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Cultivating the Cultivators: Peer
Mentorship as a Means of
Developing Citizen Scholars in
Higher Education
Catherine Duncan
Introduction
This chapter responds to the call to re-imagine higher education in a
time of disruption and the decline of content’s primacy in a mediated
world. It starts by proposing that we expand the focus of who we con-
sider to be the students we prepare for work and scholarship. I argue that
postgraduate peer mentors are simultaneously both valuable and vulner-
able members of the community of practice (Lave and Wenger, 1991)
within the university but they are often overlooked as newcomers to
teaching practice. This is a lost opportunity, and in this chapter, I outline
a project that explored how peer mentors learn to teach without for-
mal pedagogic instruction. This project was premised on Lee Shulman’s
(1987) idea that Pedagogic Content Knowledge (PCK) is a more desirable
attribute in teachers than content knowledge alone.
Pedagogic Content Knowledge has well-established credentials in edu-
cator development and marks a shift away from the reification of
content as the central focus of education. In outlining this approach,
Shulman claims that the knowledges demonstrated by educators are of
a special order: content is galvanised by the teacher’s various knowl-
edges, experiences and observations. PCK offers a conceptual framework
to bring the pragmatics of teacher training into articulation with the
calls by Arvanitakis and Hornsby (Chapter 1, this book). In so doing,
it is a chance to reimagine the purpose of the university, not as a con-
tent delivery system, but to make a turn towards educating the Citizen
Scholar.
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J. Arvanitakis et al. (eds.), Universities, the Citizen Scholar and the Future of Higher Education
© The Editor(s) 2016