Back to the Roots in Mentoring Activity: The Historical Groundings of Mentors' Discourse

• In Event: 63.071 - Core Issues in the Study of Mentoring in Preservice Education: Toward an Integrative Research Agenda

Abstract

Objectives: Situated in the context of pre-service mentoring in Israel, our paper discusses mentoring activity from the perspective of the historical groundings of mentors' professional discourse. Based on a recent study of mentoring student teachers in Arts Education (Becher, 2011), we show how - historical developments in the social Discourse of arts education direct mentors' understandings of the aims, processes and desired outcomes of the mentoring activity. To this end, we examined how mentors' use of language at different levels of mentoring activity reflects the historical developments of the broader social discourse in their educational and disciplinary domains.
Theoretical framework: Our study draws on two interrelated perspectives: Teacher education as a discursive practice, which speaks to a socio-cultural approach to professional learning in activity (Orland-Barak, 2010). A discursive perspective attends to the texts that are responded to in interactions (discourse), to the roles that are assumed and valued, and to the cultural and organizational codes and rituals of practice that are represented and appreciated in practice (Discourse) (Gee, 1996). We also draw on Cultural Historical Activity Theory, which recognizes the central role of the domain's historicity in shaping practices of any professional activity (Engeström, 2001).
Methods and data sources: Our study adopts the interpretative/methodological lens of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) which examines connections between individuals' professional language and the social and historical contexts within which their practice operates (Gee, 1996). The data sources included semi-structured interviews with five mentors from Arts education; ten non-participant observations of mentoring workshop and conversations; and stimulated recall interviews with each mentor.
The analytical framework entailed identifying connections between the style, function and method of the sentence to single out connections between and within emergent ideological Discourses. This was followed be an extensive review of relevant sources on historical developments of the practice to explain the identified connections between Discourses.
Results: Our study shows that as mentors articulate and enact their understandings of the purposes, processes and outcomes of mentoring, they engage in discursive moderation between pedagogical and disciplinary discourses relevant to their educational contexts. In doing so, they implicitly and often unknowingly rely on existing social Discourses associated with their field of work, in our case in the domain of arts education.
Significance: Our findings suggest the imperative role of the disciplinary context in shaping the way mentors think and act to define the mentoring goals and to promote mentees learning. Theoretically, our study illuminates on the historical groundings of processes of knowledge mediation in mentoring. Pragmatically, the study raises the need to prepare mentors to become aware of the historical groundings of their particular subject matter that shape their mentoring practices. The study calls for developing research frameworks that attend to the complex interplay between individual agency and social and cultural contexts in mentoring activity.

Authors

• Ayelet Becher, University of Haifa

• Lily Orland-Barak, University of Haifa