Power of the mentor and potential of the mentee: how mentoring relationships support or thwart mentees' aspirations

Paulo Freire described himself as a “vagabond of the obvious” because, in his words, “I walk around the world saying obvious things, such as that education is not neutral” (cited in Jeria, 1986, p. 71). In homage to Freire, we might suggest that we are vagabonds of the obvious in stating that mentorship is not neutral and, as such, has the potential to entrench socially unjust norms. For Freire, conscientization is the word he employs to describe problem-posing education as opposed to an education that simply reproduces the values, power and privilege of the dominant social group. Conscientization in Freire's pedagogical approach involves approaching participants as fellow learners and partners in dialogue, creating an atmosphere of hope, love, humility and trust (Freire, 2021). Conscientization is thus “a joint project in that it takes place in a person among other persons, persons united by their action and by their reflection upon that action and upon the world” (Bhattacharya, 2011, p. 273). Freire's language is apt in application to the mentoring relationship. A conscientization of the dynamics that underpin mentoring relationships has the potential to make such relationships more just by making participants aware of the biases and gatekeeping of the profession which might otherwise be hidden (Samson et al., 2024).

In this paper, we understand social justice (in a Freirean sense) is not a static concept but a dialogic process of “renaming the world” so that “once named, the world in its turn reappears to the namers as a problem and requires of them a new naming” (Freire, 1972, p. 61). In the case of mentoring and social justice, the mechanism of renaming that world offers the affordance of dignity and legitimacy to a way of being in the world for the mentee which might not otherwise be acknowledged by the dominant culture. Further, applying a Foucauldian lens of pastoral power to mentoring is useful and consonant with this issue's theme of social justice. It discloses the administrative technologies associated with mentoring frameworks used in educational settings (checklists, standards-based processes, progress reviews), interrupting mentoring's normalizing and potentially oppressive outcomes, reorienting participants to purposefully and socially just mentoring practices.

The relationships between mentors and mentees in educational settings are complex. Mentoring relationships exist in the tension between developmental aspirations and regulatory functions (Cronin, 2023; Hobson and Malderez, 2013; Larsen et al., 2023; Manderstedt et al., 2022). While mentors aim to nurture growth and agency in their mentees, they simultaneously serve as gatekeepers who must evaluate and assess against standardized criteria (Hobson and Maxwell, 2020; Peiser et al., 2018; Samson et al., 2024). While extensive research examines mentoring's role in teacher development and retention (Ambrosetti and Dekkers, 2010; Kelchtermans, 2019; Kuhn et al., 2022), less attention (see Duckworth and Maxwell, 2015) has been paid to the complex mechanisms of power that shape these formative relationships and how to educate for them.

We situate mentoring within the Australian context, which has a settler-colonial history. The resultant demographic of the teaching workforce is white, middle class (Yip and Xu, 2025) and, for experienced mentors, middle aged. Less than 2% of students in initial teacher education (ITE) courses are from a non-English-speaking background, and 1% identify as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (Dwyer et al., 2025). These realities potentially shape what practices are considered good teaching and pose the question of whose voices are marginalized. White settler norms dominate the conceptions of teaching that inhere teaching standards and the accreditation processes that inform ITE, which provide guidelines for ongoing registration, promotion and recognition.

The importance of professional learning for the development of mentors has been well-identified (Lejonberg et al., 2015; Maxwell et al., 2024; Squires, 2019; Thornton, 2024), and work on curricula for mentor education has been developed (Hobson and Maxwell, 2020; Maxwell et al., 2024). This having been noted, however, education is frequently bound by regulations and standards checks rather than by the more nuanced complexities of relationships (Samson et al., 2024). Thornton's (2024) review of mentoring preparation, however, covers the importance of mentoring relationships while also identifying the limited work that has focused on the concept of power in mentoring relationships. In a system of settler-colonial norms framing the teaching of an increasingly diverse student body (Dwyer et al., 2025), mentoring becomes the instrument of normalization, able to influence the level of welcome and inclusion aspiring teachers encounter.

The concept of power is prominent in the writing of Michel Foucault. Contemporary analyses often employ Foucault's concept of governmentality to examine the technologies of professional regulation in education (Ball, 2013), the technologies within which mentoring frameworks are often constructed. However, this macro-level focus on systems of control may obscure the nuanced interpersonal dynamics through which mentor–mentee relationships actually operate. Other tools from the Foucauldian toolbox, namely, the concept of pastoral power, may do a better job of helping us to understand and consequently enhance the quality of mentoring relationships. Our analysis extends Samson et al.’s (2024) examination of unconscious gatekeeping in mentoring, which brings together the epistemological and ontological dimensions of “the teacher” to inform an integrated professional identity. In doing so, we specifically investigate how pastoral power operates through three key mechanisms: guidance of conscience, confessional practices and technologies of self-examination. We argue that these mechanisms create complex webs of care, control and professional identity formation that cannot be fully captured through conventional norm-replicating frameworks of governmentality or supervision alone.

In the Australian context, where mentoring occurs within an ecology of professional standards and accountability measures (Taylor, 2021a), tension between accountability and self-improvement is evident, as has been found elsewhere (see Hobson and Maxwell, 2020). Mentor teachers undertake the often underpaid and underresourced task of mentoring teacher candidates and newly graduated teachers in an environment which constructs their mentees' work as solely bound to skills and knowledge presented in standardized frameworks (Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership [AITSL], 2022). Mentors also serve as assessors, further muddying the mentoring relationship, as they become gatekeepers of attainment and have influence over a teacher candidate's actual progression, as well as their self-efficacy and emergent sense of professional identity (Izadinia, 2015). Furthermore, certification through the career stages from Graduate to Proficient (part of the teacher registration process), and from Proficient to Highly Accomplished or Lead Teacher stages (sometimes accompanied by salary increase as well as status), can include mentor references. The standardized criteria approach fails to account for teacher dispositions which teachers themselves consider important in the “becoming” or “identity” of a teacher (Taylor, 2021a). The disconnection between technical standards and lived experience creates a dissonance that mentors and their mentees must navigate (Webster-Wright, 2010). Deep reflection which leads to a surfacing and greater awareness of this dissonance places mentors and their mentees in a stronger position in their relationship to focus on the aspects of their shared professional lives, which will make a difference to their development as educators. The trust inherent in the exploration of personal and professional identities affords opportunity for deeper exploration of sameness and difference, a foundational tension of social justice and power discourse (Duckworth and Maxwell, 2015).

Foucault's concept of pastoral power – with its focus on individualized guidance, confession and care – offers valuable insights into mentorship dynamics (Taylor, 2021a). Pastoral power finds ready roots in the education context, resonating with mentors' sense of “zeal, devotion and endless application” (Foucault, 2009, p. 127) in guiding their mentees. The pastoral power theoretical lens illuminates how mentoring relationships become sites where power operates through intimate mechanisms of guidance and self-examination rather than just through systemic structures of control. Understanding mentorship power dynamics is crucial given current pressures on teacher attraction, retention and attrition, which we see in Australia (AITSL, 2025) and which is replicated in many OECD countries (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD], 2024). Teachers' lack of psychological safety, overwork and being emotionally drained are well documented (Longmuir et al., 2022). Effective mentoring relationships that navigate power dynamics productively could play a vital role in supporting teacher wellbeing and professional growth. However, this requires moving beyond simplified notions of mentoring as either purely nurturing or regulatory and consciously addressing themes of justice and inclusion.

In this paper, we theorize the intimate power dynamics of teacher mentoring relationships through Foucault's concept of pastoral power, a theoretical lens that has been underutilized in educational scholarship compared to the more common governmentality framework. While pastoral power emerged from Christian traditions of spiritual guidance, its modern manifestations in education warrant deeper examination, particularly in how mentoring relationships deploy “self-examination and the guidance of conscience” (Foucault, 2000, p. 310) as techniques of professional formation. Drawing on Taylor's (2021a) analysis, we position pastoral power as distinctly focused on the individual subject rather than populations, operating through mechanisms of personal confession and self-sustaining discipline. This theoretical framing allows us to examine how mentoring relationships simultaneously nurture and regulate emerging teacher identities through the Foucauldian “zeal, devotion and endless application” referenced above. This paper interrogates how these pastoral dynamics manifest in the tension between developmental support and regulatory oversight that characterizes contemporary teacher mentoring.

The research questions guiding this interrogation are:

1. How do mentoring relationships deploy pastoral power through practices of guidance, confession and self-examination?

2. How might awareness of pastoral power dynamics inform more equitable and transformative mentoring practices?

These questions emerged from our previous finding that mentor teachers indicated an understanding that mentoring requires more than professional standards. Quality mentoring is undermined when mentors lack a deep reflective awareness of their role (Samson et al., 2024). By examining mentoring through the lens of pastoral power, we aim to make visible the subtle ways that power operates in seemingly supportive professional circumstances; to reveal pastoral power is to safeguard socially just relationships. The pastoral power lens allows us to analyze how mentoring relationships can simultaneously empower and constrain, nurture and regulate, guide and govern. Our focus on pastoral power provides new insights into the “messy complexity of human relationships that inhere teaching” (Taylor, 2021a, p. 3), moving beyond simplistic notions of mentoring as either purely developmental or purely regulatory. Through this analysis, we seek to contribute to more nuanced understandings of power in educational mentoring relationships while suggesting pathways toward more conscious, equitable and therefore socially just mentoring practices.

This paper draws on the data from two empirical studies (Samson et al., 2024; Taylor, 2016) and utilizes Foucault's pastoral power lens in arguing for the importance of bringing together the epistemological and ontological domains of the teacher as essential aspects of an integrated professional (Taylor, 2021a). The two studies are relevant and complementary in that they both, in different ways, expose teachers' deep sense of the importance of dispositions as the heart of great teaching. Thus, both studies offer insights into the ontological dimension of teachers and its centrality to their sense of professionalism. This ontological interest is central to the argument that we make for a more integrated framework for mentoring. The original studies utilize phenomenographic and Foucauldian toolbox design (Taylor, 2016) and a convergent parallel mixed-methods design (Samson et al., 2024), representing diverse approaches to the sourcing of data relevant to our theory development. Through complementary methodologies, analysis from both studies reveals mutually reinforcing insights regarding the dissonance between the collaborative ideals of mentorship and the hierarchical realities of mentor practice that replicate accepted social and professional norms.

Study 1 (Taylor, 2016) was conducted within a high-performing school system in Sydney, Australia, following university ethics approval (Ethics Register Number: 201466N). Seventy-one teachers ranging in experience from 4 years to 30+ years of service were interviewed in semi-structured interviews lasting from 30 min to 1 h. While the original doctoral study focused on teachers' perceptions of professional standards, mentoring organically emerged as a central theme extensively discussed by many participants (n = 50). Instances such as this, where concepts not the focus of the original study are so evident in the dataset as to be worthy of separate further study are well accepted as appropriate data for secondary analysis (Heaton, 2008; Hinds et al., 1997). Mentorship is indeed intimately bound to regulatory systems like teaching standards and their use in the accreditation of teachers, reinforcing the relevance of the use of this study. The focus of the interviews were teachers' perceptions of newly introduced national professional standards for teachers in Australia. Among the questions asked of research participants were questions pertinent to this paper, namely, (1) For you, do the [teacher] standards portray what a teacher looks like? (2) Do you think being a teacher has changed you as a person in any way? (3) What's new/missing/helpful in the [teacher] standards? and (4) What surprised you/was alien to you/was familiar for you about the [teacher] standards? The original study foregrounded the use of Foucauldian tools as an integral part of its methodology and interpretation of data; these tools are reprised here for the purpose of understanding the dynamics of mentoring relationships and how they may inadvertently reproduce the very power structures that transformative social justice education aims to disrupt.

The phenomenographic methodology (see Bowden and Green, 2005) employed in the study proceeds from an assumption that there are a finite number of ways in which humans conceive of the world. Phenomenography describes these qualitatively different ways of seeing the world (conceptions) as categories of description (Collier-Reed and Ingerman, 2013). The categories of description in this study were developed through coding and thematic analysis in NVivo and refined through debriefing discussions between the chief researcher and research assistants (Bowden and Green, 2005). Mapping what the methodology terms an “outcome space” can aid in understanding the categories of description that emerge from a study, which can then be employed in analyzing and understanding the why of complex problems. This translates to an understanding that teachers' conceptions of their professional lives are not idiosyncratic but rather belong to one or other positions which sit between teachers' discursive repertoires and the regulatory frameworks within which they work.

Study 2 (Samson et al., 2024) was granted university ethics approval (Ethics Project ID: 27917) authorizing research with preservice and early career graduate teachers and employing a convergent parallel mixed-methods design (Creswell, 2022). The section of the study reported in this paper sought to investigate how mentor bias, teacher dispositions and professional standards influence mentoring. The participants were drawn from a cohort involved in a university-led, asynchronous online mentoring education program. The sample included 58 pre-course survey respondents, of whom 10 further participated in a focus group. Participants' mentoring experience ranged from 1 to 30 years, offering a range of perspectives. The data collection included a 25-item Likert-scale survey (ranging from not true at all to very true), which included demographic, knowledge and dispositional propositions designed to probe beliefs around teaching and teachers. Propositions such as “No matter who you are, you can learn to teach well” and “You can always improve your skills as a teacher” sat alongside propositions such as “You can learn new things, but teaching requires a special disposition” and “Some people are not cut out to be teachers.” Qualitative data were also collected through open-ended survey responses and a focus group, conducted via Zoom (Oliffe et al., 2021). This allowed for rich narrative insights into mentors' assumptions and experiences.

The methods of analysis included descriptive statistics for the quantitative data, and thematic analysis was employed for the qualitative responses and focus group transcripts. The analysis was guided by Braun and Clarke's (2008) six-step framework. This combined approach enabled exploration of mentors' stated beliefs and surfaced the inconsistencies that were present in their implicit, and occasionally explicit, biases. The data illustrated the fact that hidden dispositional biases were evident in the dissonance between mentors' stated inclusive and strengths-based views of preservice and early career teachers and the implicit bias present in the unconscious gatekeeping of those who did not fit traditional professional norms. Professional judgment indicated a level of subjective interpretations or “gut feelings” that contributed to the assessment of candidate readiness and suitability, potentially influencing reporting and assessment outcomes. This research suggests that preservice and early career teachers may be unintentionally disadvantaged by a mentor's assumptions and unconscious biases, which is further exacerbated when this cohort does not fit within the traditional norms or ideas of what a teacher should be. Preservice and early career teachers who are “different,” whether due to minoritized or non-normative backgrounds, may find that the outcomes of mentoring relationships are not affirming and growth oriented, but rather serve to discourage and diminish their potential contributions as educators.

In this paper, the findings of Study 1 and Study 2 are overlaid with tools from the Foucauldian toolbox. Foucault asked non-systemic questions which, drawing from disparate historical contexts, sought to expose “systems of thought” (Foucault, 1996, p. 424) hidden in plain sight, so deeply are they embedded in ways of doing. One of the lesser used Foucauldian tools in thinking about education is the concept of pastoral power. Foucault's concept of pastoral power emerged from his reflections on self-regulation and external influence-over-conduct evident in Christian and pre-Christian history (Foucault, 2009). Ostensibly framed as guidance by the institution to care for the individual, pastoral power historically used the power of self-examination, guidance and confession to impose self-sustaining discipline upon individuals (Foucault, 2000, 2014). Garnering pastoral power as an analytical tool for the understanding of mentoring relationships follows Foucault's project of being wary of the potential subjugating power of “the pastoral.” In accordance with the application of a pastoral power lens to our studies and their relationship to mentorship as a professional technology of education, we understand “guidance” to refer to where the mentee ostensibly unquestioningly defers to the greater expertise and experience of the mentor, rather than a relationship between differently placed equals. As Foucault (2000) noted of Christian pastorship, “conscience-guiding constituted a constant bind: the sheep didn't let itself be led only to come through any rough passage victoriously, it let itself be led every second” (p. 310). When we refer to confession in mentorship, we are referring to the ways in which teachers are called upon to “unveil … the depths of the soul” (p. 310) through the many and varied sophisticated practices of self-appraisal that operate in teacher regulatory regimes: performance reviews, accreditation processes and reflective practice requirements. Whereas Schön's (2005) reflective practitioner develops professional knowledge through practice in all its messy complexity, confession as pastoral power orients the teacher's reflective gaze inward toward compliance with pre-formed categories. Such pre-formed categories abound in standards documents, producing more likely than not a reproduction of the teacher as a compliant technical officer (Taylor, 2016) rather than as an authentic professional. Pastoral power thus colonizes the form of reflective practice while evacuating its substance. Finally, we use the term “self-examination” to reflect the normalized contemporary practice of teachers constantly regulating their practice against standards. Foucault (2000) observed that self-examination has been deeply ingrained in Western cultures since the time of the ancient Greek philosophies and exists “not to close self-awareness in upon itself but, rather, to enable it to open up entirely to its director” (p. 310).

The phenomenographic methodology employed in Study 1 produced the outcome space illustrated in Figure 1. This outcome space maps teachers' conceptions of professional standards across two intersecting axes: quality assurance versus quality improvement (horizontal), and strong versus weak agency (vertical). The quality assurance end of the horizontal axis reflects the tendency of participants whose conceptions reside here to believe that regulatory regimes imposed on teachers, like teacher standards (and, by extension, other technologies of professional regulation, like performance review, registration, cyclical accreditation and indeed mentorship), have the purpose of assuring quality, as demanded by the controlling authority. This was expressed by one participant as “overwhelming accountability” (Kristen) ^[1]. Conversely, the quality improvement end of the horizontal axis reflects a belief that technologies of professional regulation chiefly serve to provide the framework for professionals – in this case teachers – to autonomously improve their practice and capacities. The vertical axis of the outcome space is a judgment about whether participants expressed a strong or a weak sense of agency in their actions.

The outcome space resulting from the horizontal and vertical axes described above creates four quadrants, each representing different teacher responses. The ideal quadrant is active professionalism. Active professionalism is the refinement of a term coined by Sachs (2003) and is inspired also by Foucauldian ethics of care of the self and the audacious reflexivity that it encourages (Taylor, 2021a). Active professionalism is the combination of strong personal agency (critically aware of the potentially limiting nature of technical codifications of teacher) and quality improvement (for its own sake rather than due to externally imposed accountabilities). Active professionalism affords an individual the opportunity to be audaciously reflexive, developing the critical insights and resilience required to maintain their ethical self as a bulwark against the constraining influence of technical codifications of professional identity. An active professionalism seeks out the mechanisms to nourish the dispositions which most richly contribute to teachers' sense of being as a professional. The key point in the study's findings is that the most desirable quadrant of the outcome space (active professionalism combining quality improvement with strong teacher agency) was the quadrant least populated by participants, suggesting that even in optimal conditions, professional standards (and, by extension, other technologies of professional regulation) fail to achieve their intended empowering effects on teachers.

While not specifically focused on mentoring, the subject of mentoring is deeply ingrained in participants' responses in Study 1, with 70% of participants (n = 50) discussing “mentor” and its stemmed variants more than 200 times. A key theme in these responses was the formal/structured versus informal/organic nature of mentorship in schools. A concern associated with formal mentoring structures was the performative (Ball, 2003) nature of evidence creation for mentoring associated with regulatory structures. More than 90% of participants (n = 65) made reference to “paperwork,” “jumping through hoops,” or “ticking boxes” in association with the formal mentoring structures that are a part of the AITSL regulatory standards. A further associated theme was the conception of surveillance framed as support. The strange uncomfortableness with the purpose of mentorship as actually practiced in schools is evident in this comment from study participant Gretel, an experienced teacher (10–19 years' experience) in a curriculum middle leadership position.

Here, Gretel is reflecting on the reality – and her own uncertainties – of the panopticon features of mentorship as it is practiced in her school in the context of the broader regulatory frameworks within which she understands mentorship is being practiced. Others spoke of someone coming into the classroom “to keep tabs on everybody” (Seraphina), “Big Brother watching you” (Caterina) or asked the question “why am I reproving myself” (Alison). Confession of inadequacy is seemingly systematically a part of the regulatory systems associated with beginning and developing teachers. All participants in the study who were mentees within the accreditation processes being discussed expressed concerns about levels of stress, having to prove themselves, being checked or constantly checking themselves.

Alan, in response to the question “Do newer teachers talk much about the value of mentoring?” reports on the organic way in which helpful mentorship relationships develop, implicitly acknowledging those relationships' hierarchical dynamics:

The formal mentoring relationships embedded in professional standards frameworks provide intended support for new and developing teachers while simultaneously creating structures of pastoral power, where teachers are bound within systems of surveillance and confession. Such structures do more to encourage resistance, resignation or blind faith than they do an active professionalism, committed to an audacious, socially just reflexivity.

Mentoring is often found as an embedded structure in contemporary ITE and training systems and early career teacher development, following its encodement as a technology of regulated curriculum and standards. We contend that teaching professionals can become enamored with systems and structures such as standards and the mentorship practices that are contingent upon them. Such systems and structures (and, by extension, the relationships that they produce) promise professional status and improvement, but they can in fact be the source of professional strictures and intrapersonal dissonance. Pastoral power gives us a way of understanding how it is that we are seduced by systems and structures which appear to provide care but when looked at from a perspective of power actually control and limit growth and development (Taylor, 2021b). Mentor teachers in an ITE context usually serve the dual role of mentor and assessor. In Australia, the reporting of practicum is aligned with the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers. Mentors determine whether a teacher candidate has “not met,” “met,” or “exceeded” the assessed standard. In this way, the mentor teacher, assigned by the school, holds the dual role of welcoming and introducing a preservice teacher to the profession and regulating who is deemed a suitable candidate.

Foucauldian pastoral power is evident in mentors' well-intentioned but controlling approaches to developing their mentees' practice, as evidenced by our quantitative survey results which reinforced the qualitative findings. In our study (n = 58), 93% of participants (n = 54) strongly agreed that you can improve your skills as a teacher, and 91% (n = 53) agreed or strongly agreed that no matter who you are, you can learn to teach well. Yet in that same cohort of participants, 98% (n = 57) stated that it is true or very true that teaching requires a special disposition, and 88% (n = 51) believed that some people are not suitable to be teachers. These results indicated that a significant majority of participants strongly agreed that teaching is a skill that can be improved, while an equally significant majority of participants believed teaching requires a special disposition that not all possess. The dissonance in mentor teachers' beliefs manifests itself in their unconscious biases that influence the development, inclusion and outcomes for mentees. The qualitative results of this study demonstrated participant beliefs about special disposition that appear to be indeterminate, unconscious and subjective. Themes emerged indicating expectations that teacher candidates should inherently know how to manage classrooms, talk to students and manage their planning. This suggests an underlying tension between developmental and gatekeeping functions within mentoring relationships. Making explicit the difference in the functions of mentoring is a step toward creating more socially just mentoring relationships. The potential for a misuse of pastoral power is evident in mentoring relationships where support is rhetorically prioritized but assessment requirements create hierarchical dynamics that undermine collaborative intentions and collegial partnerships.

Recent attention has turned to the emergence of professional supervision in education, particularly serving educational leaders (cf. Hunter and Broughton, 2025; Patterson, 2020). These approaches to mentoring understand it as most useful when it is built on trust, co-constructs meaning and is mutually beneficial (Hunter and Broughton, 2025), where the effectiveness of the mentor or supervisor is their ability to “foster effective exploration” (Patterson, 2020, p. 120). Such sophisticated mentoring is self-aware of the potential pastoral power of the guidance of conscience in mentor–mentee relationships and mitigates against it through such mutuality.

The construction of mentor–mentee relationships tied to the regulatory requirements of teachers' lives often carries the rhetoric of pastorally guiding relationships, imbued with the same characteristics as professional supervision. The beginning or developing teacher, however, lacks the positional power or confidence borne of senior experience to foster the mutuality of the professional supervision relationship, unbound by regulatory frameworks, which a principal may enjoy. Most frequently, however, the mentor–mentee relationship to which the beginning or developing teacher is tied reflects on practice at an instrumental level only, at the level of simple problem-solving. They fail to employ what Hunter and Broughton (2025) describe as imaginal and ontological reflection, which interrogates practice on deeper levels that get to the heart of a teacher's work and their resilience in the face of the work's difficulty. In the case of mentor relationships within the context of a technology like the Australian teacher standards, instrumental rather than ontological reflection is perhaps unsurprising; the standards almost entirely lack an ontological dimension, the very dimension that our participants tell us is the most important part of being a great teacher. Professional standards and mentoring frameworks can force both mentor and mentee to speak within those boundaries, thus structuring what can be said. It requires a certain audacity for mentees and an openness to reciprocal learning on the part of the mentor, to step beyond instrumental reflection (needed to satisfy prescribed standards for technical skills) to reflexivity, which brings mutual ontological awareness and honesty.

Justice-oriented counter moves to Foucauldian guidance of conscience: Mentees set enquiry questions for meetings with mentors. Mentors disclose their own positionality and their reporting obligations. Discussion of outcomes involves reciprocal actions.

Our teacher participants believed that ontological dispositions like relationality, empathy, passion, commitment and moral purpose are the most important things distinguishing the competent from the great teacher. The lack of an ontological dimension to speak to these dispositions in technical documents which guide regulatory frameworks instead inevitably leads to the privileging of teachers' skills and knowledge as the heart of great teaching. We are not suggesting that skills and knowledge are not important, but they are not necessarily what needs to be at the heart of conversations that constitute great mentoring relationships. A preoccupation with knowledge and skills alone in rituals like new teachers' gathering of evidence for portfolios to be accredited against technical standards is problematic because it encourages a stagnation of mentorship reflection at an instrumental level. The evidence gathering for portfolios, viewed through a pastoral power lens, is a form of subjugating self-examination. Teachers engage in humble bragging that is performative compliance (“paperwork,” “jumping through hoops,” and “ticking boxes” were the terms thickly used by participants) and does little to deepen teachers' personal investment in the profession. Problematizing self-examination within regulatory mechanisms challenges the taken-for-grantedness of such mentoring tools for new and developing teachers. This matters because the activating of accreditation, reaccreditation and appraisal processes in this way ensures that the teaching profession will remain stuck on the left-hand side of the outcome space illustrated in Figure 1, bound to impose quality assurance conceptions of the profession rather than liberating quality improvement ones. This is more likely to reduce the profession to a cadre of compliant officers rather than active professionals (cf. Groundwater-Smith and Mockler, 2009) able to engage in the deeper work of surfacing bias and acknowledging the injustice inherent in settler-culture systems and structures.

The becoming of an educator, when restricted to standards, does little to capture the essence of what it means to be a teacher. The deeply held purpose that sits at the center of teaching often finds itself in conflict with external regulatory frameworks. This delicate balance of vulnerability and validation must be nurtured in a reciprocating mentoring relationship. Awareness of the pastoral power dynamic enables mentors to appreciate their own positionality and need for reflection in order to be fully present and open to the humanity of those they mentor. Through surfacing the contradictions noted in Study 2, mentors are able to examine their own identity formation, interrogating concepts of self and other, diversity and equity and arriving at a more integrated positionality that serves their own growth, and that of the mentee and the profession. This awareness then informs the mentor's development needs and opportunities for more equitable and transformative mentoring practices. In the modeling of self-examination, the mentor creates space for the mentee to do the same, offering deeper understanding and the greater possibility of shared growth.

Justice-oriented counter moves to Foucauldian self-examination: Mentor and mentee together ask the questions: Who benefits? Who is burdened? What action(s) can redistribute benefit and/or workload now or next time?

Foucault (1984) spoke of regimes of truth, where what can and cannot be said is determined by unspoken rules. In this discussion, the regime of truth is bound by the regulatory framework within which mentor and mentee operate. For example, a constructed professional portfolio is considered the legitimate confession, whereas the informal conversation between the mentor and mentee has ambivalent value. This is seen in Study 2, where the subjective interpretations or “gut feelings” of mentors contribute to the assessment of a candidate's readiness and suitability to practice. In such circumstances, mentees have to respond within the regime of truth, without always knowing or understanding what guides mentor judgments. When the mentor is also an assessor against regulatory standards, they are subject to conflicting roles. The power that inheres their assessor function reinforces the confession of inadequacy in the mentee, who experiences the process as stressful, one where they constantly need to prove themselves. Seen through a pastoral power lens, the mentor becomes the director of conscience who interprets the mentee's confessions. The sense that beginning and developing teachers have of being under surveillance to meet a standard engenders a systematic confession of inadequacy. Such a confession is not truth per se so much as a response to what the mentee perceives will reduce stress, prove themself or help them tick a box or jump through a hoop. Confession in mentoring relationships produces docile subjects who internalize surveillance, transforming professional development into self-regulation that serves institutional rather than individual needs. The capacity of the mentor to support the mentee in such situations is limited.

Justice-oriented counter moves to Foucauldian confession: Critical storytelling – what strengths of both parties to a mentoring relationship are obscured by the formal expectations or professional standards which officially frame the mentoring relationship? Together ask the question: Will we accept, adapt or resist the official framing of our mentoring relationship?

Our findings have shown how the guidance of conscience, self-examination and confession operate at unconscious levels in mentoring dynamics (Table 1). Our findings highlight how pastoral power operates through seemingly supportive mentoring structures while reinforcing institutional hierarchies and social injustices. We contend that an awareness of pastoral power in mentoring education is a proactive defense against their limiting impacts over quality mentoring relationships.

Mentoring education is needed that explicitly surfaces pastoral power dynamics rather than allowing them to operate unconsciously through assessment and accreditation requirements which position mentors as institutional gatekeepers rather than developmental partners. Awareness of these pastoral power dynamics offers pathways toward more equitable, just and transformative mentoring practices. When mentors develop reflexive awareness of their own positionality and the power imbalances inherent in their dual roles as supporter and assessor, they can model the kind of ontological reflection that moves beyond instrumental compliance toward authentic professional growth. We propose an integrated approach to mentoring that acknowledges the importance of the epistemological and the dispositional when considering mentor education. With an equal focus on the aspect of being and becoming, mentor education surfaces the unconscious biases and implicit expectations that may lead to inequity and gatekeeping. The Mentoring Framework (Figure 2) illustrates an integrated conceptualization of the mentoring dynamic. It accounts for both the epistemological and the ontological in the development of mentors in order to move toward an elevated reflexive approach where both mentor and mentee are actively engaged in illuminating the inherent biases and potential of power imbalances in their dynamic, and are able to work reflexively beyond merely instrumental levels.

This paper makes a distinctive theoretical contribution by demonstrating how Foucault's concept of pastoral power illuminates the intimate dynamics of teacher mentoring relationships. The pastoral power lens uniquely theorizes the personal, confessional and transformative aspects of mentoring partnerships. We propose that mentoring relationships can sometimes operate through “continuous vigilance over oneself” (Foucault, 2014, p. 324) and employ discourses constructed as caring for teachers, ostensibly for their own professional good (Taylor, 2021a). This theoretical lens helps explain the tension between mentors' expressed collaborative ideals and the hierarchical practices that emerge through guidance, confession and self-examination. The pastoral power lens is a means of achieving Freirean conscientization, of providing a language to explain the obvious that mentorship is not neutral.

The Australian settler-colonial context in which this study is situated amplifies the consequence of our findings. In one of the globe's noted diverse, multicultural societies, the teaching workforce remains predominantly white, strikingly excluding non-English-speaking-background and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander ITE candidates. It is within this demographic disparity that the mechanics of pastoral power operate most damagingly. When mentoring is tethered to standards, accreditation and assessment which are saturated with white settler assumptions about what good teaching looks like, the confessional demands of portfolios, progress reviews and reflective evidence can unintentionally require minoritized teachers to translate their practice through the dominant view, rendering other epistemologies less valid or credible.

Effective mentoring requires a balance between pastoral care and professional empowerment. When mentoring relationships focus solely on technical compliance with professional standards, they risk superficiality rather than engaging in authentic professional growth. We have conceptualized mentoring as a site of care of the self (Foucault, 1986) where both mentor and mentee can develop an “audacious reflexivity” (Taylor, 2021b, p. 7) that renames the world (Freire, 1972), challenging limiting professional narratives and imposed social norms while nurturing genuine development. The three mechanisms we identify – namely, (1) guidance that tethers the mentee's professional conscience to the dominant view, (2) confession that demands self-appraisal against pre-formed standards and (3) self-examination that orients reflective practice toward compliance – are mechanisms through which normalizing epistemologies are reproduced at the interpersonal level. For mentees whose professional identities, pedagogical commitments and ways of being as educators derive from outside those pre-formed categories, the mentoring relationship becomes a site not of growth but of translation, a translation that is not lifegiving but burdensome. Mentoring that operates through the normalizing mechanisms of pastoral power risks the exclusion and attrition of minoritized teachers that the profession requires to serve an increasingly diverse student population. Our findings highlight the importance of mentor education that explicitly addresses unconscious power dynamics and mentor positionality, suggesting future research should investigate pastoral power mechanisms and Freirean conscientization across diverse cultural and educational contexts.

The implications for social justice in education are significant. Traditional mentoring frameworks often unconsciously reproduce existing power hierarchies through normalizing technologies (Taylor, 2016). Understanding mentoring through the pastoral power lens reveals opportunities for resignification, ways of working within institutional structures while transforming them. The impact of privileging such alternative discourses at a time when the profession faces existential issues of sustainability holds enormous potential. Mentor education within the school education sector is required, which considers the ontological dimension of a teacher's or educational leader's life in addition to what would otherwise be a preoccupation with their technical skills and knowledge. Mentoring education that creates awareness between mentors and mentees regarding the vicissitudes of power dynamics in mentoring relationships can contribute to the formation of an integrated professional capable of existing in the liminal space of mentoring. Mentoring sometimes demands the mentor to be assessor, but it always requires the mentor to be a professional companion. In understanding mentorship with a heightened awareness of its power to control us, we can liberate future teachers in their professional aspirations and provide spaces for all teachers to explore their own professional desires. As education systems globally grapple with questions of teacher development and social justice, understanding the pastoral dimensions of mentoring relationships becomes increasingly crucial.