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ABSTRACT
Mentoring beginning teachers' engagement in research has been an under explored aspect of the commonly published research into general teacher mentoring practices. To address this gap, this phenomenological study explores the research mentoring experiences of five mentors from various international contexts - Brazil, Ecuador, Cameroon and Turkey - as captured from their lived experiences. The data were collected through an open-response survey and analysed inductively. The participant mentors' responses indicated three dimensions concerning the pedagogy of mentoring beginning TESOL teacher researchers: developing autonomy through collaboration, bridging the theory-practice gap and nurturing the researcher self. Implications are included for mentoring beginning teacher researchers.
KEYWORDS
Mentoring, beginning researchers, TESOL teachers, phenomenology.
1. INTRODUCTION
Mentoring beginning teachers has been key to their development into teacher roles and adoption of effective teacher qualities, but stronger evidence is needed to confirm the influence of mentoring on beginning teachers' instructional practice (Ingersoll & Strong 2011; Wang, Odel, & Schwüle, 2008). Mentoring of beginning teachers is most effective when characterised by dialogic interaction based on mutual trust (Smith, 2020) offering socio-emotional support (Robnett, Nelson, Zurbriggen, Crosby, & Chemers, 2018) to overcome a key difficulty, lack of confidence. Mentoring at early stages of teaching career can provide opportunities to develop identity and experience growth (Johnson, 2003), to imagine and negotiate their teacher identity (Varghese & Snyder, 2018) and to develop resilience in the face of unpreparedness to teach (Morettini, Luet, & Vernon-Dotson, 2020). These benefits, in turn, contribute to their feelings of acceptance into the community (Morettini, Luet, & Vernon-Dotson, 2020) and reduction of low self-efficacy beliefs (Malderez & Bodóczky, 1999). These positive effects are especially enhanced when mentors' judgemental stance is minimised (Hobson, 2016).
This study explores how such benefits can also be traceable in mentoring teachers' research engagement. Studies increasingly report the process of encouraging reflective practice in TESOL beginning teachers (Farrell, 2016; Akbari, 2007), including a growing number of teacher research projects mentored by experienced educators (Dikilitaş & Wyatt, 2018; Smith, 2020). However, there is a dearth of literature that focuses specifically on the process of mentoring beginning teachers' engagement in research. In this regard, research engagement involving dialogic mentoring (Nahmad-Williams & Taylor, 2015) has the potential to inculcate beginning teachers with the complex set of research and...