Mentoring Undergraduate Bachelor of Arts Students at an Australian University Regional Campus

Abstract

A personal teaching project, developed over six years at a regional university campus, offered mentoring to capable and engaged students with limited subject options. Providing individual or near-individual instruction enabled the mentored students to deepen their learning, extend their discipline knowledge and consider career steps. With their undergraduate experiences thus enriched many students excelled in their special subject. This individualised training and mentorship, above the general learning threshold available or expected, resulted in high grades and several research outputs: posters at conferences, conference presentations and refereed journal articles. Interactively mentoring students also provided a learning process for the academic mentor. Significantly, mentors' experiences in academic mentor-student mentee relationships receives much less attention than students' experiences and satisfaction. In the contemporary ethos of student-centred learning, the present study supports and exemplifies mentoring pedagogy as inherent in passionate teaching. Reflecting on the mentor's experience here identifies features and practices learned or consolidated in developing effective, caring, and productive undergraduate student mentoring. For the academic mentor, managing each relationship in terms of encouragement, ethics, expectations and transparency has been important to its success. Although the work did not receive a formal workload allocation, outputs have benefits for students in terms of their CVs and growth in personal confidence. Benefits for academic staff include achieving co-authored research outputs and the university benefits through additional outputs to its overall research activity and culture.

The Perennials and Trends of Rural Education

“…Only four articles referred to ethics in their title or abstract (Burns, 2020;Jervis-Tracey et al, 2012;Kline et al, 2014;O'Dowd, 2010). While many articles point to ethical clearance from an institutional committee, the general absence of articles that discuss ethical practice or ethical research in rural education within the Journal suggests that, by and large, ethics is a forgotten topic that should deserve attention.…”

Community as an Anchor, Compass and Map for Thriving Rural Education

“…This issue incorporates priorities and perspectives being sought about alternative models of education for remote Indigenous adolescents (Britton, Redman-Maclaren, Ham & Bainbridge, 2020). It reflects on ways that Tasmanian parents are engaging other parents within their communities in discussion and planning for their children's post-school education (Kilpatrick, Burns, Katersky Barnes, Kerrison & Fischer, 2020) and the ways that rural undergraduate students are finding community and capacity through their academic mentors (Burns, 2020). The issue explores preservice teachers' notions of readiness for teaching in rural and remote schools following targeted placement activities (Hudson, Young, Thiele & Hudson, 2020) and considers the ongoing professional learning needs of mathematics teachers and the opportunities afforded by their communities of practice (Bui et al, 2020).…”

“…The third paper, by Burns (2020), offers insights into the community building occurring within and through an academic community within its rural context. This paper provides a reflexive autobiographical narrative of the space exploring undergraduate engagement in a range of themes including an underpinning passion for teaching, extending an ethic of care to students and a commitment to follow the mentoring journey wherever the interaction led.…”