Understanding mentoring of new teachers: Communicative and strategic practices in Australia and Finland

Three orientations for understanding educational autonomy: school principals’ voices from Australia, Finland, and Jamaica

This paper reports on the findings from a multi-site case study conducted in Australia, Finland and Jamaica which explored the conditions that enabled and constrained the autonomy of school principals. Systematic data collection was carried out in the form of interviews of school principals and the data was analysed using a qualitative approach. The analysis indicates that: (1) school principals’ practices are prefigured by the peculiarities of historical trajectories and ideological traditions enmeshed in schooling sites; (2) these prefiguring arrangements in turn influence varying realisations of autonomous decision making practices across national sites; and (3) even in the expression of…

Articulating the Practice Architectures of Collaborative Research Practice

This chapter explores a collaborative practice of comparative data analysis through the researching activities of four researchers from Australia and Finland. We interrogate the ontological and empirical reality we experienced while engaged in a practice of analysing narrative data on mentoring. In this chapter, we are not reporting on the outcomes of our analysis of mentoring practice; instead we focus on our collaborative engagement, articulating the practice architectures of our research practice. This collaborative research practice was pre-figured by: (1) philosophical traditions instituted through a theory of practice architectures; and (2) normalised practices of researching mentorin…

What is ‘good’ mentoring? Understanding mentoring practices of teacher induction through case studies of Finland and Australia

Mentoring is a practice widely utilised to support new teachers. However, in locally formed systems, the practice of mentoring is conditioned by traditions and arrangements specific to the site. To understand ‘good’ mentoring, these local arrangements cannot be ignored. In this article, the theory of practice architectures is employed to make explicit the prefiguring arrangements of mentoring practices in Finland and NSW Australia. The findings suggest that mentoring practices are shaped by their ontological specificity and this makes reproducing mentoring practices in different sites problematic. Explicating the prefiguring architectures of practices is critical to understanding the contes…