Towards a Model of Mentoring in South African Higher Education

The imperative to replenish the South African higher education professoriate has inspired varied responses, ranging from aggressive recruitment of post graduate students to the induction of academics from outside the academy. One such response is the Staffing South Africa’s Universities Framework (SSAUF), which recognises the challenges facing early career academics (ECAs), especially as they relate to higher education pedagogies, curriculum develop-ment, supervising students, and developing scholarship in teaching. Notable in this framework is the absence of any substantive discussion around mentorship, and its potential to socialise emerging academics into the distinctive culture of the academy in all its manifestations, especially what it means to be an effective university teacher. This article surveys some of the literature on mentoring in higher education, as a precursor to introducing a proposed mentoring model, developed for a South African university. Acknowledging the complexity inherent in the practice of mentoring and the attendant power relations, the proposed model is a departure from the individualistic performance management approach typically associated with the dominant master-apprenticeship model. Instead, the authors offer a non-hierarchical, co-constructed menu of possibilities based on negotiated reflection, arising out of the specific, situated contexts of mentor and mentee