Mentoring & Tutoring: Partnership in Learning 

About: Mentoring & Tutoring: Partnership in Learning is an academic journal published by Routledge. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Higher education & Professional development. It has an ISSN identifier of 1361-1267. Over the lifetime, 763 publications have been published receiving 16827 citations. The journal is also known as: Mentoring and tutoring.

Mentoring Revisited: A phenomenological reading of the literature

Abstract: This paper details the outcomes of an exploration to describe what the mentoring concept is and how it may best be communicated. The rationale is twofold: firstly, on a personal level, despite being a mentor and researching mentoring for several years, I still found describing and sharing explanations of mentoring with others difficult to achieve with any degree of consensus. Without such a consensus, how may we ever know that we are talking about the same thing? Secondly, my own confidence in what mentoring may be was affected by discovering that the claimed origins of the very term were erroneous. As a consequence, a phenomenological reduction—whereby the inquirer 'brackets' any suppositions and previously thought knowledge prior to exploration—was deployed in order to review a sample of mentoring research and debate covering a time period 1978-1999 across several disciplines. Mentoring appears to have the essential attributes of: a process; a supportive relationship; a helping process; a teaching-learn...

Roles, Risks, and Benefits of Peer Mentoring Relationships in Higher Education

Abstract: Successful peer mentoring in university settings is the result of relationships among students, mentors, and instructors. Findings from this study indicate that even in programs where training is ongoing and established, assumptions cannot be made about the understanding of the roles, risks, and benefits involved in such relationships. This study demonstrates that students, instructors, and mentors all have different perspectives about a mentor’s role and how that role should be enacted. Connecting link, peer leader, learning coach, student advocate, and trusted friend were identified as predominant roles enacted by mentors. Also described are risks and benefits for being or having a peer mentor.

A taxonomy of the characteristics of student peer mentors in higher education: findings from a literature review

Abstract: Peer mentoring in higher education is regarded as an effective intervention to ensure the success and retention of vulnerable students. Many universities and colleges have therefore implemented some form of mentoring program as part of their student support services. While considerable research supports the use of peer mentoring to improve academic performance and decrease student attrition, few studies link peer mentoring functions with the type of peer best suited to fulfill these functions. This literature review categorizes the abundant student peer mentor descriptors found in mentoring research. The result is a preliminary taxonomy that classifies ten peer mentor characteristics according to mentoring function served (career‐related or psychosocial). The proposed taxonomy and the discussion developed in this article help shed light on the dynamics of successful student peer mentoring relationships in higher education.

Mentoring in black and white: the intricacies of cross‐cultural mentoring

Abstract: Cross‐cultural mentoring relationships can be sites of struggle around the issues of race, class and gender. In addition, the mentor/protege relationship offers micro‐cosmic insight into power relations within western society. The authors of this paper, a black woman associate professor and a white male professor, use the example of their mentoring relationship to illustrate six common issues facing academicians involved in these relationships: (1) trust between mentor and protege; (2) acknowledged and unacknowledged racism; (3) visibility and risks pertinent to minority faculty; (4) power and paternalism; (5) benefits to mentor and protege; and (6) the double‐edged sword of ‘otherness’ in the academy. Literature is used for review and critique of mentoring in the academy while offering personal examples to illustrate the complexity and success of a 13‐year mentoring relationship between a duo who began their association as teacher/student.

More than a place to teach: exploring the perceptions of the roles and responsibilities of mentor teachers

Abstract: The purpose of this study was to shed light on mentor teachers’ perceptions of their roles and responsibilities and to contrast their understandings with a normative view of mentoring (Goldsberry, 1998; Hawkey, 1997) We hypothesized that the mentor teachers’ perceptions would likely differ from established conceptions of this construct, a difference that has significant implications for mentor preparation and university collaboration Participants, 264 teachers who were serving as mentors to pre‐service teachers, were asked open‐ended questions designed to allow the mentors to describe the ways in which they envisioned their role Follow‐up telephone interviews were conducted with 34 randomly selected mentor teachers to further determine the relative value they placed on different aspects of mentoring The results of this research confirm that mentoring is a complex construct and that the perceptions held by mentors may be influenced by the kinds and quality of mentoring experiences they have had Implic