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The distant “gaze” on academic mentoring

  • Minh Nguyet Nguyen

    Minh Nguyet Nguyen studied Grad Dip in TESOL, MA in Applied Linguistics and recently completed a PhD in the area of academic mentoring policies at La Trobe University. She was Head of Language Skill School, Hanoi University in Vietnam and has been a sessional researcher at La Trobe University. Her research interests include sociolinguistics and critical discourse analysis of educational settings.

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Published/Copyright: July 30, 2019

Abstract

This study draws on Foucault’s concept of governmentality to explore mentoring policy discourse in Vietnamese higher education. It uses Fairclough’s approach to critical discourse analysis to examine the State’s and university’s documents. The findings indicate that the State aspires to maintain its “gaze” by privileging the institution’s policy document as a means of regulating the academics and polarizes the mentors and mentees along the power continuum. A range of linguistic strategies is used to establish the institution’s power and the State’s control has been discursively consolidated. The mentoring policy seems to have a range of flaws but the participants’ voices are not included in the discourse and they are not given opportunities to construct an alternative discourse around their positionality. This suggests that the mentoring policy seeks to frame and regulate the academics but not necessarily to optimise their capacities. The policy is therefore unlikely to create active subjects and mentoring as governmentality in this case may not deliver its productive function.

Funding statement: Minh Nguyet Nguyen’s research project was sponsored by the Prime Minister’s Australia Asia Endeavour Award.

About the author

Minh Nguyet Nguyen

Minh Nguyet Nguyen studied Grad Dip in TESOL, MA in Applied Linguistics and recently completed a PhD in the area of academic mentoring policies at La Trobe University. She was Head of Language Skill School, Hanoi University in Vietnam and has been a sessional researcher at La Trobe University. Her research interests include sociolinguistics and critical discourse analysis of educational settings.

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Notes

Ethics Approval R053/14 for the research project was granted on September 29, 2014.


Published Online: 2019-07-30
Published in Print: 2019-09-25

© 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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