There are as many models of mentorship as there are mentors and mentees, says Professor Stephanie Burton
In the true spirit of a community of practice (CoP), which meets to share knowledge and information and support on common concerns, the recent meeting of Universities South Africa’s (USAf’s) CoP on Postgraduate Education and Scholarship (PGES) ended in a 30-minute discussion.
This is an edited version of the questions and comments that followed the initial 90-minute presentations of the virtual meeting held on 14 November.
QUESTION 1: Mr Kevin Ayanda Ndlovu, a PhD candidate at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) where he lectures in its Humanities Extended Curriculum Programme, and one of the presenters at the meeting: When we spoke about aligning the mentor and the mentee in terms of goals, in terms of ambitions, in terms of focus, what needs to be the main focus? Should the alignment go as far as culture, race and even gender? Or should our alignment, or pairing, only be limited to professional interests and professional goals?
ANSWER: Professor Stephanie Burton (left) of the University of Pretoria and Chairperson of CoP PGES: It does depend on how it’s done. We can speak for the Thuso Connect programme (set up by COP PGES and hosted on USAf’s website), which is an algorithm that matches people based on much more than their discipline. It’s more about their interests and personality types and kind of goal-driven nature. But one of the reasons we started talking about mentorship in the first place was because it was clear from different universities that they felt their mentorship programmes were difficult to manage and not necessarily working particularly well, because of things like culture differences and power dynamics.
QUESTION 2: Mr Nkosi Xhakaza, lecturer in the Department of Anatomy at Sefako Makgatho Health Sciences University: What impact does the programme have in terms of the promotion criteria and processes universities follow, because I have noticed this is quite diverse among universities. In some universities, promotions are suspended for some indefinite period. You’ll find cases where some universities say they will only promote when money is available. And this has an impact on the mentoring process, because if you are a mentor, and you are mentoring someone towards promotion, but there’s no promotion, it does not encourage the process. So does the programme have any impact or influence in that aspect?
ANSWER: Professor Burton: We have spoken about a number of different types of programmes: the nGAP (New Generation of Academics Programme), universities’ programmes and Thuso Connect, which is independent of any one university and is sector wide. So I’m going to make a general comment. The mentorship programmes I’m aware of in institutions – and I have spoken to most of them about what they’re doing in terms of mentoring – acknowledges the value and the contribution made in a mentoring relationship, but I don’t think it is formally part of the expectation in a performance management programme. Of course, if you’re serving as a mentor, that’s part of your being an academic citizen, and contributing. But the relationship between having been mentored and being promoted, I’m not aware of that being a formal link in any of the universities, but I could be wrong.
ANSWER: Professor Zilungile Mkhize-Kwitshana (above), a medical scientist and immunologist at UKZN: I always tell my mentees, mostly informal, that when you develop, you must understand that you may not necessarily grow within this institution. Usually, you grow across institutions.
I once had an NRF (National Research Foundation) mentee who started off with a comment: ‘You sent me this email on a Sunday at 10pm’ and I had to explain that in academia, this is how most of our lives turn out. She left. She said: ‘Then I’m in the wrong career path’. She is doing well in corporate because she said she wants weekends, holidays and so forth. So, in a nutshell, we may not be mentored necessarily for specific promotion in that institution. And also, I was very happy to have shown the light to someone young, to help her see well in advance that academia is definitely not her path.
QUESTION/COMMENT 3: Mr Shiba Diketane, Deputy Director: University Capacity Development Programme (UCDP) at the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET): This is an interesting conversation at a time when higher education is grappling with areas of challenge within the broader space of academic development. One of the things we have been privileged to observe, and this is across a whole range of programmes we are implementing within the UCDP – the nGAP, the Nurturing Emerging Scholars Programme (NESP) and the University Staff Doctoral Programme (USDP) – is when there is no structured mentorship, the programme suffers. Even where there is structured mentorship, but it’s not as effective as it should be, it poses serious challenges.
As we move towards establishing a national intervention of growing strong capacity on mentorship – and not only for programmes within the UCDP but all academic developmental opportunities, starting with postgraduates, emerging academics as well as mid-career ones within the academy – it is an important conversation. I must thank you, colleagues, for taking up this important subject matter. We are hoping to reach out to you for support, as we roll out a process of developing a strong national structure of mentorship for academic development.
QUESTION 4: Mr Phillip Tshabalala, Chief Director for Teaching, Learning and Research Development, DHET: I’d like to hear how mentors navigate the mentoring space, given what we’ve heard of academics’ challenges of workload. Is there space for the mentoring of mentors? By that I mean a programme that could orientate mentors in terms of how they would do the mentorship. Because with the challenges that everybody is faced with in higher education – the workload, supervision and teaching – it is quite difficult to be effective as a mentor.
ANSWER: Chrissie Boughey (right), Emeritus Professor at Rhodes University (RU) and professor extraordinaire at Stellenbosch University, and one of the presenters at the meeting: I think most mentoring programmes do provide training for mentors. That’s my understanding. And the question about the workload, I’m a very bad person to ask about that, because my natural inclination is to just take stuff on and then find a way to work out how to do it. So I’m not good at planning workloads, unfortunately, but I hope I’ve never let anybody down yet.
ANSWER: Dr Mandy Hlengwa (left), a Senior Lecturer at RU, who manages its nGAP and NESP programmes, and one of the presenters at the meeting: There is a recognition that leaving it up to individuals to be able to cope with a workload may not be sufficient, but that’s why earlier I spoke about a developmental plan. What is on your plate? What is the expectation? I also spoke about aligning one’s professional goals against their institution’s, department’s, faculty’s or discipline’s goals. What do they expect of me in a year, in three years, at this phase of my life? From that analysis, one gets some sense of what would work, where would increasing pressure points be, and where would they not be? If any university or a department has the perfect balance, please tell us.
I’ve often heard Emeritus Professor Paul Maylam talk about how the expectations have increased substantially between the time he joined academia and now, for the newcomers he now mentors.
But the idea that you can handle all of it at the same time is a problem. You’re going to have to make decisions, such as what things to delay, that you can’t do now. There can be consequences for that, but the quality of your work will be compromised if you think you can do everything. It is important to distinguish between what you must do and what you like doing — those are not necessarily the same things.
There are many spaces where we rely on mentors’ expertise and wisdom as if they do not need resourcing. And when I talk about resourcing, they may be very well versed in their discipline, but they may not be reading, for instance, mentorship literature or access those resources. Many of our colleagues are not in structured programmes, and that’s a big gap.
QUESTION 5: Ms Sithembile Nkosi, Mangosuthu University of Technology: Is it feasible or beneficial to have more than one mentor? The first speaker said her mentor is not in her field, so I just want to find out if that would be beneficial in terms of achieving your goals on time, because I’m doing my PhD. And, if the mentor has five mentees under her, who mentors her to finish the target goals they have set?
ANSWER: Professor Burton: There are many varieties and approaches, and as many models, as there are mentees and mentors. What is correct or what is the most appropriate?
This project started with a big mapping exercise in which we asked the universities what they have in the way of support programmes for early career academics. And the answer is: there is no one answer, there is no one system.
But now that we’ve worked on this for a while, many of the universities are increasingly paying attention to facilitating mentoring and support for early career academics. We are about to do another survey to see how things have progressed over the time we’ve been running this programme.
Gillian Anstey is a contract writer for Universities South Africa.
