Abstract
This chapter describes a voluntary profession-oriented mentoring program for student teachers enrolled in a five-year integrated teacher education (TE) program, located on the campus of the University of Oslo (UiO). The aim of the program is to promote student teachers’ social and academic integration, help them to develop a teacher identity, and create a sense of coherence between the content taught in TE and professional practice; in the longer term, another goal is to prevent student dropout. Student teachers enrolled in the program are divided into groups of 10–20 by subject, and they meet their mentors three times per semester. The mentors who lead these groups are schoolteachers with extensive mentor education and experience; they also teach subjects similar to those the student teachers are studying. The findings from a longitudinal study indicate that the student teachers perceive the program to be particularly valuable in the initial years of study, when they are only taking subject studies and have no regular teaching duties in profession-specific subjects. The importance of the program is especially linked to participants’ experience of belonging to a study community and to the development of student teachers’ professional identity during the five-year TE program.
Promoting professional identity development. Teachers as mentors on campus