"Don't rock the boat": conflicting mentor and pre-service teacher narratives of professional experience

This article examines conflicting mentor (school-based supervising teacher) and pre-service teacher narratives of professional experience in schools. It draws on a small narrative inquiry about the mentoring relationship in teacher education. Interview conversations were analysed using "writing as a method of inquiry", allowing for a recursive understanding of the competing discourses that emerged, and highlighting the tensions in the mentoring relationship. While the pre-service teachers interviewed for this study expected professional experience to provide opportunities for innovation and collaboration, mentors tended to view the relationship as assimilation into the profession. Two points of challenge are identified where disruption to the tensions that arise from these competing narratives is needed if changes to educational equity are to occur.