A 'Rough Guide' to the History of Mentoring from a Marxist Feminist Perspective

Abstract

Mentoring is now a favoured policy initiative in a number of countries, including Britain and North America, both as an element of professional development, and in addressing social exclusion. The former is of direct relevance to teacher education. The latter is a key issue affecting teachers today, as they have to liaise with mentors allocated to pupils and students. Yet the concept of mentoring remains confused. This paper reviews the literature, deconstructing its mythical representations and its celebratory bias. It applies, from a feminist perspective, the dialectical materialist method to the inter-relationships between essence and appearance in mentoring. It identifies four distinct historical stages in its development. These reveal that official concepts of mentoring have shifted from dominant groupings reproducing their own power, to subordinate groupings reproducing their own oppression. The conclusion suggests a research agenda for more detailed empirical investigation of mentoring in the field of teacher education.

The ‘digital curious’: first steps towards a new typology for mapping adults’ relationships with others when using ICT

“…Academic investigations into mentoring first began in the late '70s (Anderson & Shannon, 1988;Colley, 2002). Mentoring has also been studied through examples of volunteers and charity members offering ICT learning support to middle-aged and elderly women (Lin, Tang, & Kuo, 2012).…”

Developing business students’ employability skills through working in partnership with a local business to deliver an undergraduate mentoring programme

“…It also highlighted the positive attitude required in order to acquire employability skills relevant to the world of work (Mason, Williams, and Cranmer 2009). The general response highlights the learning and career development the mentees gained from the programme as noted by Simmonds (2009), Colley (2002 and Gibb (1999). The mentors gained greatly from the programme and particular attention is given to at least one of the mentor's responses to overall programme: One of the key aspects of mentoring emphasised in the literature is the importance of matching pairs (Klasen and Clutterbuck 2002, Clutterbuck, 2004, Gannon and Maher, 2012.…”

“…However, they were decidedly underwhelmed by the lack of the focus the mentees had with regard to their career ideas. This could be due to a generational gap -mentors being on the whole more mature, experienced and knowledgeable (Colley, 2002), and the widely reported view that this generation of students have been spoon-fed throughout their education and are not capable of independent thinking and learning (Ramsden and Atwood 2011).…”

“…(Freedman, 2009;Megginson and Garvey, 2007;Woodd, 1997). Contemporary references refer to the figure of a mentor as senior, guide, dependable, instructor and an investor in the relationship (Colley, 2002).…”

Project Evidence: Responding to the Changing Professional Learning Needs of Mentors in Initial Teacher Education

“…A number of commentators point to the same dichotomy in ITE (Bryan & Carpenter, 2008;Colley, 2002;Maynard, 2000;Yayli, 2008), which Bradbury and Koballa Jr (2008) argue places mentors and pre-service teachers "in a confusing and untenable position" (p. 2136). It has been long established that, through their work in practice, mentors and preservice teachers negotiate and construct the role of the mentor (see, for example, Monaghan & Lunt, 1992).…”