1 The Context of Knowledge Transformation Research
Education is not simply a process of knowledge transmission but one of transformation, where disciplinary knowledge is reshaped, co-created and presented to enhance students’ understanding. Gericke et al. (2018) argue that knowledge must undergo transformation processes to become teachable and learnable content within the curriculum, a process that is crucial for making subject-specific knowledge accessible to learners.
The process of knowledge transformation is an important field of inquiry for education scholars and policymakers worldwide. Some core questions must be asked by teacher educators and teacher education policymakers – what knowledge is considered valuable, or ‘powerful’? Who decides what counts as important or valid knowledge? What processes are used to adapt or recontextualise the knowledge being taught and learned? And how do we ensure that the transformed knowledge remains reliable, rigorous and research-informed?
We know that transformation occurs across various levels, the individual level of the teacher and the level of the institute (Hudson et al., 2023), but at a system level, what do we consider powerful knowledge? The idea of powerful knowledge, first introduced by Wheelahan (2007) and developed by Young (2008) in collaboration with Muller (2013, 2019), stems from curriculum studies and addresses a fundamental question in education: what knowledge should pupils have access to? According to Young (cited in Hudson, 2018, p. 387), powerful knowledge serves as a guiding curriculum principle, grounded in the belief that across all subjects, there exists “better knowledge, more reliable knowledge, knowledge nearer the truth about the world we live in and to what it is to be human” (Young, 2013, p. 107). The knowledge pupils encounter in school is critical, not only for their educational progression but for enabling them to think beyond their immediate circumstances. Young (2013) advocates for equitable access to this knowledge, asserting that all pupils, regardless of background, should be able to benefit from the most reliable knowledge that disciplines can offer.
This book explores the transformation of knowledge within teacher education: how it is shaped, recontextualised, and enacted in a variety of higher education, curricular, and classroom settings. Drawing on contemporary debates in curriculum theory, sociology of knowledge, and educational policy, we examine the processes through which disciplinary, professional, and pedagogical knowledge are translated into forms that are teachable, learnable, and usable by prospective teachers. The authors aim to investigate how these transformations occur, what they reveal about the purposes of education, and how they shape the professional identities and practices of future teachers.
2 Teachers as Transformers of Knowledge
Recent scholarship has highlighted the crucial role of teachers in interpreting and implementing both curriculum and policy (Ross, 2023; Craig, 2012; Grimmett & Chinnery, 2009). The growing recognition of the importance of teacher agency has emerged as a key factor in fostering effective, adaptive, and responsive education across the world. Consequently, teachers’ role in knowledge development and curriculum creation has been the subject of education research internationally, in Norway (Smerud Finnegan & Proitz, 2024), England (Smith et al., 2024), Cambodia (Tep, 2024) and Canada (Nickel & Jacobsen, 2021). This research has positioned teachers as agents of change, arguing that teachers play a central role in selecting, scaffolding and transforming knowledge in the classroom. The concept of the teacher as curriculum maker demands acknowledgment that the teacher is a ‘holder, user, and producer of knowledge’ (Craig, 2010) and that teachers are active agents in the classroom.
As the role of teachers has evolved to active agents in their professional development and the creation of curriculum, it presents a challenge for teacher education and teacher education policy. Teachers must be prepared to design and adapt instructional content to meet the unique needs of their pupils, who are as focused on developing competencies as content knowledge. Secondly, teachers must be challenged to engage in continuous learning through research and professional development, to ensure that they can adapt disciplinary knowledge and to understand how best to teach it throughout their careers. By developing both teacher agency and powerful knowledge, teachers are better equipped to navigate their roles and the complexities of 21st-century teaching.
The teacher research movement supports this culture of continuous learning and improvement, aligning closely with the goals of knowledge transformation in education. Teachers who are involved in and with research are better positioned to contribute to broader discussions on educational policy and practice (OECD, 2023). Instead of relying on externally produced knowledge, teacher research positions practitioners as generators of relevant insights that address real challenges in their classrooms. Teachers who collaborate and conduct research pioneer new approaches to teaching and learning that are appropriately contextualised. Their new understandings represent a transformation of disciplinary, pedagogical, and experiential knowledge into forms that are meaningful for themselves and their pupils. Engaging teachers in and
The purpose of this book is to help us think about transformation of knowledge within teacher education in everchanging contexts, and explore its implications for teacher education research, teacher education practice, and teacher education policies. We aim to both investigate and problematise concepts of knowledge transformation, while also considering how to prepare the best teachers to use research to co-construct, interpret and enact powerful knowledge in the classroom.
3 The Contribution and Structure of This Book
In a changing world, developments regarding sustainability, digitalisation, and globalisation create new challenges for education. Schools and teachers are challenged to rethink their aims and their curricula in providing students and pupils with powerful knowledge to contribute to future society. This shift requires innovative and creative approaches to teacher education and teachers’ continuous professional development. By examining the transformation of knowledge in teacher education, this book aims to provide educators, policymakers, and researchers with deeper insights into how teachers acquire, reshape, and apply knowledge in their practice. Through theoretical discussions, case studies, and empirical research, we seek to illuminate the challenges and opportunities associated with knowledge transformation and in ensuring that knowledge remains dynamic, relevant, and empowering within teacher education. The following overview provides insight into the authors’ contributions to all three sections of this volume.
3.1 Section 1: Teacher Education Research for Professional Development and Change: Practice-Based Research
Section 1 explores how teachers are and should be prepared to generate, interpret and transform knowledge. Chapters within this section explore the multifaceted nature of knowledge transformation, seeking to understand how knowledge is not only imparted but reshaped by the very individuals who will go on to disseminate it in the classroom.
Through teacher education, professional development and practice-based research, teachers can be prepared as agentic and active professionals. The chapters within this section discuss various methods of professional development, including reflection, collaboration, mentorship, and teaching practicums that support teachers in actively engaging with real-world problems. These
The first chapter, Developing student teachers’ ability to reflect on their own professional development: A learning study within a teacher education programme by Söderlind, Mellerskog and Kilbrink, explores ways to support student teachers to engage more meaningfully in the process of reflective practice for development. Drawing on an intervention study involving two learning study cycles, where two teacher educators and one researcher collaborated systematically in planning, implementing and revising teaching, this chapter highlights some common pitfalls experienced by student teachers. The authors argue that students’ reflective practice can be improved by implementing a cyclic, systematic, and collaborative learning study process.
In the second chapter, Exploring collaborative teacher development through the use of causal loop diagrams, Koffeman, Cijvat and Snoek focus on the importance of supporting teachers with tools to strengthen the social capital of schools and explore how causal loop diagrams (CLD s) can be used as a tool for teacher teams. 22 experienced teachers from different school levels were engaged in a participatory action research design and discussed CLD s with colleagues within their schools as well as in focus groups with each other. The results show how CLD s can support teachers in teacher teams to understand social patterns and how elements in the school structure might influence their collaborative learning and thereby build a basis for collaborative professional development.
In Kaçaniku’s chapter Negotiating teacher educator identity in the context of knowledge transformation: An examination of boundary objects, the focus is on teacher educators in initial teacher education and how their view of knowledge transformation can differ based on their identity formation deriving from different academic fields. Teacher educators from different disciplinary areas were interviewed using a vignette-induced interview approach, where the results show examples of teacher educators focusing on transmitting subject specific knowledge, how there can be a tension between different educators from different academic fields, and how boundary objects can be seen as crucial for collaboration and bridging the disciplinary boundaries between teacher educators with their basis in different disciplines.
The fourth and fifth chapters focus on the mentor role during teacher education training. In Chapter 4, Hahl and her colleagues Mitchell, Crisan, Stones and Liljekvist discuss the role of mentors in student subject teachers’ development during practicum in teacher education in their chapter Developing powerful professional knowledge in mentor-mentee conversations. Based on 24 interviews with experienced mentor teachers from Finland, the United Kingdom and Sweden, representing four different subjects; geography, foreign language, mathematics, and religious education, the authors identify four themes
In Chapter 5, Hubai examines mentor teachers’ perspectives on key priorities during practicum in pre-service teacher education in Hungary in her chapter Teacher preparation in Hungary in times of change: Exploring possible implications of research on pre-service English teachers’ practicum. By analysing interviews with English as a foreign language mentors from secondary schools and assessment documents written by mentors affiliated with a Hungarian university, learner-centeredness, aims-oriented decision-making, openness to experimentation and reflection, and professional dedication are identified as prioritised themes when supervising teacher candidates during teacher preparation.
3.2 Section 2: Teacher Education in Times of Change: Knowledge Transformation and the Student Experience
The chapters that follow highlight the importance of teacher agency in mediating curriculum, providing concrete examples of teaching for example in history, geography and writing, where teachers wrestle with the tensions, challenges and opportunities involved with themes like artificial intelligence, climate change and critical thinking. Teachers draw on values, make pedagogical decisions and contextualise learning to motivate their students and encourage them to think critically about content.
As with most good teaching, focus should be on the learning process, which disciplinary knowledge itself does not provide guidance on. The teacher is the final gatekeeper; the arbiter of decisions whose role extends beyond transferring knowledge to include decisions about the transformation of knowledge itself. The chapters in this book reflect on different issues in teacher education and knowledge transformation in times of change and contribute to the knowledge base on recent developments in teacher education research.
Beginning with a chapter from the Keynote Speaker of the 2023 TEPE conference: Alison Kitson, the second section of this volume initially presents Chapter 6, The role of expert teachers in knowledge transformation across subjects, where Kitson uses case studies and lesson observations carried out in three London schools to explore the role that teachers play in mediating disciplinary knowledge and applying it to school subjects. Drawing predominantly on history education, the author unpacks history lessons to determine how the teacher encourages students to think critically, to engage actively in accessing knowledge and to create their own evidence-informed arguments. Kitson describes how teachers draw on specific ‘teacher knowledge’ to transform disciplinary knowledge within the context of their classroom environment. The
In Chapter 7, Teaching climate change in geography education: Lessons from a professional development design study, Nilsson describes how teachers can be supported to generate and make curriculum in a collaborative way through the use of professional development workshops. Drawing on a subject didactical perspective, the study engages participants from lower secondary school as teachers develop climate change teaching. The author acknowledges the complexity of climate change as a subject, which entails value judgements, ethical reasoning and economic as well as policy links. The chapter describes how some teachers navigated these challenges within geography education classes by collaborating in the planning of climate education.
In Chapter 8, Hamberg argues that artificial intelligence (AI) technology in education is now part of students’ consciousness and part of general education debate. Her chapter AI assisted writing in school: Examples from a digitally evolving practice describes how many educators are concerned about the misuse of AI, but drawing on semi-structured interviews with twelve students attending Swedish upper secondary school, the author highlights the benefits of using AI in language writing activities. Hamberg’s results demonstrate that AI can function as a study aid, giving students access to a new source of information and inspiring their creativity. As educators, we must be mindful of how we respond to challenges of AI by taking into account student experiences and influence as well as good pedagogical practices, rather than simply legislating against this new technology.
In their chapter Too Much or Too Little? Connecting to the World Beyond the Classroom in Lower-Secondary Mathematics and Social Studies Lessons in Norway and Sweden, Aashamar, Selling and Klette investigate how teachers in mathematics and social studies make connections between everyday knowledge and the disciplinary content knowledge in their different subject area, based on video recorded classroom observations of naturally occurring teaching in Norway and Sweden. The school subjects in focus represent different knowledge structures drawing on Bernstein’s sociology of knowledge, where mathematics is referred to as having a hierarchical knowledge structure, whereas social studies have a horizontal knowledge structure. The authors highlight how their empirical examples across school subjects can be used as a basis for discussions and reflections on knowledge transformation in teacher education as well as how teachers from the different subject areas can be inspired from each other on how to make connections between disciplinary content and contexts outside school.
Chapter 10 is written by Book and Tandberg. Their chapter Identity texts in meaning-making and assessment in science: Encouraging transformative learning for multilingual students with dynamic assessment and a social semiotic view
3.3 Section 3: The Impact and Value of Transforming Teacher Education Policy and Teacher Education in Times of Change
The chapters within this final section reflect on the past to reimagine the future for teacher education. As education systems grapple with shifting societal demands, growing diversity, and complex global challenges, rethinking how teachers are prepared is essential. Transforming teacher education policy involves asking difficult questions about the purpose of education, the core competencies we want our teachers to develop, and how we ensure quality and consistency in the education.
This final section commences with Chapter 11, Curricular reforms in France: The impact of consecutive reforms on French pre-service teachers’ perception of coherence and professionalisation measures, written by Schmider and De Smet, who examine how an important reform undertaken by the French teacher education system has affected teachers’ perspectives. The reform began in 2011–2012 and has been continuously adapted since then with a goal to professionalise the teacher education system and create a national framework for teachers’ competence in primary and secondary schools. In 2020 the reform focused on changes made in relation to the role of the state exam (Concours) and the reduction of practical training to provide more opportunities to gain subject-related knowledge and didactic skills. Schmider and De Smet highlight how their research could help local and international policymakers assess the impact of the 2020 reform and compare it with previous results to align teacher education curriculum and its link to practical education.
In Chapter 12, Canny and Brennan focus on the role of the sociology of education within the Initial Teacher Education (ITE) programmes in Ireland in their chapter Fostering the value of sociology of education in initial teacher education policy: Key challenges and opportunities within teacher education. The chapter examines the current policy landscape of ITE in Ireland and in particular how sociology of education has been conceptualised and the intended implications for promoting its contribution and value in ITE. Some key policy changes that negatively impacted the fundamental disciplines are highlighted. Furthermore, the potential for transdisciplinary integration to facilitate cross-cutting between theory and practice, and most importantly to develop culturally
This book will examine the multifaceted processes through which knowledge is transformed within teacher education, highlighting the pivotal role teachers and teacher educators play as active agents in shaping what knowledge is taught, how it is interpreted, and how it is adapted for diverse learning contexts. The transformation of knowledge is not a linear act of transmission but a context-sensitive process that demands critical engagement with disciplinary content, pedagogical strategies, and learners’ realities. Quality teacher education must foster the development of professionals who can navigate complexity, exercise judgment, and contribute meaningfully to knowledge creation and curriculum enactment.
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