Academic professional development: A reflexive account of informal mentorship in a transformative context

Abstract

Despite policy directives prioritising professional academic development within South Africa’s higher education context, mentorship, as a key mechanism for situated learning, has yet to be embedded as a consistent, institutionalised practice. While various policies emphasise academic capacity building, the relational, performative and embodied nature of mentorship is seldom in the foreground. In this reflective account, I draw on my personal experience as a lecturer preparing to assume teaching responsibility for a master’s module on workplace counselling. I reflect on the role of informal mentorship, which emerged organically through relational exchanges in a community of academic practice. In this autoethnographic account, located within Wenger’s Community of Practice framework, I reposition mentorship from the academic periphery and recast it as integral to my academic professional development. My reflections draw on informal mentorship relationships with two mentors, an Indian woman (Mentor A) and an African man (Mentor B), whose contrasting but complementary approaches allowed me to express a critical voice I had long suppressed. This article reflects on a series of journal entries that informed the basis of two central themes: learning in practice, which centres on developing competence, and becoming through practice, which speaks to my academic professional development. Both are understood as relational, embedded practices. At their intersection, learning and becoming merge, revealing how competence and identity formation are shaped within communities of practice. This reflexive account consequently addresses a central question: How did relational, informal mentorship within a community of practice shape my academic professional development?
Contribution: The article offers a contribution to higher education discourse by reframing mentorship as a dynamic, relational practice, fostering both professional competence and a deeper sense of academic self.