Reconsidering the Communicative Space: Learning to Be

In this chapter, we ask the reader to set aside existing perceptions of mentoring, supervision and their relatedness to professional experience and instead join us in a sharply reconsidered analysis of the communicative space in which teachers and preservice teachers negotiate the phenomenon of ‘learning to be’. We take the Habermasian concept of communicative space (Habermas J, Theory of communicative action, vol 2: Lifeworld and system: a critique of functionalist reason (trans: McCarthy T). Beacon, Boston, 1987) and earlier notions of lifeworld (Heidegger M, Being and time (trans: Macquarrie J, Robinson E). SCM Press, New York, 1962/1927; Merleau-Ponty M, Phenomenology of perception (trans: Smith C). Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1962/1945; Sandberg J, Dall’Alba G, Organ Stud 30:1349–1368, 2009) as a theoretical frame to foreground learning and practice as ‘ways of being in the world’. A series of three vignettes are presented to illustrate how mentoring is both epistemological (what we know or can do) and ontological (how we are learning to be). It is this learning to be, in the teaching and learning to teach relationship, that we aim to identify, illustrate and elaborate in this chapter.