Student-Teachers as Mentors: Developing Relational and Inclusive Pedagogies

• In Event: 35.063 - Mentoring Practices: What Works, for Whom, and Where

Abstract

In teacher education, mentoring typically refers to an expert teacher supporting and guiding a novice or student-teacher in his or her practice as a classroom teacher. The important role an experienced mentor plays in the professional development of new and student-teachers is well grounded (Hobson, Ashby, Malderez, & Tomlinson, 2009), however, there is little research exploring how student-teachers might develop from being mentors themselves. In addition, the emphasis in teacher mentoring on student-teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge and effective classroom teaching strategies overlooks the relational foundation of pedagogy (Bingham & Sidorkin, 2004) and the interpersonal and ethical complexities of self-other relations, magnified in times of social, economic and political change. Youth mentoring (Rhodes, 2002), involving a non-parental adult who guides and supports a young person typically from a disadvantaged background, is one such activity that student-teachers can engage in during their teacher education to develop relational and inclusive pedagogies.

Situated in Hong Kong where increasing economic disparities and growing political and social tensions with Mainland China have impacted schools and classrooms, this discourse analytic study examined undergraduate student-teachers’ development of relational and inclusive pedagogies through a youth mentoring service-learning programme in a faculty of education at an elite university. Student-teachers, most of whom came from middle-class backgrounds, mentored youth from a low-ranked, high poverty high school for one academic year, whilst studying theories and practices of youth mentoring and interrogating inequality and exclusion in education. Many of the youth, or ‘protégés’, were newly arrived immigrants from Mainland China. Mentor-protégé dyads met regularly for face-to-face meetings and activities. Student-teachers documented and reflected upon their mentoring journey on a private online blog, and met in small groups for sharing and support. Informed by discursive psychology in which language use is situated and orientated towards social action (Jørgensen & Phillips, 2002; Wetherell, Taylor, & Yates, 2001), transcriptions of recorded dyad meetings and mentors’ online reflections were examined to explore the social, discursive construction of mentoring relations, roles and interactions.

It was found that student-teachers developed relational pedagogies in three respects. Firstly, they developed interactional and communicative capacities in guiding and supporting their protégés academically and socially. They also developed affective connections across difference (Boler & Zembylas, 2003) particularly when difficult topics and issues of social justice arose. Finally some student-teachers developed a reflexive awareness of the nature of pedagogic relationships, and drew insights from mentoring for their future roles and responsibilities as classroom teachers. However, these developments were experienced not unproblematically, but through struggle, discomfort and ambivalence (Todd, 2001). The findings suggest that youth mentoring might be meaningfully included in formal teacher education. When a student-teacher mentors an other, they may develop relational and inclusive pedagogies fundamental to teaching in increasingly diverse classrooms. The one-to-one nature of youth mentoring not only provides a heightened, personal experience of self-other relations, but also points to the singularity of the relational which underlies the notion of mentoring within teacher education.

Author

• Margaret M. Lo, University of Hong Kong