You Are Too Shy to Be a Mentor: Rethinking Near-peer Group Mentoring and Mentors’ Disposition for Generic Competency Gains to Promote Student Partnership

Abstract

While teachers are grappling to cultivate students’ generic competencies, the literature supports near-peer group mentoring as an effective means alongside teacher involvement. However, given the existing destined “ideal dispositions” of mentors, some students are unfortunately discouraged from taking up the peer mentor’s role and are thus deprived of the corresponding benefits. While abundant research supports the view that ideal mentors contribute to mutually beneficial mentorship, this study examines an under-researched inquiry – do mentors who do not possess the ideal dispositions necessarily suffer from negative mentoring experience without any gains in generic competencies, and thus should not be granted the opportunity to be mentor? To that end, based on a near-peer group mentoring programme for 400 secondary school students in Hong Kong, this study interviewed three mentors whose self-perceived dispositions seemed unfitted for the ideal. The mentors were asked to share how they perceived their mentoring experience, to what extent their dispositions had affected their mentoring and whether they had developed any generic competencies through the programme. To triangulate mentors’ interviews, 363 mentees also completed a post-programme survey on their programme experience, such as the amount of support they got from mentors and the level of engagement. Regardless of their “unfitting” dispositions, the three mentors reported positive mentoring experience which was also corroborated by the mentees’ survey data. The results suggest that mentoring practices and mentors’ dispositions mediate the impact of the growth of generic competencies, which in return informs their future mentoring practices and contributes to more mutually beneficial mentorship. The current study is the first of its kind to examine and conceptualize the relationship between mentoring practices, mentors’ disposition and gains in generic competency. We argue that students’ disposition should not be a prerequisite for mentorship and advocate expanded eligibility for student mentors who are thus empowered as collaborative partners in developing generic competencies. By challenging the ideal mentor mind-set, the current study also contributes to underpinning further pedagogical moves to shift the traditional teacher-centred education landscape into a more reciprocal context.