ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at mentoring as an emancipatory approach to working with postgraduate students. Emancipation as a supervisory process implies both support and challenge. Habermas argues that emancipatory knowledge means that social constraints must be made apparent and a supportive environment is required. Supervision is also emancipatory in the sense that it involves developing motivational strategies that help students to increase self-efficacy, i.e. confidence in their ability to learn and progress in their writing. The research supervisor can take a mentoring approach, but because of their organisational role and obligations they may have to manage the conflict of interest that is inherent in adopting this approach. Mentoring builds upon Rogers’ belief that self-experience and self-discovery are important facets of learning and it involves acknowledging that adults can move from being dependent to being self-directed, accumulate experiences and create a biography from which they can learn and change.
