When we think about the transformation of higher education, and in particular, the critical need for academic professional development, the old age adage of ‘dime a dozen’ comes to mind – there is no shortage of legislative frameworks that forefront the imperatives of academic professional development in South Africa’s transforming higher education institutions (HEIs). For these reasons, taken together, higher education occupies a critical role in advancing South Africa’s broader transformation agenda. Nearly three decades ago, the transformation of higher education was positioned as key in advancing ‘… South Africa’s political, social and economic transition’ (Department of Education 1997:3). Within this context, South Africa’s HEIs’ transformation agenda extends beyond access to encompass shifts in institutional culture (Dullaart et al. 2023; Menon 2024), pedagogical and curricula practice (Ajani 2024), culturally responsive and decolonised teaching (Chawaremera 2024) and the advancement of social justice and equity (Heleta & Dilraj 2024). Framed in this way, transformation necessitates deliberate support for academic professional development, particularly in response to historical exclusion and social justice concerns (Dullaart et al. 2023; Menon 2024).

Academic professional development is understood as a continuous, situated process through which academics enhance teaching, scholarship and professional practice in support of student learning and institutional goals, shaping competence, professional identity and teaching practice through relational support such as mentorship (Sipuka & Motala 2023; Wardak, Huber & Zeivots 2024). From this perspective, higher education transformation positions academics as central to developing graduates who contribute to national prosperity, underscored by the view that ‘good teaching is a vital contributor to student learning and success’ (Department of Higher Education and Training 2018:5). Student success is a multidimensional construct encompassing academic progression, personal development and well-being, while academic excellence refers more narrowly to high academic achievement (Kamara et al. 2024). In this study, academic excellence is therefore treated as one outcome of student success. Student success is shaped by interconnected factors, including academic mentoring (Kamara et al. 2024), responsive teaching practices (Micallef 2025) and innovative pedagogies (Kumar, Sharma & Sharma 2025). These outcomes are closely linked to academics’ professional learning and development rather than student performance alone (Matope & Baleni 2023). Within this context, my own academic professional development, particularly informal mentorship, is positioned as a relational mechanism that supports student success.

Mentorship contributes significantly to academic professional development by supporting critical consciousness, teaching quality, research competence, professional renewal and academic excellence (Kingiri, Andersen & Hanlin 2024; Nabi et al. 2025; Nuis, Segers & Beausaert 2023). While mentorship may be formal or informal (Jeong & Park 2020), this study foregrounds informal mentoring as it emerges through everyday academic practice within communities of practice, understood as relational spaces for shared learning through dialogue and participation (Bacsu et al. 2024; Kayyali 2025). At their intersection, informal mentoring and communities of practice enable collective, relational learning that supports professional identity, pedagogical innovation and institutional transformation beyond policy alone (Hooper & Garin 2024; Kleinschmit et al. 2023; Wenger 1998). Informal mentoring further fosters reciprocal relationships that support professional confidence, pedagogical growth and academic belonging, particularly for early-career academics (Kairat & Altun 2024; Kayyali 2025). Taken together, these relational mentoring practices can be understood as a pathway through which academic professional development strengthens teaching quality and pedagogical confidence, thereby creating conditions that support student success and contribute to academic excellence. This underscores the importance of HEIs intentionally enabling and valuing communities of practice in which informal mentoring can be sustained as part of academic professional development.

More often than not, however, these communities of practice remain out of reach and unfortunately, ‘the conditions which enable and constrain the professional learning of academics in their role as teachers have not received serious attention in South Africa’ (Council on Higher Education 2017). In recognising that the higher education sector finds itself in somewhat of a crisis, the Staffing South Africa’s Universities Framework (SSAUF) (DHET 2015), as a response, initiated a framework to advance a transformative, comprehensive approach to building capacity and developing future generations of academics (Department of Higher Education and Training 2015:3). Dhunpath, Matisonn and Samuel (2018) report that what is notable in this framework is the absence of any substantive discussion around mentorship, socialising academics into academic culture, and importantly, around what it means to be a good university teacher. While the SSAUF (DHET 2015) foregrounds capacity building, it remains insufficiently explicit about how transformative academic professional development is realised in practice, particularly through informal, relational processes such as mentoring and communities of practice (Hlatshwayo 2024). This limitation points to the importance of examining how such practices complement policy frameworks to sustain academic development and institutional transformation (Hlatshwayo 2024; Van Schalkwyk et al. 2022). Within this framing, HEIs are positioned as key enablers of professionally skilled communities of practice, where informal mentoring can be nurtured as a relational mechanism for ongoing academic professional development. More recently, the National Framework for Enhancing Academics as University Teachers (NFEAUT) (DHET 2018) conceptualises teaching as an embedded, collective practice, foregrounding collegiality and openness to peer engagement as key enablers of teaching quality. While these policy efforts signal important progress, the enactment of mentorship and collegial practices remains uneven across institutional contexts.

Within this vacuum, many academics, including myself, find innovative ways to bridge these policy voids. In my own case, this bridge took the form of informal mentorship relationships with Mentor A and Mentor B, which emerged organically through everyday academic interactions, shared teaching spaces and ongoing collegial dialogue rather than through a formal institutional programme.

Drawing on selected journal entries, this reflexive autoethnographic account seeks to answer a central question: How did relational, informal mentorship within a community of practice shape my academic professional development?

Situated within this context, this study is framed as a reflexive autoethnographic account. Rather than documenting mentoring practices, outcomes or skills development in observable or evaluative terms, the analysis foregrounds how informal mentoring was experienced and made sense of over time. Particular attention is given to reflexive shifts in teaching confidence, pedagogical presence, academic identity and the development of a critical voice, as these unfolded through participation in a relational community of practice. Academic professional development is therefore examined as a lived and reflexive process rather than as a set of discrete acts, outcomes or developmental milestones, with insights offered for resonance rather than generalisation.

I am a 43-year-old Indian woman. I am employed as a university lecturer in South Africa. My reflections on preparing for, and later assuming teaching responsibility for a professional master’s workplace counselling module provides the basis of this reflexive account. When preparing to take over teaching responsibilities for this module, I was excited but also apprehensive. The weight of stepping into this important space that had been occupied by a respected colleague for over two decades was heavy. As a means of processing my feelings, I began journalling to document and trace my fears, the lessons I learned, my challenges and successes.

My mentorship journey included various learning encounters and relational practices, such as shadowing the previous lecturer for a period of six months and engaging in informal conversations with both mentors. These mentoring relationships were informal rather than institutionally structured, emerging organically through collegial interaction and sustained professional engagement. Mentoring involved an extended period of shadowing Mentor A, participation in a workshop led by Mentor B and frequent informal conversations that responded to emerging professional needs rather than scheduled meetings. What these engagements offered me was a most valued opportunity to observe, firsthand, the pedagogical expertise and tacit knowledge accrued by both mentors over years. Taken together, the following critical lesson emerged most strongly for me: mentorship is not an isolated practice – it is an opportunity to observe and absorb the enacted, embodied rhythms of teaching. When I commenced teaching this module, it became clear that my own academic professional development and emerging competence were not only guided by formal training but, more significantly, by these shadowing and interactive encounters, which gave me room to self-reflect, engage in collegial dialogue and perhaps most importantly, to express and celebrate a critical voice I had long suppressed. Although my autoethnographic journal includes many reflections, this reflexive account foregrounds two critical themes that document my continuing academic professional development as a relational process embedded within a community of practice. These early reflections set the groundwork for the twin processes of learning in practice and becoming through practice, which unfold later in this article.

By grounding my account in a lived experience, a brief introduction of my two mentors is presented below. By offering their own self-descriptions, both mentors extend my narrative account by foregrounding their voices, alongside my own;

Mentorship in higher education may be formal or informal, differing in how relationships are formed and experienced (Jeong & Park 2020). This study foregrounds informal mentorship as an unstructured, relational form of academic professional development emerging through sustained collegial interaction within communities of practice, where professional learning and identity develop over time (Jeong & Park 2020; Rinfret, Young & McDonald 2023).

When mentorship is understood as informal, relational and enacted through practice, it is consistently framed in the literature as an embodied practice (Harrison et al. 2022; Hegna & Ørbæk 2024; Puoti, Latino & Tafuri 2025). Tucker (2025) offers a clear explanation of this: he explains the embodied nature of mentorship through the concept of ‘identify as pedagogy’, suggesting that who we are as teachers is a powerful pedagogical tool which is inseparable from how we teach. The idea of identity as pedagogy holds strong empirical evidence. For example, Puoti et al. (2025) make a case for viewing the body as a primary site for knowledge and relational practice. In South Africa, research consistently reflects, with particular emphasis on informal mentorship, academic spaces as critical sites for identity negotiation and professional belonging. Similarly, Ramhurry and Luneta (2021) found informal mentorship to be key in building confidence and competence among new academics. In another study, when compared to traditional mentorship approaches, Owusu-Agyeman (2022) found relational informal mentorship to yield better development outcomes for academics. In a study among black female academics, Hlatshwayo and Ngcobo (2023) findings locate informal mentorship as an enabler to developing a sense of academic belonging. What these studies collectively demonstrate is the important role of informal mentorship as providing critical sites for learning in practice and processes of becoming through practice, themes of which are strongly anchored and reflected within this reflexive account.

Wenger’s (1998) Communities of Practice framework highlights that the best forms of learning take place when you participate within a community. It is here where shared experiences, ideas and best practices are jointly explored, negotiated and re-negotiated. Learning therefore, in this context, is viewed as both social and relational. My reflexive analysis was guided by Wenger’s framework as a means to make sense of my own learning experiences.

In this study, academic professional development is conceptualised as a process of participation, practice and identity negotiation within communities of practice rather than equated with them. Drawing on Wenger, learning is understood as situated and social, with academics developing competence and professional identity through shared engagement in everyday academic work (Lave & Wenger 1991; Wenger 1998). Professional development is therefore inseparable from practice and shaped through relationships, dialogue and participation over time. Informal mentoring functions as a key relational mechanism in this process, supporting experiential learning and reflection through collegial interaction rather than formal programmes. Literature similarly identifies mentoring as central to knowledge sharing, socialisation and academic identity formation in higher education (Atenas, Nerantzi & Bussu 2023; Krishna et al. 2024; Simmonds & Dicks 2018).

In this study, the community of practice provides the relational space within which informal mentoring is enacted, rather than constituting mentoring itself. Through dialogue, shared practice and reflection, informal mentoring supports professional learning, identity negotiation and pedagogical confidence over time (Lave & Wenger 1991; Wenger 1998). Its significance lies in relational quality rather than formal structure, fostering identity formation, socialisation into academic norms and a sense of belonging and positioning transformation as a lived, relational process (Atenas et al. 2023; Krishna et al. 2024; Nabi et al. 2025).

Wenger explains three key features that occur within these communities. Firstly, mutual engagement refers to the ongoing interactions between people within the community, which result in the development of important relationships – in my case, these included various interactions with Mentor A and Mentor B through which I built meaningful, dialogical mentoring relationships that Wenger (1998) describes as critical to mutual engagement. Secondly, joint enterprise refers to working towards the shared goals held by the community. In my case, this was the collective commitment to support my academic professional development as I assumed teaching the workplace counselling module. Thirdly, shared repertoire refers to the shared tools, including language, routines and ways of doing learned in and through the community. Through our community, these repertoires included habits of reflection and values, which allowed me to approach teaching not only with technique but also with a sense of purpose and identity. For Wenger (1998), an organic outcome of being part of a community of practice where mutual engagement, joint enterprise and shared repertoires feature is identity formation. In my case, this pertains to a certain kind of professional I became in and through participation within this community: an academic with a critical voice. My reflections in this regard affirm Wenger’s (1998) claim that belonging to a community is a matter of becoming as much as it is a matter of doing, thus giving credence to the continuous process of academic professional development in which mentorship remains front and centre.

This study is guided by the following research question: How did relational, informal mentorship within a community of practice shape my academic professional development? Drawing on selected journal entries, a reflexive autoethnographic approach was employed to enable a critical reflection on my lived experience as a source of knowledge, particularly in relation to how informal mentoring relationships shaped my academic professional development.

As a central component of academic development, Aryal (2022) suggests that the practice of critical self-reflection remains central in both scrutinising and modifying deeply ingrained preconceptions with the view to foster deeper understandings of complex social phenomena, contributing to the call of delivering an education of excellence. Reflexive methodologies have been widely recognised as a beneficial tool with which to facilitate learning. While single autoethnographic accounts are not transferable to other contexts, the value of ethnographic work lies in the author’s account being viewed as an illustration and relatable experience to others who may experience similarities (Boncori & Smith 2020). These ideas align closely with broader scholarship that positions teaching as embodied practice. Kelchtermans (2018), for example, demonstrates this by showing how professional identity is shaped in and through relationships. Kreber (2013) makes a similar point by arguing that authentic teaching cannot be separated from educator identity.

In line with this reflexive autoethnographic framing, I draw on personal journal entries capturing my thoughts, feelings and experiences when both preparing to assume responsibility of the workplace counselling module and then later, as I began teaching this module. Methodologically, this study adopts a solo, reflexive autoethnographic approach rather than a collaborative or collective autoethnography (Chang 2016; Ellis, Adams & Bochner 2010). Reflexive entries were documented over a period of 11 months, generating 56 entries that documented my ongoing reflections on academic professional development experiences. The entries varied in form, including brief reflective notes, expressions of day-to-day thoughts and feelings, extended narrative reflections and memoir-style accounts prompted by specific encounters or experiences. Entries were not recorded on a fixed schedule; rather, they were documented unsystematically as and when experiences occurred, sometimes immediately and at other times days later, allowing for both in-the-moment reflection and retrospective sense-making.

While my mentors are included as co-authors and provide brief self-descriptions, their contributions serve to offer relational and contextual grounding rather than to constitute a shared analytic voice. The analytic focus of the study remains autoethnographic, centred on my own reflexive sense-making and interpretation of experience. The mentors’ self-descriptions are not analysed as data, nor do they form part of a collaborative analytic process; instead, they situate the informal mentoring relationships within the broader community of practice that shaped my academic professional development (Chang 2016; Ellis et al. 2010).

A purposively selected subset was analysed, focusing on entries that most clearly captured experiences related to the shifts in my sense of myself as an academic. Selection was guided by relevance to the guiding research question rather than representativeness, ensuring analytic focus and reflexive transparency. Selected entries were analysed through iterative, reflexive thematic analysis, attending to recurring meanings and changes in practice over time. During analysis, selected entries were initially subjected to inductive, open coding to identify recurring ideas, concerns and moments of learning associated with the process of my academic professional development. In keeping with autoethnographic traditions, coding was used as a heuristic, sense-making device rather than a fixed categorisation system, supporting interpretive depth and reflexive engagement with lived experience (Braun & Clarke 2022; Chang 2016; Ellis et al. 2010). Through repeated reading and reflexive engagement, these initial codes were compared, clustered and refined into broader analytic patterns reflecting shared processes and tensions across the entries. These patterns were subsequently abstracted into two overarching themes, learning in practice and becoming through practice. The analytic movement from codes to patterns to themes enabled the themes to function as conceptual bridges between lived experience, relational context and Wenger’s community of practice framework.

In line with autoethnographic research, issues of rigour and credibility are addressed through reflexivity rather than through traditional notions of reliability and validity (Chang 2016; Ellis et al. 2010). Credibility was supported through prolonged engagement with the data, sustained reflexive journalling over time and transparency in the analytic process (Lincoln & Guba 1985; Tracy 2010). The inclusion of mentor self-descriptions further situates interpretations within a relational context, enabling accounts to be read as a trustworthy and as an ethically grounded exploration of academic professional development within a particular community of practice (Lincoln & Guba 1985; Tracy 2010).

This study received ethics exemption from the Research Ethics Committee of the author’s university (details masked for review), confirming all protocols have met institutional requirements for ethical conduct. All reflections included are my own, and both mentors have fully consented to the inclusion of self-descriptions.

The findings, reflected in Table 1, are based on a selection of reflections that speak most directly to the centrality of the relational, informal mentorship shaping my academic professional development in a community of practice. These intentional selections offer empirical grounding for the two themes discussed in this article: learning in practice and becoming through practice. Although not exhaustive, these selections illustrate how discursive repertoires intersect with the observation of embodied presence.

As an Indian woman academic in South Africa, I did not arrive at these mentoring relationships empty handed. I carried memories, histories, doubts and a heavy weight of feeling vulnerable. What unfolded surprised me. The generational, racial and cultural differences between my mentors and myself did not create distance, as I expected they might. Instead, they opened up a space in which multiple ways of knowing could sit side by side, sometimes in tension, but importantly, never neutralised by sameness. Neither Mentor A nor Mentor B expected deference because of the positions they held. Mentor A’s view of teaching as a living, generative space and Mentor B’s belief that psychology must speak to the soul of society both shaped how I approached our mentorship as reciprocal learning. They met me with openness. Mentor A admitted her blind spots, spoke candidly about navigating South Africa’s shifting academic and political terrain, and in doing so, I joined her in the messiness of learning, testing and trying. Wenger (1998) speaks of learning through participation, through joining in and taking risks, and I can see that in our relationship where difference itself can be used as a lever for growth.

Mentor B, as a black male academic, brought a presence that was both steady and challenging. I still hear his calm reassurances when I experience doubt. He frequently took me out of my doubting space by asking me ‘Where does this come from?’ That question stayed with me. It allowed me to look deeper at my own context, my history, and the sources of my insecurities. Like Mentor A, he shared pieces of his story, not to position himself as authority but to show another way of holding vulnerability. For me, as an Indian woman in a South African academy marked by complex challenges, such encounters mattered. The differences marked by generation and race were not threatening. They were enriching. They gave me African-centred perspectives that strengthened my critical voice. In their own words, both mentors locate their work within transformation and inclusion – orientations that influenced my own becoming.

Neither of them engaged as ‘the authority’. Our developing relationship was organic, unplanned, threaded through honesty, affect and purpose. Their openness speaks to what mentorship literature now recognises as the importance of attunement, emotion and co-regulation. And alongside this, my own insecurities, while uncomfortable, were necessary. They reminded me that becoming in this field is about honouring the histories one carries.

A most affirming experience of this journey came from a message that a student shared with me. She was asked to give a ‘massive shout out’ to the person who had trained her in counselling. The words were simple, almost casual, but they carried weight. What resonated was not only the acknowledgement of my role but the way it revealed mentorship as relational and ongoing, shifting across academic spaces and reaffirming the idea of mentorship as a shared practice. What became clear for me in this message is that mentorship finds expression in how I teach, in how students take that learning into practice and in how communities beyond the academic space recognise my contribution. In this way, mentorship is never a closed loop. It travels, it stretches across contexts and generations, shaping identities, communities and futures in ways that are both deeply personal and profoundly collective.

This reflexive account has demonstrated that informal mentorship, when enacted through relational and embodied practices, is central to academic professional development. Noted earlier, developing competence as an academic is a long, complex and continuous process, and within this process, mentorship can serve as an opportunity to observe and absorb the enacted, embodied rhythms of teaching. The findings reveal how my developing competence was steadily nurtured through experimentation, reflection and the modelling of vulnerability, while my identity was shaped in ways that align with scholarship consistently framing mentorship as an embodied practice. Wenger’s (1998) conceptualisation of communities of practice was useful in interpreting these experiences, as they illustrate that academic professional development is as much about belonging and becoming as it is about acquiring a set of learned skills. A central outcome of this process was that I was able to reclaim my critical voice, a voice that had long been suppressed but which gradually became stronger through reassurance, challenge and participation in a supportive community of practice.

My experiences may be useful in addressing national higher education concerns in South Africa. Despite sustained policy initiatives to drive formalised mentorship, in practice, these endeavours remain inconsistent and underdeveloped. Policy frameworks such as the SSAUF (DHET 2015) and the DHET (2018) have foregrounded capacity building, yet, as Dhunpath et al. (2018) explain, there is an absence of any substantive discussion around mentorship, socialising academics into academic culture and importantly, around what it means to be a good university teacher. My reflections underscore that this omission is significant, as informal mentorship has shaped both competence and identity in ways that formal structures have yet to achieve.

For this reason, it is recommended that mentorship, as an innovative means to bridge policy voids, must be embedded intentionally within academic professional development frameworks. Both formal and informal mentorship should be recognised as a national priority, supported through institutional structures and resourcing and valued for their relational and embodied dimensions. In doing so, HEIs will not only strengthen the professional development of academics but also contribute to the broader transformation agenda, where teaching excellence and academic resilience remain essential for advancing South Africa’s political, social and economic transition.

In the end, this account affirms the centrality of relational, informal mentorship in shaping both my competence and identity in a community of practice. This intertwining of learning in practice and becoming through practice confirms the article’s central proposition, that professional growth unfolds as a relational, embedded and transformative process. And through this process, I was able to reclaim my critical voice, a voice that continues to shape my teaching, my scholarship and my contribution to the transformation of South African higher education. I hope that my account serves as an important reminder that higher education must value identity work alongside competence if it is to advance its transformation pursuits.