Mentoring is a favoured practice across many fields. All professional schools, from schools of medicine and education to clinical psychology and legal education are charged with preparing their students for professional practice. This is addressed through extended placements in field settings, with formal mentorship arrangements. Mentoring is typically defined as a dyadic relation between a seasoned expert in the field (the mentor) and a less experienced novice (the mentee) (Kram, 1985; Frei et al., 2010). It is a process in which a mentor sustains ongoing “relationships based on personal caring, emotional support and nurturing” while at the same time also “guiding, instructing, imparting knowledge, and challenging the novice” (Orland-Barak, 2014, p. 180). While the importance of mentored placements, from a programme perspective, is often primarily framed in terms of supporting students in translating theory to practice, there is a lot more at stake. Students are not only inducted into the profession’s core competencies, but also into the identities, values, ethical commitments and related notions of what it means to be a ‘good’ or ‘proper’ professional in their field of study (e.g., a good teacher, a good clinician, or a good lawyer). Making this explicit immediately highlights how complex and volatile mentoring practice is, as it cannot solely rely on instrumental expertise, but inherently involves relational, moral and ethical dimensions. 

Existing mentoring research has struggled to adequately reflect these complexities in and through its theoretical and methodological choices. A recent meta-review of mentoring research (van der Kloot et al., 2025) demonstrates a strong focus (and reliance) on individual capacities and attributes of mentors and mentees. Such a focus is also visible in the surge of research on ‘effective mentoring’ (e.g., Crutcher & Naseem, 2015; Goldhaber et al., 2020) and the widespread development of mentor standards (Burns et al., 2016). Moreover, much of the existing research on mentoring remains siloed within professions, with separate networks, publication outlets, theoretical traditions and analytical vocabularies. This represents a missed opportunity for the further development of the pedagogy of mentoring, as many of the issues and challenges encountered in mentoring practice are shared across professions. At the same time, the fragmented state-of-the-art constitutes a missed opportunity for research, as it makes cumulative work more difficult and risks rendering research overly incremental (i.e., devoid from significance or impact). Moreover, confining research empirically to a single reality or setting prevents analytic leveraging of contrasts across professions in view of discovering relationships among mechanisms (theory) (Eisenhart & Graebner, 2007).

Against this backdrop, a large-scall research project on mentoring was initiated in 2021 in Flanders (Belgium) with a twofold ambition: 1) developing the theoretical and methodological resources to theorise mentoring as a relational phenomenon that emerges from the discursive constrains and resources in particular contexts; and 2) operationalising and validating this perspective through a comparative ethnographic case-study of mentoring practice in teacher education and medical education. In the final stage of the project, the outcomes of the ethnographic study were further refined in a series of focus group interviews with a larger number of mentors and students across different professions. This paper focusses on this final, and crucial, stage of the project. 

The paper addresses the following questions: 

• What can be learned from cross-professional comparison about the key mechanisms and dynamics of mentoring practice? 
• How might this inform a pedagogy of mentoring that remains sensitive to the situated nature of mentoring practice, while also offering principles and understandings that resonate more broadly across programmatic, institutional, regional and national contexts? 

The focus groups reported on in this paper, are part of a larger, multi-stage research project. In the first stage of the project, assumptions around mentoring as a relational, moral and ethical practice (see above) were translated into a discursive perspective, building on earlier work (o.a. Bruneel & Vanassche, 2023). More specifically, we combined insights from positioning theory (o.a. van Langenhove & Harré, 1998) and frame analysis (o.a. Benford & Snow, 2000). Together, these perspectives allow to account for the negation of mentors’ and students’ rights, duties, and relationships, as well as for how expectations and meanings of mentoring are (re)produced in practice. This theoretical-analytical framework subsequently informed ethnographic fieldwork in which seven mentoring dyads from medical education and teacher education were shadowed during an extended placement. This fieldwork informed the development of a guide for semi-structed focus group interviews (Wilkinson, 1998) with a larger number of mentors and students, recruited from medical education, teacher education and the adjoining field of clinical psychology. Focus groups were organised separately for mentors and for students, to avoid power asymmetries and to create a forum in which the perspectives and experiences of each group could be articulated openly. Within each profession, a total of eight to 12 mentors and eight to 12 students participated. The analysis of the focus group data was informed by the theoretical-analytical framework developed in the first stage of the larger project. This entailed close attention to the interaction between processes of positioning (i.e., the negotiation of rights, duties, and relationships) and framing (i.e., constructions of the purposes of and expectations for mentoring). After verbatim transcription, the data were coded inductively (using codes generated from the data by examining participants’ perspectives and experiences) and deductively (using the analytic concepts from the stage 1 framework). Following coding, the analysis proceeded through a nested case-study logic. In a first analytic phase, all mentors, regardless of profession, and all students, regardless of profession, were analysed together. This allowed for the identification of shared mechanisms across mentoring positions. In the second phase, all mentors and mentees within each profession were analysed together, enabling understanding of how these mechanisms were shaped by profession-specific contexts. In a final phase, a cross-case analysis was conducted to identify patterns and contrasts across professions, mentors and students. Memo-writing (Miles & Huberman, 1994) and constant comparison (Strauss & Corbin, 1998) were used to ensure the validity of findings.

Findings will be presented in the form of assertions for action and understanding, drawing on the work of Pinnegar and Hamilton (2009). These assertions are deliberately not formulated as “to-do’s” or “how-to’s”, as such formulations would negate the complexity of mentoring practice that this study aims to speak to. Instead, they function as heuristics for making sense of mentoring practices and for supporting more informed judgements for action. The forms of action addressed concern mentors and students, as well as programme coordinators and researchers committed to mentoring as a relationally sustained practice. 1) Mentoring arrangements enact a powerful hidden curriculum about what counts as a ‘good’ professional. This hidden curriculum is embedded in the structure, organisation and associated artefacts (e.g., portfolio templates, guidance for mentors and mentees) of placements, which privilege particular forms of acting, being and relating, and may unintentionally counteract the kinds of professionals programmes aim to educate. 2) The critical reflection required for students’ professional learning and development depends on a mentoring relationship that balances safety and challenge (see also Berry, 2008). 3) Mentoring relationships mediate not only learning processes (assertion 2), but also the perceived legitimacy of mentors’ expertise and advice. How students frame and respond to mentors’ contributions is shaped by the relational history between mentor and student, and the discursive negotiation of authority and trust. 4) The tension between assessment and support in mentoring is potentially productive for students’ learning and development when embedded in a relationship that adequately balances safety and challenge (assertion 2). Eliminating this tension (e.g., by formally excluding mentors from evaluation) risks obscuring its pedagogical potential. The assertations are elaborated in dialogue with empirical materials and relevant literature, in view of developing core principles of a pedagogy of mentoring that can inform future research and practice across professions.

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