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Educational Action Research
Connecting Research and Practice for Professionals and Communities
Volume 17, 2009 - Issue 4
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Articles

Fostering a theoretical and practical understanding of teaching as a relational process: a feminist participatory study of mentoring a doctoral student

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Pages 505-521 | Received 06 Jun 2008, Accepted 24 Jun 2009, Published online: 05 Nov 2009
 

Abstract

We were seeking to disrupt the practice of fostering theoretical understandings about teaching and learning in our graduate courses that had little connection to students’ teaching practices. We also desired a mentoring approach for graduate students in education that would foster an understanding and practice of teaching as a relational process. This paper provides a practitioner account of an action research study focused on the development of such an approach. In a semester‐long feminist participatory study, we utilized weekly dialogues, reflective journals, classroom observations and written documents to explore the mentoring experience of one graduate advisor, one graduate teaching assistant, and two critical friends. Through the action research process, a new mentoring approach grounded in the relational process of teaching was realized along with a new understanding of the place of authority and vulnerability in negotiations between mentor and student.

Notes

1. The graduate teaching assistant used this term to describe herself and acknowledged the commonly used Native American term.

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