cards.
Looking back, Looking Ahead
Having them bring questions to the group, seek clarifications and offer suggestions to each other demonstrated to me that what we need more of are live communities of practice like this! This paved the way for our Alums Mentoring Program which commenced in June 2025.
In a recent visit to one of the libraries, I was reminded once again of how much richer all of us are because of this nine -month pilot. However, I also realised that as a mentor, one’s work may not be over in the nine month cycle. It is easy for young mentees to doubt / second guess themselves as readers and practitioners when they encounter more proficient readers and speakers of English in the workplace. I realised I still have a small role to play in reminding them to trust themselves, keep faith in what they feel and understand that learning truly never ends. In listening to Pooja, Diksha and Milika, thinking about their challenges in the libraries and children in the libraries, I realised I too was being quietly strengthened in my own library practice. In his philosophy and approach in progressive schools, Dewey greatly valued real life experiences and problems as educative experiences. It is important that one experiences the problem and its consequences in a meaningful, emotional and reflective way as only this is likely to lead to changes in one’s actions/behaviours. The mentoring journey gave me the opportunity to engage, reflect and learn from the rich experiences of the three librarians. Since the mentoring program came to an end, I miss the shared context of library worlds that these sessions opened up for me. I am happy that the Alums Mentoring Program 2025 is here to keep the live-wire connect to diverse libraries.