Navigating academic mentorship as active, knowing, and moral subjects

ABSTRACT

Drawing on Foucault’s governmentality, this study examines five academic mentors’ narratives of their experiences in a Vietnamese university. The data collected through semi-structured interviews show how the participants responded to the government’s, the institution’s and cultural influences on their mentoring practice. They were able to form their own judgment, knew of the institution mentoring’s failings and reformed the discourses through which they were positioned. They downplayed the hierarchy in the relationship, negotiating their culturally and socially constructed patronage role and reporting power. By embracing the resistance discourse, they shaped themselves as active, knowing, and moral subjects. The ‘gaze’ from the government, institution, and culture, however, created a level of assimilation and prevented them from disturbing the mainstream mentoring. The study additionally advances knowledge of academic mentoring and Vietnamese HE governance.

KEYWORDS:

• Academic mentoring
• Foucault
• governmentality
• discourse
• Vietnamese higher education policy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ 1 Pseudonyms are used for all the participants to protect anonymity.

Additional information

Funding

This work was a PhD research project, sponsored by the Prime Minister’s Australia Asia Endeavour Award.

Notes on contributors

Minh Nguyet Nguyen

Minh Nguyet Nguyen completed a PhD in the areas of academic mentoring policies. She has been teaching higher education subjects in teacher education and language teaching. Her research interests include active learning, curriculum development, sociolinguistics, critical discourse analysis and higher education policies. Her recent projects have focussed on supervising international doctoral students, mentoring early career academics, youth agency in public diplomacy, scholars’ development program and international education.