Abstract
Mentoring through professional conversation is a common practice among teachers in the education system globally. It corresponds to zone proximal development by Vygotsky. This qualitative study adopted an ethnomethodological research design to establish how teachers benefit from informal professional conversation. Six teachers from one Eastern Cape primary school in South Africa participated in the study through the purposive sampling method. The conversations took place in the participants’ school staff room for 30 minutes per day for the whole week. The researcher video-recorded the conversations with the full permission of the participants. The video recordings were reviewed many times before verbatim transcription. Selected episodes were further transcribed following Jefferson’s notations for this paper. Clayman and Gill’s conversation analysis levels were used to analyse the episodes further to establish how informal mentoring originates from workplace professional conversation. Findings show that teachers mentor colleagues informally through sharing past experiences and testing knowledge on emerging issues. Additional findings indicate that mentoring occurred informally through requesting advice and assessing feedback. Based on the above, the study concludes that mentoring is unknowingly offered informally through professional conversation in the workplace. The study also recommends and encourages teachers and other professionals to engage in professional conversations on work-related issues to support and build each other.
Presenters
Charity OkekeLecturer, Department of Education Foundations, University of the Free State, Free State, South Africa
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
Adult, Community, and Professional Learning
KEYWORDS
CONVERSATION ANALYSIS, MENTORING, PROFESSIONAL CONVERSATION, WORKPLACE LEARNING
