Mentoring
In a recent feature article published in Educational Researcher (2014) Philip Dawson argued that more than three decades of mentoring research has yet to converge on a unifying definition of mentoring. Quoting Jacobi (1991) in her review of undergraduate
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Mentoring Lily Orland-Barak
Introduction In a recent feature article published in Educational Researcher (2014) Philip Dawson argued that more than three decades of mentoring research has yet to converge on a unifying definition of mentoring. Quoting Jacobi (1991) in her review of undergraduate mentoring, he sustains that the lack of a common definition grows out of the diversity of relationships that are classified as mentoring. Dawson, as Wrightsman (1981), Jacobi (1991), and Crisp and Cruz (2009) are all positioned within the literature of mentoring in higher education, with a distinctive focus on mentoring students in higher education. As I read the article and looked at its reference list, to my surprise I discovered almost no reliance on research studies on mentoring in the broader context of teacher education. Given the wealth of conceptual and empirical publications on mentoring in teacher education, one would expect to find some mention of leading studies in this area, especially since they offer insights on the generic character of mentoring and its growing recognition as a professional practice grounded in an empirical body of knowledge to guide standards and measures of professionalism across disciplinary contexts. For the purpose of this review, if I relied on this reference list, I would be able to spot only a thumbnail of studies out of the 426 studies identified for this search. Should this be surprising? Probably not. Finding a common language that represents an entire spectrum of professional activity for researchers and practitioners is almost an impossible task to achieve; more so in the educational research milieu with its competing paradigms, each established with its own conceptual and empirical language, very often not ‘talking’ to one another (Orland-Barak, 2014). Mentoring students in Higher Education does not ‘speak’ the same language as mentoring student teachers at
L. Orland-Barak (*) University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2016 J. Loughran, M.L. Hamilton (eds.), International Handbook of Teacher Education, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-0369-1_4
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schools or mentoring novices or experienced teachers at the workplace. Each of these categories is treated separately in the literature with reference to different journals and to distinctive research studies in each of the fields. Evidence of such disconnection comes from the recurrent thematic category of ‘mentoring’ subsumed in several, different divisions of the American Educational Research Association, not always talking to one another. For example, taking the frequent and parallel, but not always connected, appearance of Mentoring in ‘Teaching and Teacher Education’ (Division K) and the Mentoring SIG (Special Interest Group) of ‘Education in the Professions’ (Division I). Another example of competing languages and how these may add to the potential confusion and ambiguity in the field is reflected in the different terms used for conveying the same
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