What is it about?
This chapter examines teacher mentoring and induction in Romania and the Republic of Moldova not simply as professional support practices, but as socially and politically produced arrangements shaped by history, policy, language, and power. While both countries formally recognise mentoring for beginning teachers, the chapter shows that mentoring practices are enabled and constrained by deeper cultural, discursive, social, and material conditions that shape how mentoring is understood, enacted, and experienced. We argue that recent policy renewals in both countries—especially after the COVID-19 pandemic—are closely linked to geopolitical pressures to align with European standards and international policy agendas. However, this alignment often relies on linear assumptions and uncritical borrowing of international models, with limited attention to local histories, school realities, or teachers’ lived experiences. As a result, mentoring practices tend to reproduce existing hierarchies, uneven access to support, and fragile professional identities for beginning teachers. Rather than framing these issues as simple gaps in policy implementation, the chapter shows how mentoring practices are produced through interconnected discursive, social, and material arrangements that also carry political meaning. In both contexts, mentoring becomes a site where questions of professionalism, authority, belonging, and national orientation are negotiated.
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Why is it important?
This research is important because it shows that improving mentoring for beginning teachers cannot be achieved through regulatory reform alone. Mentoring practices are shaped by geopolitical, cultural, and institutional conditions that influence how support, authority, and professionalism are imagined and enacted in schools. Without critical reflection on these conditions, new policies risk reproducing existing inequalities, hierarchical relations, and fragile forms of professional support. By drawing attention to the need for trust, dialogue, and sensitivity to local contexts, this research highlights mentoring as a key site where educational change, professional identity, and broader social and political dynamics intersect.
Perspectives
I hope this article encourages readers to see teacher mentoring not as a technical requirement or administrative add-on, but as a practice shaped by deeper cultural, political, and historical forces. The ways in which beginning teachers are supported—or supervised—reveal assumptions about professionalism, authority, and belonging, and in contexts such as Romania and the Republic of Moldova they also carry clear geopolitical meanings. Mentoring is never neutral: it shapes who remains in the profession, how teachers understand themselves, and how educational change is imagined. If nothing else, I hope this article invites readers to pause, reflect, and question what is too often taken for granted.
Mihaela Mitescu-Manea
The West University of Timisoara
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Mentoring for Teacher Induction in Romania and the Republic of Moldova, January 2026, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1163/9789004727557_007.
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