Gender, Rurality, and Mentoring Relationships in Work Integrated Learning Contexts: A Zimbabwean Experience

Mentoring of trainee teachers is integral in promoting a sustainable and a sound education delivery system in any country. To ensure effective and quality mentoring, this book offers a unique, critical crescendo of mentoring relationships that promote excellence in Work-Integrated Learning (previously known as Teaching Practice) within rural Zimbabwean secondary schools. The novelty of the book lies in its specific focus on the intersectionality of gender and rurality taking into account that, in many countries of the world, the education systems in rural areas are usually placed on the margins. The book contributes a critical, context-specific exploration to the global scholarship on initial teacher education and professional development. Using a rigorous qualitative methodology with a multi-modal data generation approach to capture the lived experiences of the rural people, the book exposes the lacunas and real world challenges as well as triumphs of mentorship in rural contexts, from the insider perspective of mentor teachers and student teachers alike. The triangulation of data enables a nuanced examination of the nature and quality of mentoring relationships in the selected sites and explicates the mechanisms through which gendered and rural-specific contextual factors mediate these professional interactions. While the book is a theoretical pudding for educators in the classroom, it provides rich empirically grounded pedagogical insights for WIL coordinators, mentor teachers, student teachers, school leadership, and policymakers.