Editorial

Citation

Hobson, A.J., Long, J. and Searby, L. (2015), "Editorial", International Journal of Mentoring and Coaching in Education, Vol. 4 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJMCE-07-2015-0023

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: International Journal of Mentoring and Coaching in Education, Volume 4, Issue 3.

As readers of Volume 4, Issue 3 of the International Journal of Mentoring and Coaching in Education (IJMCE), we hope you enjoy(ed) and learn(ed) as much as we did from the articles published in the issue. IJMCE Volume 4, Issue 2 included four excellent papers written by authors from the USA, the UK, Slovakia and Norway. This issue includes two more original contributions to knowledge from the USA, one from the UK and one from Australia.

In the first paper of the current issue, "The role of mentoring relationships in counseling programs", Jennifer N. Boswell, Angie D. Wilson, Marcella Stark and Anthony J. Onwuegbuzie present findings from a qualitative research study in which 30 pre-tenured faculty, doctoral- and master's-level students in counselor education programmes were interviewed, to explore their mentorship needs. The authors used a psychological phenomenological research approach to understand the role of the mentor and significance of the mentoring relationship. Amongst their findings, they note that, in general, counselor educator participants considered that the mentoring relationships they experienced were significant to their professional development, although some mentees felt they had unmet expectations and needs from their mentoring experience. Concurring with other studies, the authors conclude that effective mentorship requires trust, safety, and responsiveness.

In a unique second paper, "Experimenting with dialogic mentoring: a new model", Lindy Nahmad-Williams and Carol A. Taylor report on a mentoring project which employed an innovative methodological approach in which the mentor and mentee wrote and shared diary entries as a means of building effective and constructive mentoring experiences, and as a vehicle for reflexively analysing the mentoring process. The authors explore mentoring as a dialogic practice in relation to three themes – identity, fear of being judged and respect; and they develop Bokenko and Gantt's (2000) concept of dialogic mentoring to propose a new theorisation of mentoring as a relational, embodied, spatial, affective and ethical practice. The paper provides much food for thought for those of us involved in research mentoring.

In the third paper, "Graduates giving back – a mentoring program for MBA students", Ann Darwin discusses the challenges and obstacles encountered in the implementation of a mentoring programme for Master of Business Administration (MBA) students. She reports findings from an exploratory case study which analysed data from over 600 students and their alumni mentors over a five-year period in order both to evaluate and improve the programme, and to cultivate a critical community of adult learners. The paper shows how mentoring can support learning and management development, and emphasises the importance of business leaders giving back to their alma mater through mentoring current MBA students.

In our fourth and final paper of this issue, "STEM mentoring and the use of the Principles of Adult Mentoring Inventory", Charles Feldhaus and Kristin Bentrem report findings from a convergent parallel mixed methods study which explored mentoring experiences within the context of a science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) specific mentoring programme for urban, at-risk, high-school youth. Amongst their findings, the authors show that this mentoring programme too had a positive impact on mentees, and that mentors' perceptions of their mentoring abilities – as measured by the Principles of Adult Mentoring Inventory (PAMI) – increased over time. The authors also explore contributory factors to both of these outcomes, focussing on the commonly recurring themes within their data of communication, information and gender differences.

Moving on from a discussion of the present issue, we would like to take this opportunity to congratulate IJMCE's winners of the 2015 Emerald Literati Network Awards for Excellence. First, the winner of the Outstanding Paper Award was Kate Thornton, for her article Mentors as Educational Leaders and Change Agents (Vol. 3, Issue 1), which explored the educational leadership capacity of mentors who worked with new teachers, and identified factors supporting and impeding the development of such capacity. The article has attracted significant interest: at the time of writing, in July 2015, the full text had been downloaded 463 times.

Secondly, the Outstanding Reviewer Award went to Deborah MacPhee and (our ex-Editor-in Chief and Founding Editor) Sarah Fletcher. We found it extremely difficult to identify winners of this award because we have so many excellent reviewers – and we would like to record our appreciation to all of them for their selfless work in helping us to ensure that we maintain IJMCE's high standards while assisting authors to improve the quality and readability of their papers. Nonetheless, we felt that Sarah and Deborah were especially deserving of the award on the grounds of both quality and quantity – their reviews are extremely thoughtful, rigorous and formative on the one hand, and they do quite a few of them on the other!

Speaking of colleagues who have made a substantial contribution to improving the quality of authors' manuscripts, we wish to extend our sincere gratitude to Pat Ashby, who has served as IJMCE's Associate Editor since 2013 but who has been forced to step down due to problems with her eyesight. We will greatly miss her editorial prowess and attention to detail. Thank you, Pat. We wish you a hugely enjoyable (full) retirement.

Finally, for those readers considering submitting manuscripts to IJMCE, we will be very interested to read and consider them, but not before they are formatted in accordance with the IJMCE Author Guidelines! Please check here: www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/products/journals/author_guidelines.htm?id=ijmce. We are presently returning direct to authors around half of the manuscripts submitted because they do not include the required structured abstract, for example. We also suggest that it would be beneficial for prospective contributors to IJMCE to study the commentary "Why manuscripts submitted to an international peer reviewed journal in education are rejected" (Hobson, 2014) prior to finalising and submitting their manuscripts. The commentary was published in IJMCE Vol. 3, Issue 2 and is available free of charge on the IJMCE web site here: www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/full/10.1108/IJMCE-04-2014-0014

Happy reading, researching, writing, mentoring and coaching!

Andrew J. Hobson, Jan Long and Linda Searby

References

Bokenko, R.M. and Gantt, V.W. (2000), "Dialogic mentoring: core relationships for organizational learning", Management Communication Quarterly, Vol. 14 No. 2, pp. 237-270

Hobson, A.J. (2014), "Why manuscripts submitted to an international peer reviewed journal in education are rejected", International Journal of Mentoring and Coaching in Education, Vol. 3 No. 2, pp. 188-196