In the last decade, mentoring in teacher education at the University of Limerick has been reconceptualised as Productive Mentoring for an academic practice of knowledge co-construction within a socio-political context where context, care and an aesthetic of productive possibility matter (Mooney Simmie & Moles, 2011). This framework defines the key principles in a master’s study dedicated to educational mentoring involving over 300 professional practitioners from a diversity of educational settings (e.g. primary and secondary schools and higher education settings). The study provides academic accreditation for mentors seeking to ‘problematise’ mentoring as a clinical practice of competences and pre-scripted dispositions and as networked communities within hidden differential power relations. This master’s study eschews the concept of action research as problem-solving to ‘improve’ mentoring practices using a knowledge application methodology of ‘what works’ within a standpoint of educational research as a strategic science. Instead, university tutors work with mentor teachers as co-constructors of knowledge for a specialised and advanced professional practice, within a school-university partnership, where care and professional agency are valued and where, from a radical pedagogy perspective, there is an ongoing quest for alterative discourses to emerge within an aesthetic of productive possibility (Lonergan, Mooney Simmie & Moles, 2012; Mooney Simmie & Moles, 2012). For this paper, we conducted a qualitative analysis of the ways in which practitioners in formal leadership roles (e.g. school principals, deputy principals, programme coordinators, assistant principals and university tutors), ‘problematised’ mentoring in their master’s studies and the alignment with a ‘Productive Mentoring’ framework (Mooney Simmie & Moles, 2011) and complexity theory (Opfer & Pedder, 2011). The study has implications that go beyond country and continent in relation to mentoring as problem-solving within a clinical practice or as problem posing by mentors acting as co-constructors of knowledge and agents of change and care, within a specialised and advanced professional practice.

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