The influence of the mentor lecturer on pre-service professional teacher identity

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to determine fourth-year pre-service teachers’ perceptions of the influence of mentor lecturers on their Professional Teacher Identity (PTI) while on teaching practice. The problem underpinning this study was that the students may not be able to mediate the merging of the academic world with the world of work if the influence of the mentor lecturer is lacking. The significance of this study lies in the student perceptions of the mentor lecturers’ role. The data were collected through the Fourth Years Initiative for Research in Education (FIRE) project. Students reflected in groups on the development of their PTI and the role their mentor lecturers played in this development. In this qualitative, descriptive case study, a document analysis was conducted on transcriptions of the posters that the students created in workshops. The conceptual framework combined a mentorship and a PTI model. The results showed that in PTI development, the mentor lecturers’ influence ranked sixth out of nine. The students felt misunderstood and unsupported. The findings indicate either that the role of the mentor lecturer is a redundant feature of the BEd programme, the mentor lecturer is not meeting the students’ needs, requiring revisitation of the programme, or this millennial generation sample is not open to critical self-reflection and critique. Similar studies may access the mentor lecturers’ perceptions of their own PTI and their influence on their mentees’ PTI development, and why passion for a subject is not a statistically significant influencer of PTI.