New Findings Challenge Traditional Mentoring Models by Centering Bicultural Identity

Horváth, G., & Varga, A. (2026). “I can help children who grew up in similar circumstances to me”: Roma university students’ perceptions of being bicultural mentors. Intercultural Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/14675986.2026.2652736

Introduction

Roma students in Hungary face compounding structural disadvantages, including higher rates of early school leaving, segregated schooling, and racial prejudice. These limit educational advancement at every level. Against this backdrop, Horváth and Varga (2026) examine a Hungarian university mentoring program supporting primary school students in rural, underprivileged communities. The authors asks how bicultural identity, defined as navigating both a Roma heritage culture and the dominant majority culture, shapes mentors’ motivations, experiences, and challenges when working with protégés from similar backgrounds.

Methods

The authors employed a two-phase sequential mixed-methods design. Phase one administered a 27-item online questionnaire to 50 university mentors (N=180) between 2019 and 2022, capturing motivations, memorable experiences, and perceived outcomes. Phase two conducted semi-structured in-depth interviews with 25 mentors during 2024–2025, focusing specifically on bicultural identity. Two Roma mentors were selected through intensity sampling for detailed analysis. Both phases used abductive thematic analysis. The study was conducted in Hungarian; participant quotations were translated by the researchers.

Results

Bicultural mentors prioritized helping children as their primary motivation, whereas monocultural mentors most frequently cited personal benefits. Roma mentors drew on lived community knowledge — what the authors frame as community cultural wealth — to build credibility and trust that outsider mentors typically cannot replicate. Interview data revealed that both participants had lacked formal mentoring during their own schooling and were motivated by a desire to become the mentors they never had (though students had informal mentors). Community proximity also created boundary challenges, including overlapping personal and mentor relationships. Notably, when controlling for group size, material benefits such as scholarships and travel discounts were proportionally more important to bicultural mentors than to their monocultural peers, a finding the authors link to the socioeconomic disadvantages bicultural mentors disproportionately face.

Discussion

The authors situate these findings within critical mentoring frameworks (Stoller, 2021; Weiston-Serdan, 2023), arguing that traditional mentoring structures inadvertently reproduce majority-society norms and undervalue the cultural assets bicultural mentors carry. Roma mentors’ community embeddedness (their credibility with families and protégés) functioned as a protective asset, though proximity also generated role boundary tensions and performance pressure rooted in societal expectations of Roma as role models.

Implications for Mentoring Programs

Programs should actively recruit bicultural mentors, provide equitable access to program information, and design training that supports identity-conscious self-reflection rather than assimilation into majority institutional norms. Supervision structures must address boundary management specific to community-embedded mentoring relationships.

The full paper can be found here