ERIC Number: EJ1098144
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2016-May
Pages: 34
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0195-6744
EISSN: N/A
Stability and Change of Mentoring Practices in a Capricious Policy Environment: Opening the "Black Box of Institutionalization"
März, Virginie; Kelchtermans, Geert; Dumay, Xavier
American Journal of Education, v122 n3 p303-336 May 2016
This article addresses how institutional logics are translated, maintained, or disrupted by actors and their (inter)actions within schools. The changing policy environment for mentoring beginning teachers in Flanders (Belgium) provides a fertile context for answering this question. Combining neoinstitutional and sensemaking lenses and analyzing the mentoring practices in one school, we investigated the role of mentors' sensemaking in shaping responses to changes in the broader institutional environment. Based on semistructured interviews, observations, and document analyses, the study identifies how the introduction, and later withdrawal, of direct financial support for mentoring installed a new logic of mentoring as a professionalized job and how mentors creatively employed elements of this new logic in their daily interactions. The study contributes to the recent research on inhabited institutionalism by demonstrating that organizations are not only the instantiation of institutional logics, but are sites where people and groups make sense of and creatively use institutional logics.
Descriptors: Mentors, Beginning Teachers, Educational Policy, Organizational Change, Semi Structured Interviews, Observation, Content Analysis, Financial Support, Foreign Countries
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Belgium
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A