Session Information
01 SES 06 B, European Perspectives on Teacher Induction and Mentoring (Part 2)
Symposium continued from 01 SES 04 A
Contribution
Mentoring for novice newly qualified teachers is considered essential. Many researchers have pointed to the concepts of mentoring, coaching, and supervision as “ill-defined, poorly conceptualized and weakly theorized” (Colley, 2003; Skagen, 2014; Attard-Tonna et al., 2017), yet internationally, mentoring remains a common concept and practice (Olsen, Bjerholt & Heikkinnen, 2020). Researchers also point at teachers’ need for training to help them become effective mentors (Schatz-Oppenheimer, 2017), and indeed, as part of the increasing professionalization in teacher education, mentors’ training programs proliferate. Many European countries support such mentoring programs and sometimes even make them mandatory (Caena, 2014). These programs are often run by academic institutions, placing researchers in a pivotal position as those responsible for nurturing future generations of mentor-teachers. It is, therefore, not only interesting but also of great importance to discuss pervasive academic perceptions regarding mentoring, which may serve as the undergirding logic for mentors’ training programs and influence their design. One crucial issue to consider is researchers’ attention and responsiveness toward the context in which mentoring is enacted. Therefore, this study aims to unpack the academic discourse regarding teacher mentoring, and reveal its major constituting concepts and premises while contrasting two different contexts. We focus on the academic literature on mentoring from two countries, Austria and Israel. From these considerations, we come to the following leading research questions: 1. How does academia in Austria and Israel frame the discussion about teacher mentoring? 2. What are the similarities and differences between those framings? To answer these questions, we first focus on the academic discourse regarding teacher mentoring in each country separately and then compare the two. Our corpus includes Austrian (n=32) and Israeli (n=28) academic papers that discuss teacher mentoring. Analyzing these allowed us to reveal their dominant trends and expose their framing of desired mentoring practice and its implications for training. Overall, we find many similarities, and despite the few differences between the two discourses – that of Austria and that of Israel – we question researchers’ attention toward cultural differences.
References
Attard-Tonna, M., Bjerkholt, E., & Holland, E. (2017). Teacher mentoring and the reflective practitioner approach. International Journal of Mentoring and Coaching in Education, 6(3), 1–18. Retrieved from https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/IJMCE-04-2017-0032/full/html. doi:Doi 10.1108/IJMCE-04-2017-0032 Caena, F. (2014). Initial teacher education in Europe: an overview of policy issues. European Commission. ET2020 Working Group of Schools Policy. Consultado en http://ec. europa. eu/education/policy/strategic-‐framework/expert-‐groups/documents/initial-‐teacher-‐education_en. pdf. Colley, H. (2003). Mentoring for social inclusion: A critical approach to nurturing mentor relationships. London and New York: Routledge Falmer. Olsen, K.-R., Bjerkholt, E. M., Heikinnen, H. L. T. (2020). New Teachers in Nordic Countries – Ecologies of Mentoring and Induction. Cappelen Damm Akademsik. DOI https://doi.org/10.23865/noasp.105 Schatz-Oppenheimer, O. (2017). Being a mentor: Novice teachers’ mentors’ conceptions of mentoring prior to training. Professional Development in Education, 43(2), 274–292. https://doi.org/10.1080/19415257.2016.1152591 Skagen, K. (2014). Kunnskap og handling i pedagogisk veiledning. (2nd ed.) Bergen: Fagbokforlaget.
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