Reading a mentoring situation: one aspect of learning to mentor

This paper describes and interprets the meanings that one novice mentor attributes to ‘reading a mentoring situation’, an organizing metaphor for describing how one experienced teacher of English learns to analyze one aspect of her learning in talking to mentor teachers of English throughout her first year of induction into mentoring. The study revealed that learning to become a mentor is a conscious process of induction into a different teaching context and does not ‘emerge’ naturally from being a good teacher of children. Thus, at an operational level, teacher education programs should prepare teachers for this passage by encouraging the dissemination of in-service courses that allow novice mentors the opportunity to articulate the construction of their new role. Such courses can be structured as ‘learning conversations’ whereby mentors are encouraged to reflect on their roles in the company of fellow mentors, mediated by an experienced mentor of mentors.     

Hidden labor in the mentoring of pre-service teachers: Notes from a mentor teacher advisory council

This article argues that mentoring reflects a form of hidden labor within pre-service teacher education. Using Marx’s concern for the ways in which aspects of an economic system are rendered invisible, the article draws on discussions from an American mentor teacher advisory council to illuminate otherwise marginalized aspects of mentors’ work. Meeting data reveal challenging dynamics of initiative, complications in determining teaching opportunities, and unique positions taken up by mentors during transitions in authority. The authors argue for the creation of “intersection contexts” where the voices of various constituencies in the mentoring of pre-service teachers can be heard.     

Building the mentoring relationship: humanism and the importance of storytelling between mentor and mentee

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we describe a mentoring program designed to help prepare high school seniors at Arizona State University Preparatory Academy for postsecondary education. Specifically, we address the usefulness of ‘humanistic mentoring,’ a form of mentoring that stresses the importance of reciprocity, mutuality, and empathy in the mentor/mentee relationship. We further describe how sharing stories was useful in developing such humanistic relationships. Based on etic-thematic coding of interviews from 13 of the mentees, a humanistic lens for mentoring and sharing personal stories is productive for both developing relationships and passing on knowledge.     

Connecting theory and practice in mentor preparation: mentoring for the improvement of teaching and learning

As a group, entrepreneurs and small business managers require training which is specific to their skills gaps, and takes into account that they are geographically dispersed with limited time available for such activities. They also require training which is integrated with their business activities and sufficiently flexible to incorporate into their busy and changing schedules. Email potentially provides a means of delivering a training intervention which suits the particular training and learning needs of this growing group. In spite of the growth of development and delivery of e‐mentoring programs, there is limited academic research around structured e‐mentoring generally and, in particular, around the evaluation of online programs for professionals in the micro‐business and small to medium enterprise sector. Given this lag in the academic literature, this article aims to explore how e‐mentoring programs for this target group might be usefully evaluated by drawing on pedagogical discourse. Specifically, this article proposes an adaptation to a model for evaluating computer‐based education programs and applies this intepretative framework to an e‐mentoring scheme called Mentors Online with reference to other programs aimed at similar target groups. The adaptation provides a possible framework for grounding the evaluation of e‐mentoring programs and making explicit the theoretical and pedagogical basis of much of the literature to date. The Mentors Online program was developed and delivered in 2002 by an Australian employee association with a membership of around 25,000 professionals. The Mentors Online website is available at www.apesma.asn.au/mentorsonline     

以项目为载体的高职英语听说教学探索与实践

近年来,社会对具有较强英语综合能力的高素质技能型人才有着迫切的需求,在英语培养目标当中,提高高职学生听说技能也成为重中之重。本文以职业需求为出发点,通过现状分析,对高职英语听说教学体系的改革做了初步探讨,并用教学实例来展现项目教学法在高职英语听说教学中的必要性。     

The Hearing School: an exploration of sound and listening in the modern school

In recent years sensory history has emerged as a research topic of growing interest to historians and has been accompanied by a call to incorporate the senses into our understanding of the past. Under modernity, social direction and control were built into the infrastructure of modern life as specialist institutions emerged and multiplied in the urban landscape; institutions which were designed to discipline, control and shape urban bodies – the prison, the workhouse, the asylum, the reformatory, the children's home and the school. This paper focuses on one of these sites of childhood control: the school. Historians of education and childhood have to date paid little attention to the sensory worlds of schooling and childhood. This study focuses on one sense – hearing. Hearing, sound and aurality have been shown to be deeply implicated in modernity's daily elaboration. The study explores the sounds of modern schooling; the culture of listening in modern schools; the materiality of the modern school “soundscape”; and the influence of architectural acoustics on the culture of listening. In doing so, the study addresses the problems, sources and methodologies involved in writing a history of the hearing school.     

艺术家的玫瑰画像

:象征 ,是乔伊斯常用的一个艺术表现手法。“玫瑰”,作为一个反复出现的象征意象 ,在《画像》中起到了不可替代的作用。本文论述了小说中玫瑰的象征意义 ,玫瑰作为涵盖作品内容的一种“有意味”的形式 ,及其在记叙主人公成长经历过程中所发挥的意象整合作用     

Riots and a blank canvas: young people creating texts,creating spaces

This article draws on research into the work of Greenshoots, 1 1 All young participants referred to in this article have been anonymised and pseudonyms provided. In discussions with Greenshoots and the mentors, they took the decision that they wanted to be named, and for Nottingham to be identified as the context of the place and its history is an important element of their work.
a small company of creative practitioners who provide opportunities for young people to work on projects involving visual and creative practices with a strong link to local heritage. Two specific projects form the focus of the paper: Riot and Blank Canvas. Both aimed to provide opportunities for young people to work with professional artists and performers to create a site‐specific exhibition and performance in a disused warehouse space on the edge of the developing Creative Quarter in Nottingham. The projects took place out of school, and the research focused on the creative processes and practices involved in the production of texts created by the young people as they inhabited the space and developed, within a community of peers and artists, representations of that urban space. This article explores the ways in which the projects open up the potential for young people to engage with literacy practices, which traverse the boundaries of space, of art forms and of notions of culture and heritage. Two theoretical frames are used in the paper: Lave and Wenger's “legitimate peripheral participation” (1991) and various scholars' explorations of place‐based approaches. In this way, the article aims to contribute to understandings of the diverse roles and potentials of young peoples' creative practices and literacies in and out of school contexts.     

Unboxing mathematics: creating a culture of modeling as critic

Educational Studies in Mathematics - From the socio-critical perspective of mathematical modeling, reflexive discussions about the nature, criteria, and consequences of mathematical models are not...     

Mindful hands,gestures as language: listening to children

This paper explores ideas of language as a cognitive tool and the role of gesture in expressing children's interests and levels of knowledge. The context is a group of three‐year‐old children who participate in a weekly music session with a trained musician. The authors present drawings from photographs of children's hands and interpret them, using contextual information, to explain how the positioning of the children's hands reflects their internalized understandings and can be viewed as a rich symbolic language. A discussion of the early childhood curriculum and the use of finger plays has been included to suggest that gesture was initially viewed as part of ‘the whole child’ but, today, activities like finger plays have become ritualized exercises. It is suggested that if adults do not listen to the language of hands they are depriving themselves of a valuable window into children's thinking and learning.     

Educational Leadership: Modeling,mentoring, making and re-making a learning community

The paper presents a holistic view of educational leadership that is based on relational learning, collaboration, connectedness and commitment to self, to others and to community. The context of the study is a community high school where teacher-leaders are responsible for the governance, the daily administration and the teaching in the school. The interconnectedness of teaching, learning and leading are acknowledged by teacher-leaders whose work is based in an understanding that the intellectual, emotional, social, moral, spiritual and aesthetic dimensions of human beings are inextricably interconnected. The focus for school leaders is on working to co-create a learning environment which emphasizes authentic self-expression, the development of relationships, and the development of the whole person within the school, the local and global communities. Two major themes are used to explicate and discuss the enactment of these issues and to outline the boundaries and obstacles encountered in the realities of everyday practice. These themes are: (a) the development of an authentic voice and identity: supportive relationships, dialogue and shared governance; (b) learning from and with others: creating a culture of collaboration, connectedness and commitment to community.     

The roles of the mentor and link tutor in primary school mentor training

This paper reports the evaluation of a small scale pilot mentoring scheme developed by a University Faculty of Education and some of its link primary schools to illuminate how the initiative might most profitably be developed in future years. This evaluation focused on the perceptions of all the parties involved in the mentoring (Head teachers, mentors, class teachers, students and link tutors) about their roles. Some suggestions are made about how the scheme might be developed in the future.     

高职英语听说测试改革的实践与探索

英语听说测试作为衡量学生语言应用能力的手段,越来越受到教育界的关注。本文结合高职院校测试的现状,探讨高职院校听说测试改革,为进一步提高高职学生语言应用能力提供借鉴。     

Supervision as mentoring: the role of power and boundary crossing

There is a current consensus in the literature and policy documents on postgraduate supervision that positions mentoring as the most effective supervision strategy. Authors suggest that this approach to supervision overcomes some of the problematic, hierarchical aspects embedded in supervision as a pedagogical practice. They portray supervision as an innocent and collegial pedagogy between autonomous, rational supervisors and students. However, mentoring is a powerful form of normalization and a site of governmentality. Therefore, I argue that rather than removing issues of power from the supervision relationship, describing effective supervision as mentoring only serves to mask the significant role played by power in supervision pedagogy. I have applied Devos’ investigation of mentoring to postgraduate supervision to highlight the work that mentoring does as a form of academic and disciplinary self-reproduction that can have paternalistic impulses located within it. In particular, I argue that supervisors need to be conscious of the operations of power in postgraduate supervision despite their best intentions. I have also begun to explore what implications this more nuanced understanding of supervision might have for people such as me, who are charged with the responsibility of providing academic development programs on supervision.     

Mentor teachers: Their perceived possibilities and challenges as mentor and teacher

This interview study, including seven case studies of mentor teachers in primary education, explores the possibilities and challenges these mentor teachers perceive when they (sequentially and simultaneously) combine the teacher and mentor roles. Mentor teachers perceive two challenges while simultaneously performing both roles in the same classroom: to transfer (or not) responsibility for the class and pupils to the student teacher and to intervene (or not) in classroom procedures. Mentor teachers felt that being the teacher of the pupils was their primary task, and being a mentor of the student teacher generally was perceived as an aside and additional task.     

Contexts of mentoring and opportunities for learning to teach: a comparative study of mentoring practice

Drawing on data from twenty-three US, UK, and Chinese mentor teachers, this study explores the relationship between contexts of mentoring and mentoring practice. It discusses learning opportunities created by mentoring in different contexts for novices to learn to teach. Through comparative analysis, it finds that mentoring practices show greater differences across programs and countries than within. This is the case even when mentors are practicing or moving toward practicing a kind of teaching as expected by education reformers. These differences are reflected in mentors’ beliefs about what novices need to learn, their interaction patterns and foci with novices. Three instructional contexts in each setting shape such differences: structure of school curriculum and assessment, organization of teaching and mentoring, and student population. These findings suggest that the reform-minded teaching practice that mentors developed does not necessarily guarantee the effective mentoring that supports teacher learning and teaching reform. Teacher educators should pay attention to the influences of instructional contexts on mentoring and the kinds of learning opportunities that mentoring creates for novice teachers in different contexts. When designing mentoring programs and arranging mentoring relationships, teacher educators need to consider how to restructure school contexts and help mentors learn how to mentor.     

Reading,listening and feeling: audio feedback as a component of an inclusive learning culture at universities

Feedback on student performance is an important part of university assessment procedures. However, effective feedback is hampered by various obstacles. The growing heterogeneity of the student body increases these barriers, particularly with regard to the reception of feedback. One strategy to overcome these obstacles can be to communicate feedback in the form of audio files. The study presented here tested the possibilities of this procedure by giving students feedback, both as an audio file and in writing. The survey shows that some of the students find audio feedback particularly easy to assimilate, while others prefer written feedback. The aim of the study was to go beyond the level of simplistic evaluation (better–worse), and to be able to make more nuanced statements about the strengths and also the weaknesses of audio feedback. All the students stated that they felt the audio feedback was more personal and appreciative than the written feedback. It becomes clear that the different needs of students can best be catered for with a variety of forms of communication. Audio feedback cannot be considered a comprehensive solution to the different problems associated with feedback, but it can contribute to the development of an inclusive university.     

Watching,creating and achieving: Creative technologies as a conduit for learning in the early years

This paper describes the use of robotics in an Early Years classroom as a tool to aid the development of technological skills in a creative environment rich with literacy and numeracy opportunities. The pilot project illustrates how a three‐phase process can result in the development of: (1) emergent literacy and numeracy, (2) digital access for disadvantaged Early Years learners and (3) basic engineering concepts. The pilot study was conducted with a class of 16 students aged between 5 years and 6 months to 7 years, over a 6‐week period. During this period, the students were introduced to and engaged in the creation of robots and simple machines via the use of a commercial robotics package. The pilot was designed around three distinct phases: modelling, exploring and evaluating. These phases provided scaffolding for the students to engage with the technology and for the class teacher to develop her own skills. The use of this particular robotics package is unique to Australia, unique to Early Years, and links hands‐on, fine‐motor development with 21st century learning. The researchers and authors of this paper are currently based at the Australian Catholic University and are involved with projects involving creative, digital technologies, children in the early years of formal schooling, emerging literacy and numeracy for diverse Early Years learners and the development of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) subjects.