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.
Featured Image
Why is it important?
The chapter argues 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. The chapter concludes that improving mentoring for beginning teachers requires more than regulatory reform. It calls for critical reflection on the geopolitical, cultural, and institutional conditions that shape how mentoring is imagined and enacted, and for greater trust, dialogue, and contextual sensitivity in supporting teachers’ professional development.
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: Inequities in first education policy responses to the COVID-19 crisis: A comparative analysis in four Central and East European countries, European Educational Research Journal, July 2021, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/14749041211030077.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
