When is mentoring not mentoring?

My literature review of mentoring in nurse education has had a major reorganisation, from a structure based the on the headings 'Nurse education', 'Workplace learning' and 'Mentoring' to one based on the Lane and Clutterbuck model of mentoring competence structured by the headings 'Doing' (which includes 'relationship management' and 'knowledge transfer') and 'Being' (which includes 'personal characteristics' and 'experience'). I was quite excited by the new way of arranging the literature review under these conceptual headings. I thought it might facilitate greater synthesis of ideas and allow me to maintain a focus on the relevance of the chapter contents to mentoring.

However, this strategy seems to have backfired. I admit it was a struggle sometimes to make things fit under the headings, as so many research findings overlapped these categories. Nevertheless, I was able to create a narrative, or so I thought, to show that actually we know quite a lot about what mentors do, but understand much less about how they experience the role. However, my PhD supervisors complained that the narrative was missing and that perhaps I was trying too hard to speculate what this could all mean. Our discussion of the chapter concluded that perhaps it would be better to abandon the 'Being' and 'Doing' structure. But what to replace it with?

After spending many hours tossing ideas around, going back to basics (What is the purpose of a literature review? What are they supposed to contain?), and feeling totally deflated, I'm starting to think of a new story to tell. It concerns the fact that the role of 'mentor' in placement learning in the specific context of nurse education is very different to any other mentoring role, even in nursing, that involves providing collegial support. This role is much closer the the role of clinical educator in physiotherapy or fieldwork educator in occupational therapy or the mentors in teacher education than anything else.The term 'mentor' has been applied for want of a better one, but it somehow distracts from and conceals the reality of the role.

This takes me back to two pivotal past experiences. First, when I was working as a clinical placement facilitator, I and the network of colleagues I worked with invested a great deal of energy in finding an alternative term to 'mentor' that we could use as a generic term applied to all the clinical professions. We recognised that this was not mentoring in the sense that most people understood. However, we were unsuccessful in coming up with any replacement word that would be acceptable across the professions.The second experience was a brief conversation with David Clutterbuck following a lecture he had delivered on mentoring. I told him what I was planning to investigate for my PhD and he told me 'that's not mentoring'.

Maybe this is the key to unravelling my puzzle.