Mentoring PhD students working in industry: Using hermeneutics as a critical approach to the experience

Abstract

While there is abundant research looking at the impact of mentoring in academic environments, inquiry into and the construction of knowledge from the experience of mentors has remained limited. This is mainly because of the methodological difficulty that is inherent in the study of mentoring experiences. The authors address this difficulty by using hermeneutics as a research method, and developing a learning framework based on the Laurillard conversational framework to reflect on a mentor’s journey throughout her experience of mentoring a group of PhD students working in industry. From this we learn that mentoring working PhDs is a common goal focused learning partnership between all actors involved. This partnership is defined by the actors and the forms of interaction within the partnership, and is enabled by the mentor’s availability and capabilities. The paper also demonstrates how hermeneutics can be used as a robust research method to study the many subjective meanings of professional mentoring – meanings that are challenging to translate into transferable knowledge for ourselves and others to learn from. In particular, the authors wish to encourage colleagues and readers to use hermeneutics as a critical approach to explore complex, human-made academic–industrial collaborative mentoring practices from different perspectives and to produce a new understanding of the potential of alternative academic–industrial collaboration links.