Abstract
The backdrop for this thesis is the persisting criticism against teacher education.
Teacher education is claimed to be overly theoretical, unrealistic, and distant from
practice. As a result of this criticism, teacher education has been challenged to
change. There is a general call for developing new and better ways of organising
teacher education that aim to strengthen the link between theory and practice.
However, despite the fact that the criticism is directed towards the academic part of
the studies, little research has focused on student teachers as learners in higher
education. It follows from this that we know little about the part of teacher
education that we endeavour to develop. What do student teachers mean with their
claim that teacher education is too theoretical? How do student teachers work with
their academic studies and what kind of challenges do they encounter? And finally,
how do conditions within teacher education influence how they experience and
work with their studies? These are the questions that are explored in this thesis.
The thesis reports on a case study of student teachers’ academic learning
practices. The study is set in a Norwegian secondary teacher education programme
and draws upon perspectives from learning to teach, student learning in higher
education as well as more recent developments in practice theory. Qualitative and
quantitative data have been collected from 78 student teachers enrolled in two
successive years of a five-year integrated Master’s programme. Four research
questions have been explored in four separate journal articles that are summarises
and synthesised in this thesis.
Through holistic focus on the academic part of teacher education, this case
study provides additional perspectives on the criticism of teacher education with
three main contributions. First, this thesis offers alternative representations of the
much debated theory-practice gap in teacher education. It is suggested that the
constant focus on solving “the theory-practice problem” might sustain an
inappropriate dichotomy of theory and practice, which in turn prevents us from
considering the whole “ecosystem” of teacher education. Second, this thesis
demonstrates the need for reaching beneath and beyond the surface of student
teachers’ experiences. The findings direct attention to constraining conditions
within the programme and to teacher educators’ teaching practices and social
relations. The findings reveal the influence of discourse and power – issues that are
rarely discussed in research literature. Third, it is suggested that teacher educators
need to rethink traditional structures of authority in teacher education. This implies
to include student teachers as active, responsible, participants of their own learning
practices, rather than consumers of what teacher education has to offer.