ABSTRACT
Analysing pedagogy requires a rational and critical engagement with the production, distribution and consumption of knowledge. Critically evaluating pedagogy focuses on how knowledge has been constituted, by whom, for whom and for what purposes. The emphasis is on the interrelations and mediation of knowledge, which includes personal experience, subject, social and political. The analysis establishes the fact that within the process of knowledge construction, the ‘I’ plays a crucial role. The multiple ways of knowledge construction include mentoring as a method of creating, consuming and disseminating knowledge. Mentoring is conceptualized as a process institutionalized within higher education structures particularly related to research guidance that later has the possibility of changing into a more holistic relationship that of being mentors and mentees.
The questions that drive this paper include: How does the mentoring process structure knowledge production and consumption? It questions whether feminist mentoring that builds on self-reflexivity and self-interrogation as key to a politically nuanced understanding of the process of knowledge construction is possible when mentoring process takes place within university academic structures that are innately hierarchical. The paper addresses the question of why sociologists, to a large extent, have accepted that knowledge construction will entail inequality and therefore do not problematize the inherent inequality but mostly accept it as part of the larger process of knowledge construction.
