Indigenous mentor's understandings of being a mentor in higher education : insights from a Canadian university

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

This article introduces the voices of Indigenous mentors, which have been overlooked in mentoring research. This study addressed how mentors understood their role in nurturing student competence, connection, and agency; key ingredients of self-determination. Indigenous mentors participated in conversational interviews, which were examined from traditional academic and pastoral perspectives and from the perspective of self-determination theory. Six themes emerged from the analysis: mentors as knowledge brokers; facilitators of belongingness; supportive and empowering, guides, self-managers and as enablers to help mentees become self-determined. Most of these themes align with previous literature on mentoring and add insight into a small but growing body of research findings on student mentors from Indigenous backgrounds. Notably, one of the themes, mentors as self-managers, has largely been neglected in research on mentoring involving students from Indigenous backgrounds. The implications for giving voice to Indigenous mentor views are discussed in the concluding section.
Original languageEnglish
Number of pages23
JournalMentoring & Tutoring: Partnership in Learning
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2025

Open Access - Access Right Statement

© 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Indigenous mentor's understandings of being a mentor in higher education : insights from a Canadian university'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this