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In this paper, the objective is to explore the area of pedagogy in the reform of kindergarten teacher education (KTE), which was implemented in 2013 in Norway. The data material is based on semi-structured interviews with 41 educators from six focus groups, and is analysed with a hermeneutical approach. The main findings is presented in three themes; i) complexity of leadership, ii) professional competition and iii) fragmentation of a subject. The principal conclusion highlights that pedagogy, as a subject, is weakened, unclear and less defined within interdisciplinary education. Implication for leadership in Higher Education Educations (HEI) indicates in general the need for a clarification of the content of the term “pedagogy” and particularly its role in the reformed KTE in Norway.

This open access article is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license, originally published in Cogent Education. The main purpose of this article is to study the influence of social support on mentoring provided and the moderating influence of having a higher education. This cross-sectional survey was based on a questionnaire that was sent to 435 employees from 29 preschools in Norway. A total of 284 responses were returned, a response rate of 65.3%. Three research hypotheses were formulated in order to answer three research questions. Confirmatory Factor Analysis was used to develop three measurement models and Structural Equation Modeling based on multi-group analysis was used to test the hypotheses. The results revealed that social support increase the occurrence of mentoring provided at work for employees with a higher education and that having a higher education moderates this relationship as compared to those without that education. Implications for practice, higher education, and the use of convenience sampling and self-reports are discussed, especially related to representativeness and reporting biases. This is an understudied area and no previous research has used a confirmatory approach to investigate how social support and higher education influence the occurrence of mentoring provided.