Domain of Participation

Abstract

In this chapter I discuss the conceptual roots of Participation as a domain of praxis in mentoring. Drawing on authentic cases, examples, excerpts, and empirical sources, the sections in the chapters illustrate and critically explore the forms and meanings that participation takes in praxis. Specifically, the different sections illustrate how mentoring engages the mentor in mediating, supporting, managing, establishing, and sustaining relationships in dialogue. Through positioning and construing he/she acts upon the conventions, the rights, duties, and obligations of the mentor and mentee as speakers. In the process, the mentor constantly confirms and validates how forms of interaction and participation that unfold throughout the discourse are constrained and shaped by the formal and informal rules of interaction of a particular context. At the interdiscursive encounter between forms of practice and forms of positioning and construing, the mentor appropriates mediational tools. These are informed by his/her sense of responsibility and commitment as agent, participating in manifold networks of professional and relational texts. As mentors mediate persons, context, and content they validate and affirm interactions, they carry out agency, and they appropriate mediational tools to reconcile between different educational texts. As they assume supportive roles, they recognize culturally diverse texts, they intervene guided by a sense of commitment and responsibility, and they are activists informed by an ethics of care, recognizing privileged and rejected discourses in activity. As they manage accountabilities, they negotiate contradictions in interaction and deal with conflicts of loyalty and commitment while carrying out agency. As they establish and sustain relationships, they attend to culturally valued texts in potentially intimidating interactions, they appropriate texts from teaching and mentoring interdiscursively, they engage in validating and affirming reciprocal communal learning, and they hold themselves responsible for modeling formative leadership agency. The sections in the chapter explore the different encounters between forms of practice and forms of positioning and construing in Participation, as they unfold in authentic exemplars of mentoring practices in a variety of educational contexts.