Teacher Mentoring: Histories, Translations, and Reforms in Romaniaand the Republic of Moldova

This paper re-examines the historiography of teacher mentoring in Romania and the Republic of Moldova through the lens of Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory (ANT). In ANT, an actor-network refers to a material–semiotic assemblage in which agency emerges through associations among human and non-human elements. Rather than treating mentoring as a fixed institutional practice, the analysis conceptualises it as a contingent effect of these shifting assemblages of interactions among heterogeneous elements, including legislation, examination systems, mentor registries, school inspectorates, international organisations, professional discourses, material conditions and classrooms. These assemblages enrol and translate one another, producing temporary alignments that give mentoring its shifting historical forms. The study reveals that these configurations generate complex temporalities, where past arrangements persist and continue to influence current practices. In Romania, teacher mentoring has been predominantly framed as supervision, closely tied to examination practices and a centralised approach to teacher recruitment and validation of professional status. In the Republic of Moldova, it has often been conceptualised as professional support, aligning with Europeanisation discourses yet still marked by Soviet-era legacies. Notably, international agencies and geopolitical pressures emerge as powerful non-human actors, sometimes reinforcing and at other times destabilizing national practices. The paper argues that sustainable reform requires reconfiguring these actor-networks with attention to material conditions, temporal continuities, and geopolitical contexts. It proposes a research agenda informed by ANT that foregrounds translation, instability, and historical recurrence.