This programme is based on a mentorship model that is non-hierarchical, multidimensional, and involves a range of stakeholders, directed towards the growth trajectory of academic staff, with specific reference to teaching and learning higher education spaces. The principle of lifelong learning suggests that academics at various stages and phases of their professional careers require guidance in targeted areas of their work and professional responsibilities. The nature of knowledge and the evolving technological terrain are rapidly changing, opening new possibilities for experimentation and critique. Mentoring offers the possibility for developing a syntax to tackle these multiple dimensions in a scholarly and pragmatic way.

Ideally, mentoring programmes can be directed at different target audiences at varied levels: for the experienced academic who is targeting professional promotion, for the senior academic aiming to widen their scope of academic footprint, including the dissemination through publication and conferencing and for newly appointed academics who are at early stages of their academic career.

This programme is directed at early career researchers (ECR) who are developing their repertoire for being and becoming a teacher within a higher education institution. This ECR definition refers to academics who have recently joined academia and/or UKZN within the last five years. This mentoring programme includes developing a portfolio of activities in the four constitutive university dimensions of teaching & learning, research, community engagement and university service and administration.  It includes dimensions related to developing scholarship and practical action to fuel the design and development of curriculum, the epistemological and pedagogical relationships, including assessment strategies, and constructing research projects about their classroom action. It includes formal, non-formal and informal interactions. The programme extends beyond performativity discourses to include a holistic conception of being and becoming an academic, involving personal and professional growth trajectories.

Whilst the programme is not directed towards a quick-fix careerists’ agenda of ensuring projected promotion tracks, it accents the kinds of expectations of being and becoming a fully-fledged university academic scholar. This collective co-responsible agenda involves working with, through and in the communities of practitioners within the disciplinary, institutional and national structures. Its outcomes will have promotional possibilities. It foregrounds the teaching and learning in higher education.