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Similarly for Sebastian, his fixed view of ‘himself as a teacher’ limited his capac-
ity to be flexible in the teaching environment and got in the way of his ability to see
himself doing teaching differently. His mentor teacher struggled to understand what
was a potential disconnect between Sebastian’s commitment to his teaching identity
and his enacted practice as teacher. Instead, he ‘read’ Sebastian’s dogged commit-
ment to one line of pedagogical thinking as an unwillingness to teach at a level
appropriate for his primary school students.
What this vignette also illustrates is the complex and recursive process of socially
mediated learning that can comprise the professional experience. For teacher men-
tors and preservice teacher mentees, this is an experience they must work delibera-
tively together on, with the principles of communicative action in mind, if they are
to navigate the experience effectively. Moreover, since the professional experience
traverses the social, interpersonal and intrapersonal concurrently, mentoring prac-
tices and perspectives must find ways to take account of the inherently challenging
task that learning to teach entails.
Earlier we proposed that effective teaching demands an ability to connect with
one’s sense of self-worth and self-esteem, as well as the capacity to develop a strong
connection to the situation and its cultural context. When we see professional expe-
rience as the development of pedagogical knowing, acting and being (Dall’Alba,
2009 ), we can better articulate and make possible the kinds of mentoring relation-
ships that will support preservice teachers and their mentors through an otherwise
difficult process of ‘learning to be’.
Conclusion
In this chapter, we have proposed that in the professional experience setting, teacher
educators and preservice teachers are engaged in ongoing negotiations of identities
in practice or ‘learning to be’ teachers and mentor teachers. In this way, mentoring
and being mentored can be seen as an iterative negotiation and renegotiation of
social, relational and intrapersonal worlds concurrently. This view of the profes-
sional experience highlights new ways of understanding the pedagogical challenges
faced by both teacher mentors and their preservice teacher mentees. Doing so
acknowledges the identity work that mentoring in learning to teach entails, which is
distinctively different to the domains of professional knowledge and practice that
professional experiences are required to formally report on. Bahr and Mellor ( 2016 )
go some way to addressing this gap by noting the ‘positive personal qualities’ that
denote ‘quality’ in teaching yet remain unacknowledged by regulatory bodies.
Similarly the vignettes presented here attempt to offer new insights into the kinds of
challenges that ‘learning to be’ can entail. These include the importance of scaffold-
ing risk-taking, creativity and a ‘spirit of play’ with preservice teachers as outlined
in vignette 1; the benefits of fluid and reciprocal reformulation of ‘knowledge, skills
and fears’ in collaboration with preservice teachers as outlined in vignette 2; and the
M. O’Brien et al.