Generally, mentoring is seen as a supportive strategy for beginning teachers (Pennanen et al., 2015, European Commission, 2010). Mentoring has become the most popular form of teacher induction, impacting the interchangeable use of mentoring and induction (Ingersoll and Smith, 2004). However, the loose utilisation of these terms in the literature suggests a conceptual confusion about their employment. Hence, mentoring has been described as a poorly defined practice that is weakly conceptualised and theorised (Colley, 2003, Bozeman and Feeney, 2007). There is a growing literature that theorises mentoring as social practice (Kemmis, Heikkinen, et al., 2014), hence it is understood as a special kind of social practice that exists amid other social practices (Heikkinen, 2020). Within that understanding, I’ll introduce mentoring and induction practices by presenting their special characteristics and historical developments within the studied educational and political settings. In Armenia, mentoring is also seen as a means of supporting continuing teachers who are new to the school, not to the system. Moreover, mentoring and induction are not officially regulated by the relevant laws (UNICEF, 2022) but highly depend on individual school arrangements and regulations. In this study, I explore the notion of teacher induction and mentoring within the Armenian educational system to reveal the conceptualisation and practical frameworks that underpin induction and mentoring. In the framework of recent educational reforms in Armenia, there is a growing interest in induction and mentoring in policy discourses in the country, particularly within the context of SEN education, continuous teacher development, and teacher shortage. This is a qualitative exploratory study aiming to understand the state of mentoring and induction within the Armenian educational system, understand the conceptualisation of those two notions within various educational documents, and examine the affordances and constraints for induction and mentoring. To this end, I address the following research question: How are the concepts of induction and mentoring, their function and their relationship to teacher continuous professional learning and development conceptualised at the levels of policy and practice? Using the theory of practice architecture (Kemmis and Grootenboer, 2008) I will explore the specific material-economic, social-political and cultural-discursive arrangements to understand the internationally recognisable conceptualisations of mentoring and induction to be able to examine and explain conceptualisations of those two notions within Armenian educational landscape. The data for this analysis consists of policy documents, reviews of research literature and national/international reports documenting teachers’ participation and approaches to mentoring and induction.

Colley, H. (2003). “Engagement Mentoring for ‘Disaffected’ Youth: A New Model of Mentoring for Social Inclusion.” British Educational Research Journal 29 (4): 521–542. Heikkinen, H. L. T. (2020). Understanding mentoring within an ecosystem of practices. In K.-R. Olsen, E. M. Bjerkholt & H. L. T. Heikkinen (Eds.), New teachers in Nordic countries – ecologies of mentoring and induction (Ch. 1, pp. 27–47). Oslo: Cappelen Damm Akademisk. Ingersoll, R. M., and T. M. Smith. (2004). “Do Teacher Induction and Mentoring Matter?” NASSP Bulletin88: 28 40.10.1177/019263650408863803 Kemmis, S. and 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., and 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 Pennanen, M., Bristol, L., Wilkinson, J., and Heikkinen, H.L.T (2015). What is ‘good’ mentoring? Understanding mentoring practices of teacher induction through case studies of Finland and Australia. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14681366.2015.1083045