Abstract
Teaching practice is widely recognised as a central component of pre-service teacher education; however, mentoring is often conceptualized primarily as supervisory oversight rather than as reciprocal professional learning. Drawing on constructivist, social learning, and situated learning perspectives, this study reconceptualizes practicum engagement as a socio-structurally mediated site of professional reciprocity. Focusing on cooperating teachers within the University of Maroua teacher education program in Cameroon, the study employed a mixed-methods design combining survey data (N = 100) with semi-structured interviews (n = 18) to examine how mentors experience and interpret their roles. Findings indicate that mentoring extends beyond novice induction to function as reflective professional re-engagement for experienced teachers. Dialogic lesson planning, observation, and feedback processes prompted renewed pedagogical awareness and identity negotiation. However, the developmental potential of mentoring was shown to be conditional upon institutional recognition, supervisory coherence, and workload alignment. Where mentoring was institutionally supported, it fostered reflective growth; where recognition and follow-up were limited, engagement tended toward procedural compliance. The study advances the concept of conditional professional reciprocity, arguing that mentoring's transformative capacity depends on the intersection of relational interaction and structural mediation. By foregrounding cooperating teachers in a Central African context, this research contributes to global mentoring scholarship and challenges deficit-oriented assumptions about professional learning in Sub-Saharan Africa.