Mentorers betydelse, funktion och nytta för elever i gymnasieskolan : En narrativ studie kring mentorer och mentorskap utifrån ett elevperspektiv

Sammanfattning: The study describes six upper secondary school students’ thoughts of and stories about mentors and mentorship in secondary school. The mentorship has been studied with a hermeneutic approach from a narrative pupil relational perspective, which is influenced by the phenomenological humanity perspective. The aim of this study is to describe a few pupils’ life worlds and to try to interpret how they describe and explain their own behavior related to mentorship and their mentors.  Furthermore the aim with this study is to identify, describe and to look at possible patterns that may be found within the stories of the students' stories, and to let any common descriptive concepts culminate from the found. In addition, the study aims to investigate students' views on an according to them ideal mentoring. Inspired by the grounded theory the study has been conducted using a hermeneutic narrative approach with qualitative in-depth interviews. The choice of students was done by purposeful strategic sampling from four secondary schools. The results show that the mentorship is relevant to the students' choice of adaptation strategies in the study situation and that the students have different experiences and perceptions of mentors significance, function and utility, partly due to the of the students perceived offered mentoring. The results also show that there are some similar perceptions of the participating students about what are important and desirable characteristics of mentors and an ideal mentoring. One possible conclusion to draw from the study's findings is that it may be very important for secondary school students to have access to a mentor during the study period and that students need to have a regular time set aside for access to mentoring function. Another possible conclusion to draw is that a personal commitment from the mentor is an important factor influencing the student's perception of mentorship. As a summary, the results also show patterns that express the common needs and desires of the students to get more information about the possibilities of mentoring and to get a genuine demonstrated interest and commitment from mentors, together with a sensitivity to detect which support the student needs.