Session Information
01 SES 06 B, European Perspectives on Teacher Induction and Mentoring (Part 2)
Symposium continued from 01 SES 04 A
Contribution
Empirical evidence consistently highlights mentoring as a supportive strategy for beginning teachers (European Commission, 2010). However, there is considerable variety in conceptualising what "mentoring" is or how "induction" functions as a social practice (Kemmis et al., 2014), defining onto-epistemologies with significant ethical and political implications. Studies considering these aspects have increased in recent years (Shanks et al, 2020), although most of this scholarship primarily engages voices from some areas of Europe and less from others. In this chapter, we examine the theoretical and practical framings that underpin induction and mentoring in Romania and the Republic of Moldova, where how these notions are discursively constructed is rarely, if ever, the topic of critical analysis. In both countries, the concepts of mentoring and induction were given formal recognition by being inserted in the laws governing education around the same time (Law 1/2011 in Romania and Law 152/2014 in the Republic of Moldova). In the following ten years, however, at best, induction/mentoring activities' operationalisations have been sporadic (World Bank SABER Country Report, 2017). Nevertheless, as of 2020/2021, there is a resurgence of interest in induction and mentoring in policy discourses in both countries. By comparing these two national settings, we aim to deepen our understanding of the relationship between meaning-making and participation in mentoring and induction into the teaching profession. To this end, we address the research question: How are the concepts of induction and mentorship, their function, and their relationship to teacher education and continuing professional learning and development conceptualised at the levels of policy, research, and practice? Using the theory of practice architecture (Kemmis & Grootenboer, 2008) and positions theory (Davies & Harré, 1990), we examine the specific material-economic, social-political and cultural-discursive arrangements that prefigure the enmeshment of internationally recognisable conceptualisations of mentoring and induction in these two national contexts. Conceptual and processual factors affording or constraining conceptualisations of mentoring and induction in the three dimensions of intersubjective space: semantic, physical and social (Kemmis et al., 2014), are identified. We contend that large-scale policy plans presuming that semantic, physical, and social change in mentoring and induction is of a linear process-product sort (Heikkinen et al., 2012) are bound to fail or produce unanticipated effects. The data for this comparative analysis consists of policy documents, reviews of research literature in each country, and national and international reports documenting teachers’ participation and approaches to mentoring and induction in the two national contexts.
References
Davies, B., & Harré, R. (1990). Positioning: The discursive production of selves. Journal for the theory of social behaviour, 20(1), 43-63. European Commission (2010). Developing Coherent and System-Wide Induction Programmes for Beginning Teachers: A Handbook for Policymakers. Brussels: Commission of the European Communities. Heikkinen, H.L.T., Jokinen, H. and Tynjälä, P. (2012). Peer-Group Mentoring for Teacher Development, Routledge, New York, NY. Iucu, R., & Stîngu, M. (2013). Training induction mentors: alternative policy scenarios of Romanian educational system. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 76, 931-934. Kemmis, S. & Grootenboer, P. (2008). Situating praxis in practice: practice architectures and the cultural, social and material conditions for practice. In s. Kemmis & T.J. Smith (eds.) enabling praxis: Challenges for education (pp. 37 -64). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Kemmis, S., Heikkinen, H. L., Fransson, G., Aspfors, J., & Edwards-Groves, C. (2014). Mentoring of new teachers as a contested practice: Supervision, support and collaborative self-development. Teaching and teacher education, 43, 154-164. Shanks, R., Attard Tonna, M., Krøjgaard, F., Paaske, K.A., Robson, D. & Bjerkholt, E. (2020). A comparative study of mentoring for new teachers, Professional Development in Education, 48:5, 751-765. World Bank (2017) SABER Teachers Romania country report. Downloaded from https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/29775/125889-WP-PUBLIC-SABER-Teachers-Romania-Country-Report-2017.pdf
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