Analysing Youth Mentoring Conversations: A Sociolinguistic Ethnographic Approach

Abstract

Youth mentoring (Rhodes, 2002), is a pedagogic activity involving a non-parental adult who guides and supports a young person typically from a disadvantaged background to provide socioaffective and academic support. Engaging in one-to-one youth mentoring as service-learning in initial teacher education can help student-teachers learn relational and inclusive pedagogics (Lo, 2019). Many youth mentoring programmes offer mentor training covering such topics as mentoring roles, building trust, and developing social capital (Karcher & Hansen, 2014). However, given the spontaneous and open-ended nature of youth mentoring interactions and the challenges of gaining direct access to those interactions (Colley, 2003), there has been little research to date examining youth mentor-protégé conversation, that is, how topics of conversation are co-constructed, and how roles and relationships are built and negotiated through talk. These concerns are explored in this discourse-analytic study of youth mentor-protégé conversations. The inquiry is situated in a larger study which examined undergraduate student-teachers’ development of relational, social justice and inclusive pedagogies through a youth mentoring service-learning programme in a faculty of education at a university in Hong Kong. Student-teachers mentored youth from a low-ranked, high-poverty high school for one academic year, whilst studying theories and practices of youth mentoring and inclusive education. Many of the youth, or ‘protégés’, were newly arrived immigrants from Mainland China and from low-income families. Mentor-protégé dyads met regularly for face-to-face meetings and social activities. Of a cohort of 13 mentor-protégé dyads, the mentor-protégé interactions of four dyads were audio-recorded, translated from Chinese and transcribed in English. Ten dyad conversations totalling 4.5 hours of recorded interaction were analysed. The analysis was informed by sociolinguistic ethnography (Rampton, Maybin, & Roberts, 2015) and poststructuralist discourse theories (Gee, 2008) to understand how conversations constructed interpersonal relations and were mutually constitutive of broader institutional, sociocultural and sociopolitical processes in the youth mentoring programme and educational context in Hong Kong. Utilizing microethnographic discourse analytic categories (Bloome, Carter, Christian, Otto, & Shuart-Faris, 2005), the data was examined for discourse genres, themes and thematic shifts, interactional units, and intertextuality and intercontextuality. The conversations comprised both pragmatic interaction and casual conversation (Eggins & Slade, 1997). The most prominent theme was academic life, with educational discourses dominant in Hong Kong (such as study skills and habits, examination performance, and future work and study) being discursively reproduced in the interaction. A close analysis of three conversations between mentor, Anne, and protégé, Wendy, revealed how a caring mentor role was co-constructed and how personal sharing arose and shaped relations. The analysis also unpacked a thematic thread around Wendy’s father, which shifted the relational dynamics. These findings highlight the complexity of navigating “the mix of friendship, instruction, guidance and inspiration” (Coles, 1994, p. 110) that is youth mentoring. In addition, the findings suggest that even within a context of inclusive education, mentoring interactions may reinforce individualist competitive discourses in education. The need for and ways of attending to these tensions in youth mentoring will be discussed, with implications for initial teacher education.