Mentoring of new teachers is a social practice. In terms of the practice theory adopted here, practices are constituted within specific conditions and arrangements that we call practice architectures (Kemmis, et al., 2014).: a form of socially established cooperative human activity that involves characteristic forms of understanding (sayings), modes of action (doings), and ways in which people relate to one another and the world (relatings), that ‘hang together’ in a distinctive project. A particular practice of mentoring, in a particular school or municipality or country is enmeshed with and shaped by local and more general practice architectures that exist in that school or municipality or country. These practice architectures function as particular preconditions for mentoring as it occurs there. Practice architectures thus prefigure, though they do not determine, people’s practices, in the way that a path offers an easier way through a forest; similarly, practice architectures change in response to changing conditions, as a path changes its course when a fallen tree causes walkers to make a new path around it (Kemmis & Heikkinen, 2012). Practices thus partly take their form from the practice architectures at a site. Practice architectures enable and constrain what can be said and done in the practice, and how people can relate to one another. They prefigure what people do in a practice by furnishing particular kinds of resources for the sayings, the doings, and the relatings of the practice: a particular language that can be used, a particular location in physical space-time, particular arrays of objects that enable and constrain what can be done, and particular social conditions that enable and constrain how participants relate to one another. In this symposium, our aim is to study the preconditions of the national practices of mentoring and teacher induction which enable different induction practices.

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