Teachers' professional qualification; different forms of preservice programs and different knowledges

The Teachers' Professional Qualifications (TPQ) project has focused on how professional qualifications are developed for teachers and pre-school teachers in a tension between research-based and experienced-based knowledge at a university college or workplace, or as campus based vs. workplace based education. Student teachers maintain there is a 'gap' between lecturing on campus and training in practice, but this does not mean it is impossible to see connections. Students experience this as an expression of different kinds of learning and knowledge, which in different ways can be useful in their coming profession as teachers. Research in the TPQ project has revealed that student teachers find greater meaning in traditional dissemination because this is what they actually see working in school, and it is what they experienced as successful when they themselves were in school. The pressure to achieve good results in a range of subjects in many schools seems to lead to placement teachers not letting their student teachers set the stage and create their own lectures. This is because they are afraid that it will reduce the efficiency and the quality of their pupils' results. Scholars at campus seem divided on what represents the highest learning output for student teachers in practice-subjects and didactics or pedagogy. Scholars feel knowledge of their own subjects are superior to that of pedagogy, and vice versa. Furthermore, the scholars believe that the student teachers have more professional benefit from their teaching of subject than from the lessons they have in didactics and pedagogy, and vice versa. Teacher educators on campus, concerned with the subject pedagogy, point out that reflections together with student teachers is something they want more of and that this is of great importance for the development of the subject of pedagogy. However, none of those teacher educators reflect on or discuss how their own teaching may influence the student teachers in their job as future teachers. Our results indicate that placement teachers use research based knowledge to a small degree in their guidance of student teachers. Even so, the results shown that they actually use it to a far higher degree than they are themselves aware of. This becomes evident when looking at what they say about research-based knowledge and what they describe that they are actually doing. Schoolteachers express that they wish to have more contact with scholars on campus, because this could have contributed to improve their work as placement teachers. Most of the teachers also seem dissatisfied with the cooperation with campus teachers about the student teachers' training. They miss a common point of reference for their professional qualification. When it comes to student teachers, it proves to be decisive for their learning and training how the cooperation between placement schools and teacher education is organized. In teacher education, which is based in workplace-based kindergartens, student teachers - to a much larger extent than in ordinary teacher education - describe how they manage meaningfully to unite the analytical, universal, and research-based knowledge results they have acquired at campus, with the normative, particular, and experience based knowledge achieved though practice. However, this appears to vary depending on whether the principal manage to arrange, so the kindergarten can evolve as both a learning arena for preschool teacher education, and as a spur for their employees' professional development. In a 2017 study, we find that placement mentors are critical of principals for not playing a greater role in the supervision of student teachers in placement. The main reason seems to be the school principals' role as middle managers, implying that a substantial part of their job involves mediating external education policies between higher administrative levels and their professional staff in schools, which makes it difficult to care enough for the student teacher. We also find that the principals of placement schools have expectations beyond their management role. Namely to be involved as more genuine partners in the exploration of the fundamental ideas on which the existing practices are to be based, as well as in discussions about what might be possible conditions for redesigning the activities on which the current practices are founded. They also lament the lack of a clear, shared vision of the placement's role in teacher education and call for a stronger dialogue concerning the implementation of the teacher education assignment. As an extension of the project, we will further work on developing our empirical-analytical model for examining how student teachers' professional development can benefit from being anchored in a Bildung approach.

There are continuous discussions about how qualification for teachers and pre-school teachers should be organized and what kind of competence that is needed. Increased importance is attached to research based education and practice. Education reforms are to a greater extent based on research. This project focuses on how teacher education is understood and implemented in pre-school and school teacher education. A central hypothesis is that a greater emphasis on research based knowledge in teacher education will lead to increased tension regarding how the mandate of teacher education is understood. Such tensions relate to different views on the primacy of research-based or experience based knowledge. Looking at such tensions from an institutional perspectiv e, teacher qualification is situated in different learning environments and influenced by various cultures. Students' learning are formed in the interaction between participants with different views on teacher knowledge who work within different instituti onal frameworks. We aim to find out how the tension between the different types of knowledge are being handled (1) in pre-school and teacher education and (2) in various full time- and part time- models. The different sub-projects are concerned with the same overarching questions and seek to draw on each other's findings and collaborate across sub-projects, combining qualitative and quantitative data. In various ways observations are combined with interviews and supplemented with logs, focus groups, sur vey questionnaires and document analysis. The qualitative data is in the projects' analysis combined with quantitative longitudinal survey data (StudData) collected from students of different professions (e.g. pre-/school teachers) and teacher educators ( LUData, FluData). A comparative perspective will expand knowledge generated from within-profession perspectives,and is therefore of great interest for professionals, policy makers and highereducation providers.