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The seminar series will take place over eighteen months and will comprise of four day seminars and a two-day symposium. Academics from sociology, education, career guidance, social policy, youth studies and child and family studies will be invited to work collaboratively with research users to examine the concept of mentoring as it has been developed in the UK and to take a critical approach to theorising the concept. The series will be breaking new ground in developing a shared research agenda based on a process of rigorous critical reflection on a key policy issue. It will provide a unique opportunity to strengthen the evidence base, to link empirical and academic work and initiate a process of interactive dissemination.
The seminars will explore the underlying assumptions of current mentoring practice and will examine how mentoring has been absorbed into youth policy in the UK and Europe. From this critical perspective the remaining seminars will explore in depth the potential of concepts such as social capital and resilience for theorising work on mentoring.
The organisers have attended ESRC seminars on related topics in the past and feel it is important to find some mechanism which draws together the learning from the individual seminars. We propose to do this by holding a smaller final symposium with key individuals who will be invited to consider emerging themes and findings from the seminars.
The seminars will take place in York, Manchester, Edinburgh and Aberdeen. The format will be four invited presentations, each followed by discussion. Both researchers and research users will be invited to present and speakers will be asked to provide a brief summary of their presentation in advance. The format for the final symposium requires each of the key invitees to prepare a short statement before the meeting reflecting on their learning from the events they have attended and outlining areas for further discussion. This will enable the drafting of an appropriate programme which various of the participants will be asked to lead. We envisage written reflective pieces as the outcome from this process and will seek to negotiate a special issue of a journal to disseminate the findings from the symposium. The themes of the four seminars are as follows:
Youth mentoring in UK social policy
The starting point for this seminar series is an exploration of the concept of mentoring, its impact on social policies for young people and its theoretical roots. What discourses underlie the application of mentoring interventions? Could mentoring be described as an intervention born out of a ‘moral panic’ that engages with broader themes about the role of youth and families in contemporary western society or does it represent an innovation that connects with communities and social networks? What are the implications of importing US policy thinking about young people into the UK cultural context? How do European frameworks connect with developments in the UK? The evidence for the benefits of youth mentoring as a form of intervention and the implications of this approach will be critically assessed.
Coleman’s and Puttnam’s work on social capital has been influential in the shaping of youth mentoring interventions in the UK. How well does this approach, in particular, the ideas of mentoring as providing a form of ‘bridging’ capital, help in theorising the concept of mentoring? How helpful is Bourdieu's notion that social capital is handed down through families as a way of retaining power and privilege? How does this compare with Coleman's view of social capital as a fragile, but key component of social cohesion and how do these perspectives help us to frame youth mentoring? How does the context of the ‘field’ relate to the accumulation, circulation and exchange of social capital? Can theories of social capital set mentoring within a framework which enables analysis to take account of structure and agency? Do notions of social capital simply represent a post hoc rationalisation for one form of social engineering?
How does mentoring policy interact with dominant discourses about families and relationships? Is intergenerational support inevitably a protective factor and where does it connect with mentoring? What issues arise within social networks and communities in which mentoring has been adopted as a means of dealing with social exclusion? What are the implications for young people whose social networks are deemed to be problematic? Does Colley’s notion of ‘engagement’ mentoring illuminate these processes? What forms of relationship does mentoring take? How do the roles of mentor/mentee develop? What potential exists for personal and professional learning? To what extent does the context of ‘professional friendship’ illuminate these relationships and how can these ideas be incorporated into the theorising of mentoring?
As with social capital, the concept of resilience has been influential in a developing mentoring literature, but it is often poorly explained, appears to cover a wide range of factors and is often interpreted from a psychological perspective as a quality that rests in the individual, either innately or as a consequence of nurturing activities directed at the individual. Is there a broader understanding of resilience which can be used to take better account of the social context in which young people are raised and make their transition to adulthood? The seminar will consider recent approaches to the study of resilience in young people and relate these to frameworks that seek to examine the construction and negotiation of social identities.
The symposium will explore key themes emerging from the above seminars with the intention of building a more rigorous theoretical framework for understanding mentoring.
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School of Education · University of Aberdeen · MacRobert Building ·
King's College · Aberdeen · AB24 5UA · UK
Telephone: (+44) 1224 274776 · Fax: (+44)1224 274900 · E-mail:
education@abdn.ac.uk
Page last modified: Thursday, 11-May-2006 17:20:35 BST
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