Abstract:

Postgraduate education is a systematic program involving students enrolling, content of courses, teaching methodology, mentoring and possible related administrative work. Among them mentoring is comparatively more direct that influences the individuals’ development of the graduates. Based on the academic axis, the teacher-student relationship in the mentoring system is a kind of rational relationship established during the whole process of teaching, researching and all their interactive activities. The research of it not only involves the observations and investigations of the behavioral relationships between teachers and students, but also the cultural context and institutional environment in which it is rooted.

By using the concept of Habermas’ Communicative Action Theory, this paper dissects the essential features of the teacher-student relationship under the analysis framework based on communicative rationality, life-world and discourse ethics. Through interviews and questionnaires, the study is conducted to collect data of graduate students and tutors from 3 universities in Guangdong (China). The research analyzes the communicative behaviors between the graduate students and their tutors and the existing problems, excavate the reasons behind so as to establish an academy-oriented life-world with better environment, institutions and teacher-student relationship, which decreases disturbance of bureaucracy politics and non-academic power to the academic communicative environment.

Keywords:

Teacher-Student Relationship, Communicative Action, Postgraduate education, Communicative rationality.