In the Mood for Mentoring: Critical Spotlights on the Canadian Integration of Immigrants as Citizens and Consumers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Historically considered an informal process of knowledge transmission, mentoring has more recently become an institutional form of intervention. Over the past forty years, formalized mentoring programs have mushroomed in workplaces, schools and non-profit organizations in North America. To specifically understand the influence of mentoring on the integration of immigrants into Canadian society, this project explored the mentoring experiences of adult newcomers from diverse national backgrounds. In two Torontonian mentoring programs with instrumental and community-based elements, mentees were matched with volunteer mentors in groups. For the examination of these experiences, the researcher utilized a theoretical framework based on critical theory as well as a conceptual framework blending studies on emotions, citizenship and consumption. Methodologically, this doctoral project employed an exploratory qualitative approach combining and integrating participant observations, individual interviews and collages. The key findings revealed that participants recognized as their mentors primarily those who were named as such, had roles, and were affiliated to organizations. Concomitantly, the same participants often ignored or discredited informal mentors. Indeed, the mentees displaying instrumental or corporate orientations seemed to fit particularly well into the researched programs, which are based on a generalized conformance to Canada's dominant values and mainstream social norms. Nonetheless, this study concluded that both mentoring and integration were fundamentally dynamic and partial processes. At the expense of its epistemological nature as a way of knowing, mentoring was commodified as part of a broader national training and volunteer process conducted under the Canadian multicultural framework. In this context, citizenship and consumerist discourses and practices intertwined to support the social construction of immigrant experiences fostered throughout happy narratives and representations. Overall, this study demonstrated that the institutionalization of mentoring is presently a powerful strategy for the integration of immigrants. Finally, this research also indicated the salience of nationality, language and emotions in these processes.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".