Mentoring

In a recent feature article published in Educational Researcher (2014) Philip Dawson argued that more than three decades of mentoring research has yet to converge on a unifying definition of mentoring. Quoting Jacobi (1991) in her review of undergraduate mentoring, he sustains that the lack of a common definition grows out of the diversity of relationships that are classified as mentoring. Dawson, as Wrightsman (1981), Jacobi (1991), Crisp and Cruz (2009), are all positioned within the literature of mentoring in higher education, with a distinctive focus on mentoring students in higher education. As I read the article and looked at its reference list, to my surprise I discovered almost no reliance on research studies on mentoring in the broader context of teacher education. Given the wealth of conceptual and empirical publications on mentoring in teacher education, one would expect to find some mention of leading studies in this area, especially since they offer insights on the generic character of mentoring and its growing recognition as a professional practice grounded in an empirical body of knowledge to guide standards and measures of professionalism across disciplinary contexts.