Opportunities for pedagogical and professional development at the University of Johannesburg: a critical exploration of the responses to a mentorship programme for lecturers working with tutors

D.Phil. (Education)Transformation policies in South Africa have seen higher education come under increasing pressure to broaden participation of historically under-represented groups. Recently, student enrolments have become increasingly diverse in terms of cultural, socio-economic and linguistic backgrounds, as well as the levels of preparedness that students have for traditional higher education programmes. This places new and challenging teaching demands on lecturers and peer tutors. Whilst peer tutors may find themselves in an ever increasing teaching role, so might those who are responsible for guiding and developing them. This research focuses on offering holistic support to junior lecturers, via mentorship, who have the responsibility of developing and advising student tutors, so that they are able to engage in sound pedagogical practice. The purpose of this study is to investigate the responses to a mentorship programme designed to assist junior lecturers to develop tutors at The University of Johannesburg. These junior lecturers are referred to as tutor coordinators. The research aims to identity what kind of identity shifts, if any, the tutor coordinators experienced as a result of the mentorship programme. It also aims to understand how tutor coordinators engaged with collaborative mentorship and to what extent the mentorship programme influences pedagogy. Several theoretical perspectives have informed the research. These include ideas on collaborative mentorship and interdependence as well as reflective practice, as a tool for professional development in combination with insights from post structuralist theory on discourse, social organisation, power and in particular, identity. The study is framed by the understanding that the research participants construct multiple identities rather than report on an existing identity, and that identity is linked to power relations in a particular context. Broadly this research is a qualitative study. More specifically, it uses emancipatory action research as the research design. This is because the participants were provided with an opportunity to critically engage with their own practice via self-reflection and the recursive relationship offered by the mentorship programme. Questionnaires, observations and interviewing were used to collect the data. Interviews gave in-depth insight into participant subject positions and responses to the mentorship programme. Initially, the data was analysed thematically, using global analysis. Once the themes had been extracted, CDA (critical discourse analysis) was used to allow for a social analysis of language. The findings suggest that the research participants’ experiences in the role of tutor coordinator, shaped their identities in different ways and that in several cases they experienced considerable fragmentation of identity. This fragmentation is evident in the multifaceted and differentiated responses to various features of the mentorship programme. In addition, in some cases notable pedagogical shifts were made and personal sites of development were positively facilitated. This research brings to the fore issues that could determine professional staff development programmes as it considers South African academic identities framed by their current professional and educational challenges