Study title

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 focused on how teacher education is understood and implemented in pre-school and school teacher education. A central hypothesis was 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. In this project researchers in five sub-projects from three university colleges examined how tension between various types of theoretical and practical knowledge is handled within different 1) educational fields (pre-school and teacher education) and 2) educational models (full time and part time models). Data was collected through interviews, survey questionnaires and document analysis.