Student teachers’ perceptions of mentoring as an influencer of their professional teacher identity development

ABSTRACT This study investigated the role of the mentor lecturer in the development of the Professional Teacher Identity (PTI) of 838 fourth-year pre-service teachers while doing Work Integrated Learning at a South African University. The students reflected in group workshops on the role of the mentoring they received in their PTI development. In this qualitative, descriptive case study, a document analysis was conducted on transcriptions of the posters that the groups created. The results showed that the mentor lecturers ranked sixth out of nine as influencers of the students’ PTI development. The students felt misunderstood and unsupported. There are three possible interpretations of this finding: the role of the mentor lecturer is an unnecessary and unwanted feature of the teacher training programme, the mentor lecturer is not meeting the needs of the student, or the millennial generation into which this sample fits is not open to critical self-reflection and critique.