Conceptual and Contextual Confusion? Making Sense of the Concept of "Mentoring" and the Accurate "Context"

• In Event: Mentoring as Professional Practice: Studies of Mentoring in Teacher Education

Abstract

Mentoring is a global phenomenon. Even though the concept of “mentoring” exists in different national and cultural contexts and is performed in a variety of ways, it is nevertheless a contested practice (authors, 2014). The incoherent way of naming, framing, and defining “mentoring” has been discussed in the literature, and different concepts, such as mentoring, coaching, supervision, etc., have been used to describe the same phenomenon (cf. Gold, 1996; Sundli, 2007; Mullen, 2012). For instance, Mullen (2012) writes that: “While some theorists think of coaching as a type of mentoring, others see the exact reverse – that is, mentoring as a type of coaching” (p. 9). Further, in the educational field, a clear line is seldom drawn between “mentoring” practiced in initial teacher training and the “mentoring” of newly qualified teachers. This may mean that the same phenomenon is described and named in different ways or that different descriptions and namings are applied to the same phenomenon.

The purpose of this conceptual paper was to problematize how the concept of “mentoring” is used in the literature to address the “phenomenon of mentoring.” In this study, a sense-making perspective was used to acknowledge the processes of sense-making and negotiation of meanings. According to Weick (1995), sense-making involves three specific elements: a frame of past moments and understandings, cues of the present moment of experience, and a connection in-between, Accordingly, “the content of sensemaking is to be found in the frames and categories” (p. 111) that summarize past experiences. Thus, how the concept of “mentoring” or the “phenomenon of mentoring” is made sense of in individual or specific contexts is a result of negotiations of meanings.

The data for this conceptual paper was generated from strategically chosen journal articles that exemplify how the concept of “mentoring” is used in different national and cultural educational contexts. A content analysis was performed to identify the various meanings of mentoring and the contexts in which it is used (Miles, Huberman, & Saldaña, 2014).
The analysis shows that major challenges in (accurate) sense-making can be due to: (a) language transformation (notions and concepts from one language are transformed into another language, most often into English, which can result in a change of meaning); (b) context transformation (sense-making of context-specific circumstances may be difficult); (c) context insensitivity (mixing up different “mentoring contexts”); (d) phenomenon insensitivity (mixing up different phenomena, e.g., “coaching,” “mentoring,” etc. In certain contexts, some of these issues may be of minor relevance, whilst in others, they may be vital for achieving (accurate) sense-making. The paper draws attention to the importance of acknowledging linguistic, conceptual, and contextual dimensions of “mentoring” in the sense-making process in order to achieve stringency and coherence in research, for instance, when research overviews are conducted to frame one’s own research.

Author

• Göran Fransson, University of Gävle