Mentorship as a professional development tool: Addressing early childhood female teachers’ lived experiences and perceptions

Abstract

This article seeks to address mentorship as a critical professional development tool for novice teachers in Early Childhood Education (ECE), focusing on its role in identifying challenges and highlights novice teachers lived experiences and the perceptions of school principals. This research explores how structured mentorship, and induction can provide essential support to novice teachers, particularly in a developing inclusive, diverse and transformative professional development to support the contexts where mentorship frameworks are inconsistent. Grounded in the Positioning Theory and Ubuntu Theory, this paper reports how power dynamics, hierarchical structures, and collective responsibility shape mentorship experiences of novice teachers in ECE. The positioning theory helps explain how novice teachers navigate professional identity and relationships with mentors and school leadership, while Ubuntu Theory emphasises the importance of communal support and shared responsibility in teacher development. Using a qualitative methodology within an interpretivist paradigm, semi-structured interviews with six novice ECE teachers and two principals provide insights into their professional experiences. The findings reveal significant challenges related to mentorship, with themes such as work overload, power dynamics, time management and emotional support or lack thereof emerging as critical. This article contributes to the limited South African literature on novice teacher support, advocating for formal mentorship programmes rooted in equity, collaboration, and collective growth. The findings also hold global relevance, emphasising the need for structured, community-driven mentorship to improve teacher retention worldwide.