Mentorship–a pedagogical method for integration of theory and practice in higher education

Abstract

Mentorship is a method that is used in both professional education and training and in working life to introduce new employees. Previous research has shown that there is limited experience of mentorship in the parts of higher education that are outside of professional education and training. The purpose of this article is to deepen knowledge of how mentorship can be used as a pedagogic tool to integrate theory and practice in a social science programme at a Swedish university. The empirical material is obtained from a case study that includes students/mentees and contact persons/mentors. The results show that mentorship is an important contribution to the learning process for the integration of theory and practice in higher education to develop both practically applied and theoretically anchored knowledge. Besides cooperation forms and workplace-related studies in the programme, mentorship thus becomes the third component of the learning process.