Effective mentoring can be about making people independent of any need for guidance

Mentoring does not have an end point – even if someone is on a specific mentoring programme with a cutoff date.

“I hope when you get to the official end point, you don’t have the idea that it means you no longer need mentoring. It might mean you have to look for different people to mentor you, because you’ve got different needs or different gaps or different areas you’d like to focus on. All the people I really admire continue to have mentorship. It just looks different at different stages of your career,” said Dr Mandy Hlengwa.

Dr Hlengwa said while it is easier to identify the benefit for the person entering the institution or profession, mentoring is mutually beneficial to both parties. This is because the person coming into a new role has a different and invaluable perspective.

“It’s not just a case of, ‘oh, I just see it differently’. What do you see differently? Why do you see it differently? And how can that enrich and change and be transformative in your space?” she said.

As a mentorship relationship involves dialogue, both parties need to express their views. Universities might have policies, rules or practices that seem outdated, no longer serve anybody, or are exclusionary. Mentees coming into that space will be more attuned to this. “Knowing and understanding those rules and policies is really important before we can embark on a journey of transforming or making sure those rules are changed and updated,” she said.

She said it was important to develop a plan of professional ambitions. How do those align with your department’s, your discipline’s and your university’s expectations? “Having a conversation with your mentor is really important to see where these dovetail, and where these seem to be in conflict, or perhaps initially seem to be in conflict, and how to then resolve that,” she said.

Dr Hlengwa outlined key ingredients of a successful mentoring programme. These include:

• Building flexibility into the pairing of mentors and mentees. Sometimes there needs to be a change, which doesn’t always mean the relationship didn’t work.
• Regular check-ins.
• Managing expectations. In the social sciences and humanities, one-on-one supervision and mentoring is still dominant. “If you have the idea you’re going to get everything from your mentor, that sets up the relationship to have severe limitations,” she said.
• Reading literature about mentorship. “Reading about it will help with the idea that perhaps you are not alone in terms of particular challenges and experiences. Literature and resources like the Thuso Connect platform provide a really important part of building an effective mentorship programme”.

Professor Chrissie Boughey spoke about mentoring from the perspective of supervision. “Most of my experience with respect to mentoring comes from being a supervisor, and if you look at the literature on postgraduate supervision, a lot of it talks about mentorship as an important element,” she said.

She referred extensively to research by Dr Anne Lee, an academic development consultant, and specifically to her article, How Are Doctoral Students Supervised? Concepts of Doctoral Research Supervision, published in Studies in Higher Education in 2008 when she was at the University of Stavanger in Norway.

Boughey said people are drawn to a particular approach “because of who we are as people”. She, for example, tends to avoid the functional approach as she doesn’t enjoy project management. “So Anne Lee’s schema allows supervisors to reflect on where they are naturally inclined.”

It also allows to “shift approaches throughout a postgraduate journey, depending on the student’s needs at a particular time. For example, in the very beginning that project management approach, the functional approach, might be really important, because the student’s got to get registered, they’ve got to get a proposal through the higher degrees’ committee, they’ve got to get ethical clearance, and there are often timelines. But then the point would be to not to stick with that, but to shift across the other approaches.“

In Lee’s schema, mentorship is noted only in relation to emancipation, which is about helping students to find themselves. Boughey said the article itself refers to supervisors understanding the need for students to become independent. “One of the supervisors interviewed by Lee says something like, ‘What I want to hear from my student is ‘No, I don’t agree’. So it shows the student now is able to think for themselves. They’ve emancipated themselves, in respect of their need for guidance from the supervisor.”

Professor Boughey said Lee’s “enculturation”, which refers to the supervisor “gatekeeping” and to “diagnosis of deficiencies”, can sound quite negative. This is especially true in South Africa where, she said,  the idea of “coaching and role modeling students to ‘be like me’ isn’t entirely appropriate in a context where we’re looking at transformation and where we’ve been very concerned with decolonisation and Africanisation of knowledge”. Yet she is drawn to mentor her students with that approach.

She explained why.

She cited American researcher James Paul Gee’s concept of discourses, which is a role or identity, “a way of thinking, speaking, reading, writing, valuing, acting, that identify us as a member of a particular community”.

During postgraduate supervision, students need to be mentored into those ways of being within a discipline, “because disciplines have rules about knowledge making, and one of the roles of the supervisor is to ensure that a student produces a valid piece of research where validity means it’s recognised as valid. So the mentorship, the coaching enculturation, can be about mentoring into these discipline-specific ways of thinking, believing, knowledge-producing. Significantly, unless a student is recognisable, unless a student can demonstrate that they are a member of this community, I don’t think they’ll be heard,” said Professor Boughey.

She advocates bringing students into the academic community, “but making them critical of it at the same time – building the ability to look at it from a critical perspective, and challenge it,“ she said.

“Once they have the title dr or professor, they can use that power to bring about change. That, for me, is what mentoring involves in supervision,” said Professor Boughey.

Dr Ncango from the NRF explained how his role and involvement with mentoring – particularly for post graduate students, post docs and early career researchers – has been nuanced around setting up frameworks that enable the right level of mentorship for these early career researchers.

Sometimes there is a mismatch of expectations. This made contracting and formalising the relationship very important, to set out the roles and responsibilities of both mentor and mentees.

And it is vital to determine how they are going to communicate. “Are they going to communicate via email? Are they going to set up physical meetings? Are they going to communicate virtually? That is something we have seen as a drawback when the communication barriers are not clearly outlined,” he said.

“As the NRF, the advice we always provide to the early career researchers, and also the post docs, regards things like setting up clear goals from the beginning about how they want their relationship with their mentor to unfold. And also to communicate their goals with the mentor, and to be proactive in taking the initiative, to schedule the meetings, to prepare questions, to drive discussions and to be more engaged in what they are doing.

“And also, most important is for them to be open to feedback. We have often seen this become a challenge. I guess it depends on how one will interpret it.  Do you interpret it as ‘someone is being critical of my work’, or do you interpret it as ‘these are the areas I need to improve on?’

“The advice we give is that they need to consistently build relationships, because this can only elevate the relationship between the mentor and the mentee. And for them to network actively, to identify platforms such as these, for instance, where they could meet a range of people,” said Dr Ncango.

Gillian Anstey is a contract writer for Universities South Africa.