Youth Mentoring as Service-Learning to Develop Relational and Inclusive Pedagogies in Initial Teacher Education

Abstract

A key challenge in teacher education for social justice is preparing student-teachers to address social and academic disaffection in youth from marginalised communities. The quality of teacher-student relationships is central to this endeavour. One-to-one youth mentoring is a mode of service-learning that potentially facilitates pre-service teacher candidates’ appropriation of inclusive and relational pedagogies. However, inequality, economic anxiety and social and political tensions have magnified the intersubjective and ethical complexities of self-other relations. This study examines how studentteachers in a Hong Kong undergraduate teacher preparation programme developed relational and inclusive pedagogies as they mentored youth from a high-poverty local secondary school, whilst exploring and reflecting upon social and education inequality in Hong Kong society. I adopted a discourse-analytic approach in which mentoring relations are viewed as situated, social practices, and mentors and protégés are positioned by social discourses whilst appropriating, resisting or recreating them. Data included mentors’ reflective writings, interviews with protégés and mentors, and field notes of course sessions, group excursions and mentor support meetings. Through several cases of mentors and protégés relating across difference, I illuminate how mentoring relationships were discursively shaped, and explore the pedagogic and ethical consequences. I suggest that discourse analysis can help us unpack and grapple with some of relational tensions lurking within youth mentoring and service-learning in teacher education.