1 Three Themes in the Chapters of the Book
1.1 Teacher Education: Theory and Practice
The initial five chapters, constituting the book’s first part, explore different facets of teacher education and the processes involved in teachers’ professional development. One aspect that is either explicitly or implicitly highlighted in the chapters is the relationship between theory and practice, and the role this relationship plays in developing student teachers’ professional knowledge.
Söderlind et al. have created a model based on a practice-based project, referenced in Chapter 1, that can contribute to the development of student teachers’ meta-perspectives. Establishing a meta-perspective is identified as a vital step in professional growth, as it enables student teachers to reflect on their didactic actions in a scientific manner and should, therefore, be central to teacher education, according to Söderlind et al. In Chapter 2, Koffeman et al. present an alternative model for professional development that focuses on in-service teachers working in teacher teams. This is a model that could be utilised when testing and evaluating teaching practices within the context of collegial collaboration. In this manner, Koffeman et al. situate the teaching profession within a collegial context. Kaçaniku underscores in Chapter 3 the significance of viewing teacher education comprehensively, advocating for the necessity to transcend
The fact that teacher education comprises a professional education, in which university-based components are integrated with school-based components, is emphasised in slightly different ways by Hahl et al. and Hubai in Chapters 4 and 5. Hahl et al. assert that supervisors are vital in developing student teachers’ professional knowledge; not least important is their role in helping student teachers acquire the essential ability to transform knowledge rooted in academic disciplinary contexts into teaching content in schools. Hahl et al. illustrate how supervisors can adopt various supervisory roles and highlight that supervisors and student teachers can learn from one another. Hubai also emphasises the importance of the school-based component of the teacher programme. In her chapter, she presents ideas for enhancing teacher education by lengthening the practicum periods, wherein qualified practitioners guide student teachers to reflect on their professional development. In this way, Hubai, like Söderlind et al., underscores the significance of student teachers developing a meta-perspective on their profession.
1.2 Transformation Processes as a Central Element of Teachers’ Professional Knowledge
The transformation processes are the focus of the chapters in the book’s second part. These chapters examine various ways in which teachers can turn disciplinary knowledge into teaching content. The chapters emphasise the importance of these transformation processes in relation to societal perspectives and pupils’ everyday lives.
In Chapter 6, Kitson, drawing on Bernstein’s conceptual framework, describes the role of teachers as agents of recontextualisation. The chapter contributes to an understanding of how the nature of school subjects and the academic parent disciplines to which the subjects relate affect the processes of transformation. Kitson argues that teacher education should empower teachers as agents of recontextualisation by ensuring they acquire sound knowledge of the subject matter, the pupils, and the broader educational objectives. However, this is not sufficient, according to Kitson. Teachers also require practical pedagogical knowledge concerning how the subject matter is transformed into teaching content for pupils to engage with in the classroom. In Chapter 7, Nilsson describes a workshop where teachers collaborated to enhance their
A common theme in the chapters by Hamberg, Aashamar et al. and Book and Tandberg (Chapters 8, 9, 10) is that they, in various ways, connect teachers’ transformation processes to pupils’ prior knowledge and everyday lives. Hamberg discusses, for instance, how AI as a tool in writing instruction in upper secondary school has introduced both opportunities and challenges. She examines how AI can support pupils and calls for clarity on how it can – and should – be used as an aid in teaching and incorporated into pupils’ writing process. A central theme in the chapter by Aashamar et al. is how the connections between everyday knowledge and subject knowledge in teaching can contribute to powerful knowledge for pupils. The authors argue that teacher education should equip future teachers to make these connections. They demonstrate how teachers from different subject areas can learn from one another and create teaching that integrates various forms of knowledge, providing pupils with the tools to understand and influence the world around them. Here, Aashamar et al.’s reasoning partially aligns with Kaçaniku’s regarding the importance of both student teachers and in-service teachers having an understanding of different disciplines, as well as the significance highlighted by Koffeman et al. in Chapter 2 concerning the collegial dimensions of the teaching profession. Book and Tandberg also emphasise the importance of relating to pupils’ previous experiences in order to create optimal conditions for learning and meaning-making. In their case, they refer to multilingual pupils. These pupils acquire language and subject content simultaneously. Book and Tandberg demonstrate that multimodal identity texts play a valuable role in enhancing both learning and assessment processes for these pupils.
1.3 Organising Teacher Education
Chapters 11 and 12, which comprise the third section of the book, concentrate on organisational challenges and policy formulation. Schmider and de Smet examine reforms in teacher education in France and their impact on the structure of teacher education, as well as the status and appeal of the teaching profession. Their discussion relates to the ongoing discourse regarding the connection between theory and practice in teacher education, as well as the essential framework for developing a teacher education system that adequately
2 Knowledge, Content and Structure in Teacher Education
A recurring and prevalent theme throughout the chapters of this book – especially in the first and third parts – concerns the relationship between theory and practice. This topic prompts inquiries into the type of knowledge teachers should possess and where it originates. Is this knowledge primarily developed within the framework of academia, or is it generated through practical experience? The answer to this question influences how one perceives the structure of teacher education. Another key theme featured in several chapters, particularly in the second part of the book, emphasises specific teaching practices and the prerequisites for transformation processes undertaken by teachers.
2.1 Didactics and Social Realism: A Fruitful Tension
Teachers’ ability to create didactic situations in which pupils can acquire content relies on the teacher’s knowledge base and their skills in fostering these situations.
The Research on Subject-specific Education (ROSE) interdisciplinary subject didactic research group at Karlstad University was the primary organiser of the TEPE conference in 2023, where the chapters of this book were initially presented and discussed. The research within ROSE examines, from various perspectives, what professional knowledge teachers require to develop didactic situations that equip pupils with the knowledge to tackle future challenges (see Gericke et al., 2018; Hudson et al., 2023).
Social realism and the concept of powerful knowledge have received attention in Northern European subject didactic research. The ROSE research group was among those who embraced the concept early on (see, for example, Nordgren, 2017; Gericke et al., 2018; Bladh et al., 2018, see also Muller, 2022). In subject didactics, the teaching content is central. A core idea is that the nature of the content, what is to be learned, shapes how this can be achieved. In this sense, within the subject-didactic tradition, one can speak of the primacy of the what-question. Although other didactic questions, such as how and who are also central, it is still in what, and the goal of education – why, that didactic thinking takes off. The emphasis on content and its significance represents a shared interest in subject didactics and social realism, united by the necessity that the what question is the starting point when considering the curriculum and how education should be organised (see Bladh, 2018).
In important ways, however, social realism differs from the subject-didactic tradition. The former represents a sociological view where powerful knowledge emerges as a content-oriented curriculum principle. In this sense, it points towards the content of education at the curriculum level rather than focusing on how it is to be implemented in practice. The sociologists of education, Young and Muller, who have been instrumental in developing the discourse on powerful knowledge, do not enter the classroom. Their primary concern lies in the nature of knowledge and its role within the curriculum.
It is essential to emphasise the teachers’ role as curriculum makers. This concept was also introduced in the book’s introductory chapter to highlight teachers’ agency and their central role in selecting and restructuring content to facilitate pupils’ acquisition of knowledge (see Lambert et al., 2023). This perspective establishes a connection between Anglo-Saxon educational research and the Northern European subject-didactic tradition (Bladh, 2020).
The relational foundation of subject didactics implies that the content must be reconstructed in relation to specific teaching contexts, making each teaching situation unique (cf. Ongstad, 2006). This involves linking not only to pupils’ prior knowledge and cognitive abilities but also to their life world experiences. In this connection, a tension arises between the powerful knowledge of social realism and the relational understanding of content in didactics. Acknowledging the significance of pupils’ life world experiences raises questions about the role that knowledge encountered in their daily lives should play in school (see Nordgren, 2021). The tension between specialised knowledge and everyday knowledge has become a significant focus of the ROSE group. This is also an issue – a tension – that is highlighted in several chapters of this book. Aashamar et al. consider it important to link subject knowledge to everyday knowledge when teaching. Nilsson also touches on this tension by emphasising that in-service teachers regularly need to strengthen their knowledge and ability to teach about complex societal issues. These questions require linking disciplinary knowledge to ethical and value-related dimensions. In this way, the didactic tradition contributes to problematising the clear boundary that social realism draws between academically specialised knowledge and everyday knowledge. However, this problematisation should not be interpreted as questioning whether education should be grounded in specialised knowledge; rather, it concerns how this is accomplished. The suggestion is not that the boundary between the two types of knowledge should be blurred; on the contrary. From a subject didactic perspective, a fruitful understanding can be developed by discussing the relationship between specialised knowledge and everyday knowledge; the distinction between the two types of knowledge has a role to play (Nordgren, 2021; Stolare et al., 2022).
2.2 The Content of Teacher Education
It is important to recognise a fundamental truth: being a teacher involves engaging in a profession, and teacher education is a kind of vocational education. Initial teacher education and professional development should therefore incorporate specific elements that prepare individuals to practise the profession; however, this alone is insufficient; possessing knowledge is also critical.
One way to deepen the understanding of the nature of the knowledge that teachers should possess is to relate it to the sociologist of education, Basil Bernstein, and his reasoning about different types of fields of knowledge: singulars and regions (Bernstein, 2000). Singulars represent specific and delimited scientific disciplines, such as academic disciplines (i.e., physics, chemistry, economics). Singulars are clearly classified and framed, featuring a vertical discourse (see also Hordern, 2016, 2018). Regions encompass unlike disciplines with explicit external goals; they are fields of knowledge concerned with application. In this sense, a region connects disciplines to the practices to which they are to be applied. Examples of regions include medicine and technology, with education also fitting this category. Regions, however, differ significantly; compared to a region like medicine, education lacks the same clear knowledge base or overall framing (Hordern, 2017).
One interpretation of the chapters of this book is that a key aspect of teacher education lies in the interaction between theory and practice, allowing the two elements to enrich one another. In this way, the specific aspects of education as a region emerge. These aspects include both the challenges and opportunities that arise from connecting the knowledge that student teachers acquire through the disciplines they study, which is validated internally, with the knowledge and skills gained during the practicum, which represent a form of knowledge assessed based on its external legitimacy. As reference above, Söderlind et al. and Hubai address this facet in their chapters, emphasising the importance of student teachers developing a meta-understanding of teaching and their future profession. A meta-perspective entails training future teachers to step back and examine their practice from a slight distance; with this meta-perspective also comes a conceptualisation that enables them to discuss their discoveries from that vantage point. Through these meta-perspectives, opportunities might arise to establish a more scientific viewpoint on practice. This connects to Jim Hordern, who, following Bernstein’s, has discussed the possibility (and need) to establish education as a more clearly framed scientific field of knowledge that draws nourishment from both academia and teaching practice (Hordern, 2017).
Didactics, and above all subject didactics, embody the distinctive features that Hordern (2017) advocates. Subject didactics examines teaching as a practice from various perspectives and is a field of research that has expanded
The balance between theory and practice, between scientifically developed knowledge on one hand and practice-based knowledge on the other, is being questioned, particularly in Anglo-Saxon countries such as England, Australia, and the United States. Here, researchers have highlighted an ongoing de-academisation of teacher education. This has led to scrutiny of the university-based aspects of teacher education and the role of teacher education institutions (Hudson, 2025; Hulme et al., 2021). This book, along with the studies presented in the various chapters, argues against this trend. Teacher education must maintain a scientific foundation; the relationship between theory and practice is significant and requires further development. A key to achieving this may lie in enhancing the role of supervisors and mentors in education, an issue discussed by Hahl et al. The mentors during student teachers’ practicum do not only seem pivotal in concretely connecting and integrating different aspects of education, but they can also impart the professional knowledge that student teachers need to develop, forming the core of teacher education. Preserving research on teaching and teacher education is crucial for this professional knowledge to remain dynamic. Continuously building this knowledge is essential for teachers and pupils to effectively confront the challenges they will encounter in the future.
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