Whether you are working with beginners or experienced students‘, there are some common characteristics of a good recruiter/mentor.
Mentors should...
Be enthusiastic about social issues and teaching social studies; Be willing to reflect on their own practice; Be prepared to examine critically, with their mentees, their own practice; Be able to articulate their professional knowledge; Be open minded with the
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view that their approach to teaching and learning is not the only one; Be willing to develop their own skills in and understanding of geography teaching and learning; Be accessible, with a sympathetic and understanding approach to beginning teachers;
Have a positive and encouraging attitude; be supportive; Have the ability to be critical in a constructive manner; Be a good communicator and a good listener; Be committed to their role as a mentor; Be aware of ―best practice‖ and innovation in geography education and able to relate these to their practice. Mentors should be excellent teachers, Able to plan and implement organised and academically stimulating lessons.
Mentors should be able to interact, work well with others and be available. Mentors need to be able to listen and define a problem, generate alternative solutions, and suggest a viable course of action. Mentors need to make these suggestions and offer possible solutions without encroaching on the fragile and vulnerable autonomy of the teacher with which they are working. This is not an easy task for a confident, competent, expert teacher who may be more inclined to tell the teacher who is new to climate change model what needs to be done or how to best solve the problem. Thus, guiding is better than directing.
i) Mentor as Wise Teacher, Guide, and Friend
A wise teacher, a guide, or friends are often used to define a mentor. Smink (1990), for example, defines mentor as; A wise and loyal advisor, teacher or coach, any caring person who develops an on-going, one-on-one relationship with someone in need.
A mentor encourages, listens and gives advice, advocates, acts as a role model and shares information and experience. Smink‘s conceptualisation of mentor includes a number of the more commonly mentioned elements of what characterises a mentor or mentoring. This definition is very similar to interpretations shared by many, particularly those involved in school mentorship programme with at risk children.
Freedman (1993) has been involved in the mentoring movement for many years. He argues that if ―one-on-one‖ is not protected in the definition, the meaning and purpose of mentoring will lose its significance and importance.
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According to Freedman (1996), mentoring is a ―sustained, close, developmental relationship between a more experienced individual and a younger person (p. 4) .The meaning of many terms in these definitions are not self-evident. What does
―sustained‖ mean in a mentoring relationship? When is a relationship qualified as being ‗close‖? When do a series of visits count as a relationship? Is it 8 weeks, 12 weeks, 24 weeks, a year, or longer? How does trust develop and grow in a mentoring relationship between a young child and an adult? Smink‘s (1990) definition identified advocacy as one of the functions of a mentor. There has been considerable discussion about whether the terms ―mentor‖ and ―advocate‖ need to be differentiated.
ii) Mentors as Advocates
Advocacy has been a controversial issue in the mentoring movement and has raised questions for researchers who are concerned that mentoring has been misconstrued as advocacy (McPartland and Nettles 1991; Legters and McDill, 1995). They feel mentoring and advocacy has been used synonymously and would like to maintain a distinction between them. To distinguish between mentoring and advocacy, Legters and McDil (1995) suggest that mentoring is commonly defined as a one-on-one relationship between an adult volunteer and a student who needs support for achieving academic or personal goals. Advocacy is defined as a continuing set of relationships between an adult (volunteer or paid) and members of a group of students‘, in which the adult provides support and services by intervening on the students‘ behalf, monitoring participation in programme, or brokering additional services (mp.7).
McPartland and Nettles (1991) also argue that the two terms are different and warrant clarification. They offer the following contrasting definition;
Mentoring is commonly defined as a one-on-one relationship between a caring adult and a student who needs support to achieve academic, career, social or personal goals.
Mentor-student relationships can develop naturally or within structured interventions through activities designed to arrange, sustain and monitor matches ... [whereas advocacy is a supportive relationship wherein a resourceful adult (who may be called an advocate, programme coordinator, youth worker or counsellor) works with the same group of students‘ over a specified period of time and provides intensive instrumental, material and emotional support that can include assessing
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students‘needs for academic and social services, intervening on the students‘ behalf in schools and other institutions, monitoring students‘ participation in programmeas well as identifying and brokering formal services (p. 568-569).
In these definitions, mentoring empasises a one-on-one relationship while advocates may provide support for all members of a group of students‘. Is advocacy a critical part of a mentor‘s role? Does this depend upon the context of the mentoring?
iii) Mentors as Tutors
Some would argue that the word mentor is a glorified title for a tutor. In existing programme, distinctions have been made between mentoring intended to improve children‘s‘ academic grades and mentoring intended to enhance social emotional development in children. Is this distinction made because the first is associated with tutoring and the latter associated with mentoring? Should these be separated? Can a mentor not enhance a Childs social emotional development as well as the child‘s academic grades? Does academic growth not improve as social emotional growth improves? Does one not have an effect on the other? What does it mean to a child who is not progressing well in school to have a mentor? These questions deserve careful exploration given their significance for programme development.
Confusion also arises with tutoring. What is the role of a tutor? Are all mentors also tutors? What is the difference between an advocate, a mentor, and a tutor? What is the difference between being a mentor to a child and being a tutor to a child? Flaxman and Ascher (1992) observed that when children received care from people in remedial programme, it was fortuitous and unplanned and not considered or counted as part of the programme‘ effects. How far can the definition of mentorship be stretched or reduced before it loses useful meaning?
Although different conceptions of mentoring exist in current or recent programme, there are a number of characteristics that are most commonly referred to in related literature to describe and define mentors. These include someone who: advises, teaches, coaches, encourages, listens, shares information and experience; is caring, trusting, acts as a role model and is committed to establishing a regular, on-going close relationship with a mentee. The role of the mentor may indirectly involve
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advocacy in the sense that advocacy implies representing someone‘s interests, that is, looking out for another person. It may also entail tutoring because mentors engage in a variety of activities with the mentees, one of which may include assisting with school work. Mentoring has also been described as a process which involves giving and receiving. This dimension helps to explain what makes mentorship work, or what sustains mentoring. The following section deals with the giving and receiving in mentoring relationships.