Professional experience, mentoring and transformative spaces in initial teacher education: a praxis perspective

This paper unpacks the place of context and how this can define what mentoring can look like. Specifically, the notion of diversity and understanding the preservice teacher’s pathways to university, background and personal values are explored. This complexity of context does impact on how mentoring is enacted and the negotiation of values, we argue is the foundation stance that both the mentor and mentee should begin with. We explore this notion through the lens of Boler and Zemblas’ (2003) ‘pedagogy of discomfort’ framework. This notion of understanding difference and diversity (or what is often termed as differentiation in the delivery of curriculum content) we argue, needs to be applied to mentoring the preservice teacher. A vignette of supporting students who enter university via alternative pathways, including the VET sector stream will be unpacked as an example of how this position can be applied in teacher educational organisations to reduce inequity and power imbalances.