Induction and Mentoring of New Teachers in the Nordics as an Ecology of Practices

This roundtable introduces an overview of the current situation in the Nordic countries
regarding induction and mentoring of new teachers and the historical development
which has led to the current state of art. This review is rooted in a number of
consecutive cross-sectorial network projects on induction and mentoring in the
Nordics, the first of which was launched in 2004. The ongoing project, funder by
Nordplus is entitled “New Teacher and Induction (NTI)”.
The NTI network consists of representatives from teachers’ unions and researchers
in five Nordic countries Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. In
the fall of 2020 the NTI network published a scientific anthology in which it presented
the historical main lines and discussed relevant measures on induction and
mentoring in the aforementioned (Olsen et al., 2020). This paper seeks to bring these
perspectives together. However, this presentation is not just a compilation of the
earlier book, but the interpretation has been updated and developed further through
joint seminars across the research network in the spring of 2022.
The focus of this roundtable is to present some empirical finding of the ecosystems of
mentoring in the Nordic countries, based on a long-term research of a network
consisting of researchers, teacher educators and representatives of teacher unions
which now form the NTI network. The theory of ecologies of practices helps us to
understand the development and diversity of the different mentoring and induction
practices in the aforementioned countries. It suggests that the relationships between
practices and their environment resemble the relationships between organisms and
ecosystems in nature (Kemmis 2022; Virolainen et al. 2022). From this perspective,
practices of induction and mentoring derive their essential qualities and their
existence from their relations with other practices within wider ecosystems of social,
political and educational practices (Capra 2005; Heikkinen 2020). We portray the
different national practices by describing how things have progressed in a dynamic
balance, how mentoring has found its ecological niche in the midst of different policy
interests, and how the image of mentoring in the Nordics begins to take shape as a
rather diverse and rich ecology of practices.