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This in-depth case study examined the mentor's role in mediating a culturally diverse community of student teachers-as-learners in the context of practice teaching in university teacher education in Israel. Specifically, it explored how the mentor's response to cultural aspects of learning to teach shaped the group's learning environment.

Data collection included 23 video-recorded meetings of the learning community and semi-structured interviews with all four participants.

Findings proposed six actions of the mentor that aimed at promoting an empathetic and supportive learning environment that encouraged collaborative talk around culturally diverse issues that surfaced during practice teaching. Implications for teacher education programs are presented and discussed.

The study offers a practical framework of tools (or mentor actions) that can help mentors to promote social interactions in culturally diverse mentoring conversational settings.

The study identified six actions that can serve as tools in mediating sensitive discourse to issues of diversity in communities of culturally diverse learners.

Current approaches to early childhood teacher education have moved from a view of student–teacher training as interactions involving one novice and one expert, to a process that demands resources and engagement of several professional players while mediating students’ learning in practice. The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of a triadic mentoring model of a university–school collaboration (“Academia–Classroom”) on student teachers’ (STs) learning in the context of early childhood education in Israel. Eight mentoring triads were formed in six kindergartens. Each mentoring triad was comprised of the ST, a cooperating teacher and the college supervisor. This paper focuses on three representative triads of the eight that were studied.

The in-depth study adopted qualitative methodology including three complementary data-collection sources: observations of the STs working with children in the kindergarten; observations and recordings of the triadic mentoring conversations following the observations; in-depth interviews with each participant in the mentoring triad. Data were analyzed using an interpretative framework developed for the study, which combined elements from Engestrom’s cultural historical activity theory, Gee’s building tasks and Edward’s relational agency.

The research identified three major patterns of interaction operating in the mentoring triad that promoted or hindered the learning process of early childhood education students: dissonant, harmonic and argumentative. The way in which relational agency developed in the triads was found to be the most significant aspect of students’ learning process.

The patterns of interaction identified shed light on new aspects of relational agency, thus offering additional interpretative lenses for examining how relational agency operates in ST mentored learning processes. These new identified patterns have practical implications for the design of mentoring frameworks in early childhood teacher education.