93Mentoring as Support
The concept of mentoring might have first been written about in Homer’s poem The
Odyssey. The poem is often cited as a touchstone for the space in which ‘mentoring’
once occurred and how the actions associated with ‘mentoring’ appeared (Anderson
& Shannon, 1988 ; Orland-Barak, 2014 ). In the poem, Athena, goddess of wisdom,
appears to Telemachus in human form as Mentor. It is Mentor’s responsibility to
develop Telemachus to his full potential, offering himself as a role model while
simultaneously allowing Telemachus to develop his own perspective and style.
Mentor’s actions could be viewed as constituting a ‘supporting and guiding’ model
of mentoring in which a mentor assists a mentee to reflect on their practice and sup-
ports them to explore and experiment with their practice, providing suitable chal-
lenges and advice along the way. Many teacher mentors would recognise their own
actions within this model of mentoring as they engage in a professional learning
space with preservice, early career and, sometimes, more experienced colleagues.
Thus, for them, the most common conception of a space for mentoring is within
educational settings, both inside and outside the classroom, and the actors in that
space are preservice, beginning and supervising teachers. The ‘supervising’ role,
however, is also a common conception of how teacher mentors in these spaces carry
out their role. This is because the actions of these people are so often perceived of
as primarily evaluative (Kemmis, Heikkinen, Fransson, Aspfors, & Edward-Groves,
2014 ). An alternative conception of teacher mentor would see those in the role focus
on processes of collaborative and mutual ongoing education.
According to Hobson, Ashby, Malderez, and Tomlinson ( 2009 ), mentoring, as a
relational space in which ongoing teacher education might occur, has featured in
research literature since the 1980s. Those involved in mentoring relationships, how-
ever, hold different views as to the purpose and practices of mentoring, and such
views often reflect both the context and the times (Ambrosetti, 2010 ; Devos, 2010 ),
particularly in relation to education policy. Thus, as Kemmis et al. ( 2014 , p. 155)
explain, mentoring remains a contested concept in need of further exploration and
elucidation. In mentoring relationships, the mentor is usually considered as the
‘expert’ person and the mentee as the ‘novice’. Indeed, the Australian Professional
Standards for Teachers (Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership
(AITSL), 2012 ) make it clear that only those teachers working at the level of ‘Highly
Accomplished’ would be offering support and advice, as a more experienced
teacher, to another colleague.
Unlike traditional pairings, where these roles are fixed for the duration of the
relationship, I see the mentor/mentee roles as fluid and reciprocal. In any given
mentoring relationship, the mentor is the person who takes the lead in facilitating
the learning process at a particular point in time. In the next learning moment, they
may be the mentee. The aim of mentoring is not to preserve the status quo (Kennedy,
2005 ) by inducting new teachers into ‘the way we do things here’ but rather to trans-
form teaching work through the ongoing education of all involved. Thus, transfor-
mation implies change, but I do not advocate change for its own sake. Rather, the
6 Distinguishing Spaces of Mentoring: Mentoring as Praxis