Editorial

Citation

Hobson, A.J., Long, J. and Ashby, P. (2015), "Editorial", International Journal of Mentoring and Coaching in Education, Vol. 4 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJMCE-01-2015-0003

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: International Journal of Mentoring and Coaching in Education, Volume 4, Issue 1

Welcome to Volume 4 of the International Journal of Mentoring and Coaching in Education (IJMCE). Volume 3 contained some exceptional contributions to the field of mentoring and coaching in education, with papers published reporting research conducted in Australia, Canada, Germany, Ireland, Japan, New Zealand, USA and UK. Not unrelated to this, IJMCE usage continues to increase: during 2014 there were over 4,600 downloads of articles published in the journal. This year we are increasing the number of issues from three to four, and appointing an additional Co-Editor to join us on the IJMCE Senior Editorial Team.

IJMCE is increasingly attracting excellent manuscripts from researchers across the world, and our dedicated reviewers and thorough review and editorial processes are enabling many of these to be strengthened prior to publication. Nonetheless, inevitably we also have to reject a large number of submissions. In order to minimise the prospects of a “reject” decision (and to potentially improve the quality of their papers), we urge prospective contributors to IJMCE to study the Commentary “Why manuscripts submitted to an international peer reviewed journal in education are rejected” (Hobson, 2014) prior to finalising and submitting their manuscripts. The Commentary was published in IJMCE Vol. 3 Issue 2 and is available on the IJMCE website via the “Table of Contents”: www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/products/journals/journals.htm?id=ijmce

Authors should also refer to the IJMCE Author Guidelines and ensure their submissions are consistent with these. We are surprised how many manuscripts are submitted without the required Structured Abstract, for example!

The current issue includes valuable contributions from scholars in Canada, Switzerland, the USA and the UK. In the first paper “Extending the mentor role in initial teacher education: embracing social justice”, Duckworth and Maxwell draw upon Bourdieu and two thematic reviews of literature to explore how mentors can act as change agents for social justice. They argue that in the UK and several other countries, mentoring is dominated by an instrumental assessment-focused approach in which any focus on social justice is marginalised. They propose a model for mentoring in initial teacher preparation in which “social justice mentors” are able to establish collaborative democratic mentoring relationships, create spaces for critical reflection, support trainee teachers to experience different cultures, develop inclusive critical pedagogies, and generally act as advocates and foster passion for social justice. Recommendations for the training of social justice mentors are also proposed.

In the second paper of this issue “Dialectical tensions experienced by diversified mentoring dyads”, Meyer discusses findings from a study which examined diversified mentoring relationships amongst faculty members and professional personnel at a midsized Midwestern state university in the USA. The mentees were primarily members of underrepresented minority groups (URMs), whereas the majority of mentors were members of the dominant culture. A thematic analysis of data generated from semi-structured interviews reveals tensions experienced by diversified mentoring dyads, as well as communication strategies that dyad members used to manage these tensions. The author highlights potential implications for URM faculty members in predominantly white institutions around the globe, and for the training of those who mentor URM faculty members.

The third paper “Mentoring for women starting a PhD: a “free zone” into academic identity”, by Stroude and colleagues, reports a study of group mentoring associated with the “StartingDoc Program” offered to women undertaking PhD programmes in French-speaking Switzerland. The study, which employed a qualitative, narrative case study design, provides insights into the value of such a mentoring scheme, notably as a tool for supporting professional identity development among female doctoral students. More specifically, the research found that the mentoring created opportunities for mentees to: discover aspects of academic life, break isolation and develop some of the soft skills required to facilitate their doctoral journey.

In the fourth paper “Building a sustainable structure to support the Adaptive Mentorship model in teacher education”, Salm and Mulholland report on a study which advances our understanding of how to implement a professional development training strategy for the Adaptive Mentorship (AM) model (Ralph and Walker, 2010), exploring how a sample of cooperating teachers in Canada used the model, not only to assist pre-service teachers in their development, but also to reflect on their role as a mentor. The research used a collective case study approach designed to collect data from cooperating teachers across a two year period on the frequency of use and effectiveness of the AM model. The findings suggest that for many cooperating teachers the notion of reciprocal development of mentoring had not yet permeated their consciousness. The recommendations from this study may guide the professional development training necessary for implementing the AM model with pre-service teachers and future cooperating teachers’ professional development sessions to support the paradigmatic shift from supervisor to mentor.

In the final paper “Equality of mentoring and coaching opportunity: making both available to pre-service teachers”, Salter explores why the practice of mentoring is preferred to coaching when supporting pre-service teachers. As the literature is limited with regards to the use of coaching for pre-service teachers, this paper examines the use of mentoring and coaching within schools in a more balanced way, questioning underlying beliefs about the purpose of mentoring and coaching and whether or not these are based on deficit or asset-based models. The paper addresses the ways mentoring is used for pre-service teachers’ development, followed by a discussion promoting the place and use of coaching within education. Recommendations suggest that mentors of pre-service teachers could be helped and supported to make greater use of a mentor-coach integrated asset-based approach, encouraging the use of reflection and self-directed learning.

We trust that, like us, you will enjoy and learn from the papers published in this issue. Finally, we would like to record our appreciation for the efforts of members of the IJMCE reviewer panel and Editorial Advisory Board both in assisting the authors to improve the quality and readability of the papers published in the present issue, and in supporting the development of IJMCE more generally.

Andrew J. Hobson, Jan Long and Pat Ashby