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Abstract

There are growing numbers of African international students studying at Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in North America and the United Kingdom. Intercultural mentoring is one response to supporting students in navigating the complex cultural, social, and academic transitions from home to host countries. This article examines the experiences of 18 participants who had recently mentored African international students attending higher education institutions in Canada or in the UK. Semi-structured interviews with participating mentors were transcribed and analysed from a critical intercultural perspective. Results highlight four themes that provide insight into mentors’ approaches to intercultural mentoring: navigating fields of action and intervention, engaging in reflective practice, intercultural mentoring as a relational practice, and mentoring as a decolonising practice. Study findings provide insight into how intercultural mentoring relationships develop and evolve and how mentors approach mentoring relationships as sites that hold transformative learning potential for both mentors and students.

Keywords

Mentorship Africa internationalization international students experience intercultural higher education

Introduction

The number of Higher Education (HE) international students living in countries outside their own has increased significantly over the first decades of the twenty-first century (De Wit & Altbach, 2021). With this increase, the internationalisation of Higher Education has involved a number of different transitions that affect international students’ learning, career pathways, and identity development as students move into new and unfamiliar cultural spaces (Ploner, 2018). Although the transitions faced by international students may vary in scope and nature, some of the main areas identified in the literature focus on transitional challenges related to students’ academic expectations and sociocultural adjustment (Ecochard & Fotheringham, 2017). On the one hand, academic transitions experienced by international students can emerge from the need to identify the differences that exist in pedagogical cultures between HEIs of different countries and the effort required to adapt to them (Quan et al., 2016). On the other hand, sociocultural transitions may stem from international students’ exposure to local cultures and practices and the process of navigating their new environment (Volet & Jones, 2012). Studies are highlighting different ways to address those challenges that may negatively impact upon the experience and performance of international students in HEIs (Smith, 2015). Amongst those strategies and support systems, mentoring has been identified as an effective intercultural intervention and educational practice for aiding HE international students’ transition and academic performance (Thomson & Esses, 2016).

In the area of intercultural education, mentoring is described as a form of intercultural pedagogy through which the mentor offers ongoing support and facilitates intercultural learning and growth (Giovanangeli et al., 2017). According to Felten et al. (2013), a mentor is someone who creates a conversational environment where a mentee may ask questions, investigate concerns, and share thoughts before developing their own solutions and reflections. Although definitions of intercultural mentoring differ, it is commonly accepted that its general goal is to encourage mentees to come ‘‘into new forms of participation in the meaningful activities of a cultural community’’ (Bearman et al., 2007, p.377). Thus, mentoring can provide a space in which international students’ ideas and experiences related to identity, culture, and belonging may be revisited and explored. Mentors play a critical role in facilitating the transition of international students into new pedagogies, institutions and cultures, but when mentees come from educational systems based in countries “marked by post-colonial links and educational dependency” (Calvo et al., 2022, p. 384), their relationship may be faced with sets of challenges specific to this target group of students. Despite the fact that studies have shown that students who engage in intercultural mentoring relationships receive a variety of personal, sociocultural, and educational advantages related to cultural transitions (Thomson & Esses, 2016), less research exists on mentoring the growing number of African international students during their transition into HEIs in North America and in the UK. Given the unique experiences of African international students in studying abroad and to unpack the mentoring experiences of mentors, our leading research question for this project was: What are the mentors’ perceptions and understandings of their mentoring practices with African international students?

Intercultural Mentoring & Transitions

Definitions of mentoring found in the mentoring literature abound, and its interpretations, as well as its methods, are shifting and developing as the practice continues to evolve (Clutterbuck et al., 2017). Generally, mentoring can be understood as a process that has professional, psychosocial or relational objectives and involves different stages and transitions (Mullen & Klimaitis, 2021). In simple terms, mentoring is an interpersonal partnership in which a mentor with more experience actively supports, counsels, and guides a mentee with less experience (Johnson, 2015). In the context of HE mentoring, defined as an integrated approach to advising, coaching, and nurturing students through positive relationships, can support students’ psycho-social needs and wellbeing in the process of transitioning and establishing themselves in a new academic setting (Posselt, 2018). Due to cultural, academic and language differences, many international students encounter challenges in developing a sense of belonging (Caligiuri et al., 2020). In response to that, HEIs throughout the world have created intercultural mentorship programmes for international students with the purpose of aiding them in obtaining a feeling of belonging in the unknown host country through structured or informal mentorship schemes (Li et al., 2018).

From the perspective of international education, the impact that the process of intercultural transition can have on students can be substantial as it denotes multiple changes ranging from a move from one academic, spatial, or sociocultural setting to another, as well as issues that encompass identity shifts and negotiations (Briggs et al., 2012; Ploner, 2018). As intercultural transition involves a separation from the familiar things one knows, and the creation of new meaningful connections with new environments, students might require support to cope with the many strong and often mixed feelings that their new settings evoke (Palmer et al., 2009; Ploner, 2018). As international students find themselves in these crucial moments during these experiences of transition, when they are presented with different cultural constructs that require careful thinking and reflection, mentoring can play a vital role in helping them interpret their new reality (Felten et al., 2013). In that sense, mentoring can endorse intercultural learning by providing a space in which students can explore views, attitudes and practices around culture and identity (Giovanangeli et al., 2017).

Furthermore, international students are frequently portrayed as a homogeneous group in the literature (Trahar & Hyland, 2011); however such groupings can foster oversimplified conceptions of their unique needs and realities (Andrade, 2006). For instance, African international students can have distinctive experiences due to the more frequent encountering of prejudice and discrimination during their studies (Beoku-Betts, 2004; Boafo-Arthur, 2014; Constantine et al., 2005; Hyams-Ssekasi et al., 2014). Thus, the ability of mentors to facilitate intercultural learning processes for students can be a complex and challenging endeavour. Amplifying this challenge is the lack of resources for mentors to deepen their understanding of intercultural learning. For example, there are few studies that focus directly on experiences of African international students studying in North American or European institutions and the supports, such as mentoring, that facilitate intercultural learning (Akoth & Enoksen, 2022; Gichura, 2010 are exceptions). There are also few studies that focus specifically on the experiences and perspectives of the mentor of African international students and the insights and strategies used to develop intercultural mentoring relationships. This study contributes to this dearth of research with the intention to bring to light the kinds of mentoring relationships mentors use to support intercultural learning.

Critical Interculturality

However, a view of the mentoring practice that approaches it solely as a one-way learning process, with the mentor acting as an expert and the mentee as a learner can overlook key aspects of intercultural relationships that are in line with more contemporary and critical theoretical understandings of culture and the power relations that encompass them. As Hoult (2017, p. 71) argues, engagement with others ‘’who have a different cultural background is never a neutral act’’, but these encounters and experiences have ‘'strong political and power dimensions that are written through them’’. This implies that pedagogies related with intercultural learning between those from the ‘West’ and ‘non-Western’ others are political acts that reveal power dynamics that are part of these interactions (Hoult, 2017). Hence, drawing on a critical intercultural framework (Dervin & Jacobsson, 2021; Nakayama & Halualani, 2010; Walsh, 2015), our research adopts a critical understanding of culture and of the intercultural, seeing them as wide metaphors for examining the links between power, culture and self-identity. This approach moves from traditional views of concepts like the intercultural as a form of equal exchange between different cultural groups, to an unveiling of the entanglements of cultural, discursive, and symbolic practises that produce power relations within and between cultural communities (Nakayama & Halualani, 2010). In that sense, critical interculturality does not presuppose equal relationships of power between people, but instead tries to highlight the discursive power dynamics that govern these interactions (Walsh, 2015).

When it comes to mentoring relationships, especially those that are located within spaces of Higher Education, it has been argued that they can reproduce hierarchical power relations while accentuating exclusion (Goerisch et al., 2019). Although top-down notions of mentoring as a one-sided learning process in which the mentee appears primarily as the student and the mentor as the teacher are progressively being questioned (Eguchi & Collier, 2018), it is important to continue examining how these relationships can transform into tools for empowerment, mutual growth, and inclusion. This becomes especially significant in the case of intercultural mentoring relationships where mentors in HEIs collaborate with students who are part of historically marginalised minority groups. As Eguchi and Collier (2018, p. 67) argue, ‘’the academy is an ideological and material site of (re)constituting power relations’’. They propose that a critical intercultural mentoring/allying approach can be an essential tool for navigating these complex frameworks of power and of difference, which necessitates people who occupy different positions to acknowledge and enact how these differences are informed by power and history. Part of their approach for developing critical intercultural mentoring is to conceptualise these relationships as non-hierarchical spaces where both mentor and mentee can share experiences that have the potential of becoming sites for ‘’a critical intercultural communication praxis in which differences informed by power relations are productively discussed and acknowledged’’ (Eguchi & Collier, 2018, p. 51). Similarly, Goerisch et al. (2019) develop the concept of power mentoring to advance an understanding of mentoring as a relational system which is constituted by different sets of relationships that are permeated by networks of power. This approach to mentoring promotes a high degree of reciprocity between the mentor and mentee, it provides a space for mentees to work through their challenges, it fosters high-quality connections, and it allows the mentee to self-express and communicate their requirements in their own terms (Goerisch et al., 2019).

In this article, we argue that the intercultural encounters that occur as part of mentoring relations can promote critical and transformative intercultural learning for both mentor and mentee in Higher Education, as processes that entail questioning one's preconceptions about their own identity and that of others (Mezirow, 1991). Our research suggests that this critical and transformative intercultural learning is empowering in the sense that it allows people to construct their own interpretations of the world rather than unknowingly acting on objectives, concepts, and judgements of others, while becoming aware of ‘’how culture and prejudice operate in everyday life’’ (Holliday, 2010: ix). By examining mentors’ perspectives and understandings of their work with African international students, our research allows a deeper understanding of the mentoring process with a specific group of international students, as well as of the potential that these relationships hold for becoming sites for transformational and critical intercultural learning.

Study Sites and Methods

This research project is a collaboration between two specific sites, a Canadian University and a British University, each offering mentoring opportunities to African international students attending their universities. Both institutions are consistently ranked in the top 30 of global universities and each with a large body of international students (23% in the Canadian institution; 42% in the British University as of 2022), but with a low (although growing) representation of African students amongst their international body (with 566 in the Canadian institution, and 475 in the British institution in 2022). Each institution has established a professional student-staff (not necessarily academic) mentoring system that provides safe-spaces where students have opportunities to reflect, voice their concerns and acquire personal skills associated with constructing positive self-identities and resilience. Currently, in the Canadian institution this takes the form of an informal mentor-student relationship with self-initiated suggestions for mentor-scholar connections and where front-load training is not offered. In the British institution, a more established and integrated mentoring programme is in place for African international students where staff members are matched each year with new students, and where mentors receive some guidance and some training, although limited to an induction meeting where the issue of intercultural encounter is only briefly discussed.

The researchers were part of a team of academics involved in a scholarship programme that supported African students in both institutions. Our collective goal was to research and share institutional insights that create opportunities to forge stronger mentoring relations that meet the needs of African international students and provide them with the strategies and tools needed to navigate identities across transitional space. Drawing from a reflexivity exercise that brought the researchers to consider their own role as teachers and mentors of African students in the past and from focus groups held with African students who have been mentored (twenty undergraduate and postgraduate students across both institutions), we designed an interview scheduled that aimed to capture the dynamic experiences of mentors from both the Canadian and British institutions working with African international students.

At each institution we invited mentors of African international students to participate in the study through individual semi-structured interviews. In total, 18 interviews (11 from the British university and 7 from the Canadian university) were completed via Zoom over the course of three months. Each interview lasted between 40–60 min and was recorded and then transcribed. Interview questions focused on mentors’ experiences of working with students from African countries, their mentoring strategies, and challenges encountered. Semi-structured interviewing allowed us to keep questions consistent for all participants while allowing for exploration and deeper discussions when opportunities arose. This kind of interviewing required creating an interview climate that allowed intimate and sensitive conversations and reflections to occur (Blaikie & Priest, 2019; Brinkmann & Kvale, 2015).

The data were analysed by following the principles of qualitative thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006; Brinkmann & Kvale, 2015) with the qualitative data analysis software NVivo. We analysed each transcript individually and then met to discuss and compare themes across and within our institutions. Initial coding included specific mentoring skills, strategies, and approaches as well as roles and challenges. Upon completion of the coding process, the research team audited the coding scheme for consistency and added a second level coding process to examine mentors’ experiences (Saldana, 2013), a process that led to deductive interpretations in this second phase of the analysis. We then clustered these significant statements into categories, which then were further synthesised into themes. Through discussion of these themes, we were able to provide a rich description of mentors’ perceptions and understandings of their mentoring practices with African international students.

Overall, while the researchers felt that the utilized methods allowed for the collection of relevant findings and created spaces for important conversations and reflections, the team was conscious of the fact that those conversations, that took place through online platforms and not in person, could have reached a deeper level of intimate reflections and trust between the interviewer and the interviewee if taken in a face-to-face setting. However, the online solution was dictated by the reality of the global pandemic in 2021 and in 2022 while the research was undertaken.

Findings and Discussion

Four major themes emerged from our analysis of the empirical data with each of these discussed in more detail below using theories that are part of a critical intercultural framework.

Navigating Fields of Action and Intervention

The mentors in our study identified a number of areas where they play a crucial role in sustaining and supporting the mentees, with that of acting as a ‘’cultural benchmark’’ as the primary role. When it comes to reception, orientation, and learning the mentors aspired to act as ‘’points of reference’’ inside the new culture and the university by introducing the mentees to the host culture and its systems, and helping them to orient themselves in the new academic and social environment. Regarding the academic environment, the mentors would aim to increase awareness around university mechanisms, help them identify appropriate systems of support, like university websites, and support services, but also focus on students’ academic transitions, including adjustment to the differing demands of academic study, ranging from adapting to different teaching and learning approaches, and the manner in which classes, student-staff interactions, and evaluation systems are carried out. The mentors would also encourage the mentees to make use of non-academic opportunities by participating in different activities and groups and maintaining a sense of balance between academic and personal life. As one of the mentors said:

I felt I could help in terms of being a point of reference for the students within the university as someone who has quite a good overview knowledge of the institution and of the culture and also of some of the issues and challenges they are likely to have [been] faced coming into the university. I see my own role as both providing help with helping the student acclimatise, adjust and make the most of what's going to be a few years of living abroad (UK mentor).

Aspiring to support students with processes related to academic transition, many of the mentors described as part of their role helping alleviate some of the challenges and anxieties associated with culture shock (Furnham, 2010) and the process of leaving one's culture behind to move to a different culture. These challenges included working through topics like the loss of friendships, status, and the sense of being part of a familiar environment, as well as the surprise and uneasiness that emerged when the students were confronted with cultural differences, or feelings of inadequacy as a result of struggling to adapt to the new environment. Some of these cultural transitions and topics of discussion ranged from adjusting to different weather and unfamiliar foods, to other more noticeable differences that encompassed communication, dress, religion, and language.

What emerged from the findings was that many of the mentors partly expressed a more traditional understanding of their role and responsibilities, which for them included exposing and socialising the mentees to the host culture and working through some of the differences that encompassed the process of cultural transition. Thus, some of their fields of action were associated with helping the students achieve an increased sense of belonging (O’Brien et al., 2019), attain a stronger engagement in their academic programmes (Lunsford et al., 2017) and engage in a process of intercultural learning (Prieto-Flores et al., 2016).

However, the mentors simultaneously expressed an increased awareness of the diverse backgrounds from which the students were coming from, as they strived to become attuned to their unique needs. As mentors of African international students, the mentors aspired to develop skills that were relevant to their students, while actively seeking to learn about the mentee's culture. As one participant shared:

I go into this relationship with a mindset that I can learn from them not [that] they can so much, learn from me, and I'm there to support them in this journey that they've started. That's how I approach every connection. In terms of relationships and the knowledge that I've gained, I'm very thankful because I did not know much about the countries the students come from, but because of these relationships, when they tell me something, I go and check the political situation, social-economic situation, beauty of the country and the nature. It's been a learning process for me in terms of what countries and cultures they are coming from (UK mentor).

By understanding and appreciating the differences in backgrounds and experiences between themselves and the mentees, the mentors felt that they could support the mentees in more meaningful ways, thus expressing a critical awareness of the complex ways in which cultures were informing their relationship with the students.

Engaging in Reflective Practice

Amongst the different practices described by the mentors the use of reflection, or what could broadly be described as a form of learning that happens through a person's experiences (Harvey et al., 2016), clearly emerged as a recurrent one. Specifically, by asking questions and helping the mentees identify new perspectives, mentors spoke about assisting mentees to gain insights into their ways of doing things (Mezirow, 1991), and for mentees to examine their experiences and thoughts with the aim of learning from them. Thus, the mentors described as part of their goals the need to help to provide meaning to experiences and reframing challenges as learning (Mezirow, 1991; Schon, 1983). As one of the interviewees disclosed:

This is an opportunity to be reflective or sit down and proactively think about their thoughts, their experiences, and try to articulate them. The primary function is to allow the students’ space to reflect. It's about providing the space that can empower the student to make these choices and to take action rather than just passively reflect or just become aware of some things and not do something to change them (UK mentor).

To elicit this reflective process, some of the mentors utilised structured reflection techniques like reflective questions and reflective writing. For example, the structured reflective questions explored the successes, challenges and the activities the mentee was working on and would like help with. Although this reflective approach was encompassed by a more structured framework, this was flexibly organised and adapted to each mentee, and was mainly used as a springboard for eliciting deeper conversations. The research participants also identified writing as a valuable tool for evoking reflection as something that encourages the person reflecting to be attentive and intentional about their thoughts, while slowing down their thinking. At the same time the mentors saw reflective writing as a means which compelled some of the students to articulate their views more clearly than they would have done through simply talking. Utilising free writing, the mentees were encouraged to follow their stream of thought while writing freely about issues that were part of their everyday life as international students, allowing them to engage more critically with their experiences.

Regarding the role that reflection plays in the context of intercultural dynamics of the relationship, the mentors highlighted that they used it as a valuable technique for reflecting on their own potential biases and the ways in which power is a part of their encounter with the mentees. This accentuated their effectiveness as mentors, while promoting the creation of a space which was attentive to power imbalances. As one of the participants said: ‘'So, if needed, when in doubt not to be afraid to confront someone and ask for advice as well. And during a conversation, sometimes asking that question about my own bias and trying to be self-aware, at least making the effort” (Canadian mentor). Simultaneously, as it clearly emerged from the analysis of the interviews, this critical reflective approach made the mentors more conscious of the limitations that exist around fully understanding the lived experiences of students who are part of underrepresented minorities, especially regarding the encounter of discrimination and microaggressions which can increase the feelings of discomfort that accompany partaking in non-diverse spaces in their daily lives (Harwood et al., 2012). Thus, the reflective space that was created as part of the mentoring intercultural encounters, facilitated the creation of intersubjective sites in which knowledge and self-awareness were co-created.

Intercultural Mentoring as a Relational Practice

The participants emphasised the role of strategies that are connected with relational or softer skills as being integral to the mentoring relationship in order to establish a positive relationship of trust with the mentees. As one participant expressed it:

I just really like sitting down with someone and getting to know them and try to create a connection that is not necessarily a verbal connection, like sitting with people and just try to get the sense of who they are and how they sit in their space. I try to create a safe space where they can feel comfortable talking or not talking and just spending time with me (Canadian mentor).

Overall, the participants understood the notion of presence, as their overall approach, attitude, and responses that they exhibited during their interaction with the mentees as critical to the mentoring relationship. For the mentors, the heart of having an open presence was the capacity to be emotionally and bodily present, while actively listening to the mentee and being in contact with their own emotions and thoughts. As the following quote portrays: “Again, listening deeply and trying to understand while building trust. I take the approach that our role is to listen to their issues and just offer a listening ear. Even just listening can help them and help them talk through their own solutions in many cases” (UK mentor). Thus, active listening as an embodied process that requires the listener to be present and actively engaged and responsive with the speaker was employed by the mentors (Billington, 2018). At the same time, the mentors described a conscious effort to put aside their own worldviews in order to enter the students’ lived realities and experiential processes that are part of their everyday life away from home.

Thus, concurrently with active listening, radical listening played a substantial role in the development of the relationship with the mentees. This radical form of listening was expressed in the effort to make room for understanding the mentees’ points of view without attempting to alter it, while the mentors as engaged listeners remained susceptible to change. As one participant stated: “I’m going to say something very cliched, but I feel that my mentees taught me how to be a mentor” (Canadian mentor). Radical listening grew out of critical pedagogy and was first coined by Kincheloe (2008) as a practice that is deeply permeated by the wish to understand the speaker's “standpoints and axiological positions” (Tobin, 2009, p. 505). That is, when listening, the listener must try to also listen to the speaker's underlying assumptions, life experiences and values, in order to become repositioned as a learner, thus infusing the encounter with transformative potential for both parties involved. Thus, radical listening involves being much more attentive to how networks of identity and power become part of the interaction (Tobin, 2009), and how these critical connotations underline the intercultural mentoring process for the participants, while creating a learning space for all those involved in the relationship. By using this form of radical listening the participants described gradually becoming more capable of understanding the mentees perspectives and responding to their concerns.

Lastly, the participants disclosed that building trust in the relationship often required them to show transparency and vulnerability in order to show the empathy and the authenticity the students required to open up. At the same time, they argued that the relationship should still be focused on the mentees’ needs, because although it can be valuable for the mentor to share about their own challenges, this should never take focus away from the mentee. This is reflected in the following quote: ‘’When I'm with the student, I'm with the student 100%, I show them my vulnerability and open up, as well. I do speak about my personal situation so that they know me a little bit better, but I don't speak a lot about myself. I listen more’’ (UK mentor).

Fries-Britt and Snider (2015) highlight that through building trust and transparency and having the willingness to be vulnerable as a mentor, the mentor can help create authentic relationships. Additionally, students from underrepresented and minority backgrounds report that faculty mentors who share a common ground with students while providing holistic support by showing authenticity, positively affect students’ success (Museus et al., 2011).

Mentoring as Unlearning Colonial Logics

The mentor will frequently have greater experience, expertise, and authority within the educational institution compared to the mentees, as well as the ability to plan and define the content of the mentoring discussions. However, the mentor also provides room for the mentee to share decision-making regarding the path of the mentee's growth by being conscious of their authority and privileges. This may foster a healthy environment in which knowledge is co-created, with both mentor and mentee learning and developing. One of our key research findings is that some mentors described their experiences of the intercultural encounters that transpired through the mentoring relationship as providing enhanced opportunities for a critical self-awareness, leading mentors to recognise that they need to develop those attitudes, knowledge and skills that comprise the ability to work with people from diverse cultures. This is portrayed in the following quotation: “I think one of the things I've learned is don't assume that you know where someone comes from. And don't assume that you can sit and talk to someone for an hour and know them, because we are ultimately products of our own cultures and childhoods that dictate what is normal for us” (Canadian mentor).

Thus, the intercultural encounters with mentees provided an opportunity for mentors to recognise and unlearn viewing their world through stereotypes and preconceptions that they had about different cultural backgrounds and work towards changing them. By working through these often-unconscious biases the mentors became capable of acting against them and approaching their mentees as individuals rather than labels.

This process is captured by one of the participants in the following quotation:

So, learning and reading and just staying informed and reading articles or watching talks that would help me understand. And other than that, learning is one of my approaches to dealing with my own bias and lack of understanding and knowledge, talking to people close to me who can give me advice and who can relate better to these student experiences (UK mentor). 

Mentoring therefore provided opportunities for learning that included not only becoming aware of personal and cultural assumptions of the other but also challenging actions reinforced by colonial logics. Donald (2012) refers to colonial logics as “dividing the world according to racial and cultural categorizations, which serve to naturalize assumed divides and thus contribute to their social and institutional perpetuation” (p. 92). By acting against their unconscious-biases mentors acted to unlearn and disrupt these implicit and dominant ways of being in relation with their mentees.

If unlearning colonial practices means questioning and challenging assumed privilege and to better understand the complexity of power distribution, colonial realities and changing the geopolitics of knowledge, then intercultural mentoring, when properly done, becomes a powerful and liberating tool for reflection and awareness, along with an important space where to develop strategies for transformation (Bell, 2018; Morreira et al., 2021). Hence, the intercultural mentoring relationship became an opportunity to unlearn colonial ways of thinking (e.g., hierarchies of mentorship roles) while developing a more critical understanding of the power dynamics that are part of this relationship. Some of the participants reported that through this relationship they recognised parts of their identities and how these are differently permeated by power for the first time, such as being “white”, a “staff-member” or “speaking the dominant language”. Thus, the participants disclosed the gradual critical recognition of their own positionality and the power dynamics that are part of it. This is in line with more contemporary perspectives of mentoring which recognise the need to engage with the imbalances in power that people of different identities can experience in a mentoring relationship (Cobb-Roberts et al., 2017).

The mentoring relationship can be hierarchical in nature and this power structure can be amplified in the intercultural mentoring of students, as the mentor also has cultural knowledge and experiences that the mentee is less likely to have (Johnson-Bailey & Cervero, 2004). By becoming aware of some of the power dynamics that are connected with these different positionalities the participants spoke about gaining a more critical cultural awareness, as an ability to evaluate how their perspectives and practices are products of one's own culture that might be implicitly or explicitly present in their interactions with others. This is reflected in the following quotation:

I think one thing that has come up for me through our discussions, has been questions around both racism as a real experience for many of the students, and how to go about checking in on that and talking about that. Also, I started thinking about my own positionality, being a white staff who signed up into this program that is mostly for Black students, and how that plays into the support I give them. I remember I thought: I wondered if there are some things that might be more difficult for the student to share with me, things that I can't quite imagine or comprehend (UK mentor).

All this involves unlearning colonial ways of thinking toward not only recognizing personal assumptions and biases but also enacting other ways of being in relation. Fanon (1986) writes of racism as a form of colonialism. In discussing their mentorship practices, mentors provided examples of how they were unlearning colonial logics through identifying and resisting colonial practices that required self-awareness and developing pedagogies for up-lifting knowledge, experiences, and identities of their mentees. Through these relationships the mentors spoke about gaining what could be described as an intercultural perspective that requires recognising that reality is plural, complex, dynamic, and changing and that one's own background and beliefs act as cultural lenses through which they see the world.

Conclusion

This cross institutional study highlighted some of the benefits that mentoring presents when it comes to responding to minority students’ intercultural experiences of transition and their unique needs. At the same time this study contributed to discussions that approach mentoring as a critical intercultural interaction, thus aiming to redefine the role of mentors as learners by approaching the mentoring relationship as a site that holds transformative learning potential for both mentors and minority students. As this paper argued, it is necessary to unpack the dynamics that surround mentoring relationships with minority students, as well as mentors’ perspectives and understandings of their practice with African international students whose experiences in their host institutions might be underlined by racial discrimination and historical imbalances of power.

This article indicates that the ability to facilitate this intercultural learning process for students requires a considerable degree of expertise by the mentor. Paige and Goode (2009) stress the importance of mentors having an understanding of intercultural ideas, the capacity to incorporate intercultural elements into the relationship with the students, as well as the skills to design and carry out activities that invite students to develop new notions of culture. In line with our findings, they also suggest that mentors should have an awareness of what the mentoring relationship entails and of basic theoretical principles linked to intercultural learning and the formation of intercultural competence.

This study also advances an understanding of intercultural mentoring as a relational and dynamic process. In order to facilitate the creation of productive mentorship relations with students coming from African contexts, this study found that the repositioning of the mentor as learner who is critically aware of the relational power dynamics that surround mentoring relationships with minority students is essential. This study highlighted that the experiences of intercultural encounters that transpired through mentoring relationships offered increased opportunities for developing a critical self-awareness, leading mentors to recognise that they need to advance those attitudes, knowledge and skills that comprise the ability to work with people from diverse cultures. Thus, these intercultural encounters with mentees provided an opportunity to recognise stereotypes and preconceptions that mentors had about different cultural backgrounds and work towards changing them. As the mentors expressed an increased awareness of the diverse backgrounds from which the students were coming from, they strived to become attuned to their unique needs, and aspired to develop skills that are relevant to their students, while actively seeking to learn about the mentee's culture. By understanding and appreciating the differences in backgrounds and experiences between themselves and the mentees, the mentors felt that they could support the mentees in more meaningful ways, thus expressing a critical awareness of the complex ways in which cultures were informing their relationship with the students.

Footnotes

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Barbara Bompani

Author Biographies

Christina Sachpasidi is an independent researcher based in Athens, Greece. She has received a PhD in Counselling Studies from the University of Edinburgh. She has also worked as a researcher in public health and international education at the University of Edinburgh. She is interested in critical intercultural relations, creative qualitative research methods, and the intersections of identity, economy and emotions.

Barbara Bompani is a reader in Africa and International Development at the Centre of African Studies, the University of Edinburgh and an associate researcher at the African Centre for Migration and Society (ACMS) at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Her research broadly focuses on religion, politics and development in Africa. In the past ten years, she investigated the relationships between sexuality and public religion, in particular conservative Christianity, in East Africa. She has published widely on these topics.

Cynthia Nicol is a professor in the Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. She currently holds the David Robitaille Professorship in Mathematics and Science Education, and her research focuses on culturally responsive curriculum and pedagogies across local and global contexts.

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“Intercultural Encounters”: Mentorship Relations as Spaces for Critical Intercultural Learning in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs)

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Intercultural Mentoring & Transitions

Critical Interculturality

Study Sites and Methods

Findings and Discussion

Navigating Fields of Action and Intervention

Engaging in Reflective Practice

Intercultural Mentoring as a Relational Practice

Mentoring as Unlearning Colonial Logics

Conclusion

Footnotes

Funding

ORCID iD

Author Biographies

References