We examined teacher mentoring and induction practices in Romania and Moldova, focusing on how these concepts are constructed in educational policy discourse. While both countries recognize mentoring and induction in their policies, variations exist in their implementation and interpretation. Our data set comprised 129 documents, 81 of which are from Romania and 48 from Moldova. Policy documents, research studies, conference proceedings, nationally implemented projects, and international reports are the several categories into which documents in our data set fall. The time frame under investigation is 2011– June 2023 for Romania and 2014– June 2023 for Moldova. Furthermore, we carried out several case studies, specifically concentrating on teacher mentorship and induction, and analyzed 11 thematic initiatives in Romania since 2011 and 4 projects in Moldova. To further our knowledge, we revisited interviews with starting teachers from previous studies (Mitescu-Lupu, 2012; Mitescu, 2014). The positions theory (Davies & Harré, 1990) and architecture of practice theory (Kemmis & Grootenboer, 2008) were employed in data analysis. Our findings indicate that Moldova views induction as a supportive service, while Romania sees it as supervision. Romania has re-examined mentoring to reshape it as a support strategy but struggles with its implementation. The questions we address in this presentation are: what explains the non-linearity of emerging mentoring and induction practices, and how does it impact beginning teachers’ participation in mentoring? We contend that geopolitical nuances are essential in understanding the relationship between mentoring practices and the conditions in the countries we looked at, where we found that policy alignment often lacks critique and serves political communication strategies. Policy discourse in Romania emphasizes European norms without critical engagement, while in Moldova, alignment reflects a shift away from post-Soviet affiliations. These practices shape teacher identities. Changing mentoring practices requires changing practice architectures (Kemmis et al., 2014). As policies alone prove insufficient to prompt immediate transformations of mentoring practices, we discuss a number of potentially recommendable directions of action, such as the open communication between policymakers, practitioners, and researchers; reassessment of knowledge production and circulation practices in education, along with identifying steps towards decolonizing and diversifying these practices; critically reflecting on conceptualizations of mentoring and induction all categories of participants in these practices operate with. We conclude that mentoring practices' effectiveness depends on the infrastructure of support, training, and communication. Long-term, sustained transformations are needed to support diverse participation and conceptualize changes in mentoring and induction practices in both countries.

Davies, B., & Harré, R. (1990). Positioning: The discursive production of selves. Journal for the theory of social behavior, 20 (1), 43-63. 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. Mitescu-Lupu, M. (2012) Învățare și profesionalizare în domeniul didactic, Editura Univ. Al.I.Cuza, Iași, România. Mitescu, M. (2014). A Synopsis on Teachers' Learning during Early Stages of Professional Practice. Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 149, 595-601, DOI:10.1016/j.sbspro.2014.08.233.