Reciprocity in Mentorship: Exploring the Benefits for Peer Mentors in Guiding Graduate Teaching Assistants

Graduate teaching assistances (GTAs) are PhD researchers, who have taken on a teaching role within their institution. Balancing their roles as students and emerging educators, GTAs navigate a unique landscape where they contribute to teaching, as staff, while pursuing their own research, as students.. Despite their pivotal role, existing research on GTAs often overlooks their specific learning needs and instructional practices.. Within The University of Manchester, the Mentoring Excellence Program was developed to support our GTAs in gaining recognition for their teaching practices by being supported to apply for Associate Fellow of Advance HE through peer support. Within this dynamic relationship, the mentor assumes various roles, serving as a role model, teacher, advisor, guide, and resource for their peers (Biaggio, 2001; Galbraith and James, 2004). The multifaceted nature of mentoring in higher education thus underscores its significance in fostering a collaborative and enriching learning experience for both mentor and mentee. Research highlights that mentoring is a highly effective form of training, surpassing the impact of campus-wide seminars or departmental training programs (Jones, 1993). Bhatti and Viney (2010) emphasise various benefits associated with mentoring, including the development of professional identities, improvement in clinical and interpersonal skills, career guidance, opportunities for career advancement, increased research productivity, and enhanced job satisfaction. Additionally, mentoring provides mentees with crucial emotional and psychological support, particularly during times of stress or difficult situations (Davies and Gibbs, 2011). It also provides opportunities to reflect on teaching practices and more importantly how GTAs themselves learn. Whilst there are drawbacks associated with mentoring, such as time pressures seeing as GTAs are both students and staff and/or imposter syndrome (e.g., Poulsen (2013); Muzaka (2009). A model tailored for GTAs should address the inherent tension between teaching and research (Park, 2004). This tension significantly influences job satisfaction, research progress, and thesis completion rates for individual graduate students. This paper seeks to understand the firsthand experiences of GTAs participating as mentors on the Mentoring Excellence programme. The paper examines how the design of the programme helps not only the mentees but also the mentors themselves to develop. In addition, the paper investigates what the mentors gain from the different aspects of the programme and what practice they bring with them from their own experience of being mentees.