Enhancing Support and Recognition for Teaching Mentors

We present research to understand and improve support and recognition for staff who mentor colleagues to develop their teaching. Mentoring is essential for supporting colleagues with their teaching, however, it is poorly understood and recognised, and as a result is uneven and underdeveloped as a pedagogical approach for enhancing teaching. Mentoring is integrated into Northumbria’s AdvanceHE accredited professional recognition programme, through the taught PGCAP for academics new to teaching, and the experiential HEA Fellowship route for experienced HE educators new to Northumbria. Mentoring also takes place informally to support colleagues new to teaching, to facilitate educational enhancement across programmes, as well as supporting educational career development. We are interested in understanding perceptions of mentoring in order to better support and develop policies and practices for staff across Northumbria.

As a group of academics located across disciplines and departments, we used cultural historical activity theory (CHAT) as a methodology to explore mentors' experiences of mentoring, in order to develop proposals to improve support for mentoring. We chose CHAT because of its focus on social practices in particular contexts, and its identification of contradictions as a source for change. This fitted our intention to make proposals to policy and practice to enhance mentoring for teaching. Initially we developed vignettes of our experiences of mentoring across disciplines and departments, through questions guided by CHAT. We developed a questionnaire for colleagues who are mentors across departments, using the CHAT framework. In this session we report on our research and initial analysis of the data.