Mentees Voices: Disablers and Enablers for Mentorship in Initial Early Childhood Teacher Education

While the literature on mentorship is replete with references to relationships that examine the mentor perspective or the mentor-mentee relationship; less is known about the contextual accounts of mentees in initial teacher education (ITE) especially in early childhood in the South African context. The skewed knowledge generation and resultant power relations is counter-productive to understanding the agency of mentees. The aim of this chapter is to foreground the disablers and enablers that contribute towards understanding mentee experiences in multi-tiered mentoring relationships. The sociological perspective of agency provides insight into the mentees capacity to act and conditions that shape these actions. The chapter is based on a District-based Teacher Recruitment Project (DTRP) which involved the early childhood Bachelor of Education Foundation Phase students from a rural district in the Free State Province. This qualitative study draws on data generated through two group interviews that were analysed for their contributions for a mentee agency perspective. The findings show that the mentorship support was mainly directed towards financial, psychosocial, and pedagogic support. The complex arena of being in multi-tiered mentoring, led to notable tensions and affirming experiences that were enabling for student agency. Bearing in mind the vocality of the mentees and their positioning in agentic roles, this chapter calls for reframing mentoring through a social justice approach in ITE. This approach creates possibilities from the perspective of agents mediating action in power-laden spaces.