Special Education Mentoring within the Context of Rural Schools

This article describes a one-year rural mentor training program designed for novice special education teachers and their teacher mentors. Mentoring efforts to encourage collaboration and collegiality run counter to age-old norms of autonomy and congeniality in the school settings. However, collaborative forums can provide support for both experienced and novice teachers to engage in ‘critical friendships’ through discussions on the dilemmas, ambiguities, and paradoxes identified within the contexts of their rural school settings.