Colley, Helen (2002) A ’rough guide’ to the history of mentoring from a Marxist

Mentoring is now a favoured policy initiative in a number of countries, including Britain and North America, both as an element of professional development, and in addressing social exclusion. The former is of direct relevance to teacher education. The latter is a key issue affecting teachers today, as they have to liaise with mentors allocated to pupils and students. Yet the concept of mentoring remains confused. This paper reviews the literature, deconstructing its mythical representations and its celebratory bias. It applies, from a feminist perspective, the dialectical materialist method to the inter-relationships between essence and appearance in mentoring. It identifies four distinct historical stages in its development. These reveal that official concepts of mentoring have shifted from dominant groupings reproducing their own power, to subordinate groupings reproducing their own oppression. The conclusion suggests a research agenda for more detailed empirical investigation of mentoring in the field of teacher education. Mentoring is highly popular. Mentoring is the ‘in’ thing. It has become highly popular in a number of (mainly Anglophone) advanced capitalist countries over the last two decades, and is increasingly de rigueur as an element of policy solutions in a wide range of contexts. It is now a key feature of initial training in public service professions, for example in the fields of teaching, nursing, and career guidance, as well as in the development of business managers. Mentoring has also moved to centre stage in many of the US and UK governments’ initiatives, in both compulsory and post-compulsory education, to address social exclusion among young people. In the US, the two largest national programmes of this latter kind kind, Big Brothers Big Sisters and GEAR-UP, were using over a million volunteer mentors in 2000, and both are targeted to double in size in the next few years (Miller, 2002). Similar projects abound at state level, and this growth is reflected in Canada, Israel, Sweden and Australia. In England, youth mentoring emerged in the mid-1990s in localised schemes, funded through short-term, noncore sources which swam against the tide of Conservative government policies in education and guidance (Ford, 1999). Now, embraced enthusiastically by the New Labour government elected in 1997, it has appeared as a major ingredient of every new youth transition programme, such as the New Deal and the Learning Gateway. The new Connexions interagency support service for 16-19 year olds represents the culmination of this trend, creating a new profession of Learning Mentors (for young people in school) and Personal Advisers (for those in post-16 transition). Almost 3,000 such mentors are now in post, and a total of 20,000 are to be trained for Connexions. In all of these initiatives, thousands of additional volunteer mentors are also being used. Since mentoring first appeared in academic literature in the late 1970s, noticed then as a sporadic and usually informal phenomenon, these developments show that it has now been elevated to an unprecedented degree of systematic and official organisation. This paper draws on a recently completed research project into the power dynamics of mentor-mentee relationships in the context of mentoring for ‘disaffected’ youth (Colley, 2001