Abstract
M.Ed. (Education)
The novice academic has served higher education institutions for a long time. These individuals are, due to the very nature of their positions, often “thrown in the deep-end” of academia and given the intimidating task of lecturing in an environment that they only knew as students. Very often, they are told to get on with the business of teaching with very little or no support from institutional heads or from new, more experienced colleagues. As a result, such neophytes often feel marginalised from full participation in such a community of practice: they are not fully engaged in academic discourse with their more experienced, permanent or tenure-track colleagues.
This study attempts to document the perspectives and experiences of novice lecturers’ mentorship practices at a university and its possible contribution to their social learning as academics. This study is conducted within the interpretivist paradigm of social inquiry, with the goal of coming to some understanding of the nature of novice lecturers’ experiences of mentorship practices in their first year(s) of teaching. The aim of the study was to explore how mentorship practices contribute to the social learning of novice lecturers; with the added focus on how they were able to perform their academic duties.
The study brought the following significant issues to the forefront: (1) the novice lecturers experienced isolation and loneliness with very little to no support from colleagues or from the institution itself. This significantly hindered their ability to perform their academic functions effectively and as such precluded them from being part of a community of practice; (2) Mentoring and Communities of Practice were found to serve as pathways to social learning: novice lecturers were able to learn informally by making connections with experienced colleagues or other novice peers; (3) remarkably, in the absence of a supportive environment, novices used survival tactics to “swim” rather than “sink” in the contested fields of academe, with a motivation paradoxically driven by no support from the experienced. By taking responsibility for their own learning, and being self-directed in essence, these novices were able to successfully integrate themselves into academe.