Afdal, H.W. and Nerland, M. (2012): Does Teacher Education Matter? An Analysis of Relations to Knowledge among Norwegian and Finnish Novice Teachers.
Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research. Published as Online First 3 October
2012: DOI:10.1080/00313831.2012.726274
This article examines knowledge relations as they come to the fore in Finnish and Norwegian novice class teachers’ conceptions of their work within the context of in-depth interviews. By targeting primary school teachers who have graduated from a ‘research-based teacher education program’ at the University of Helsinki, and a ‘general professional teacher education program’ at Oslo University College, we reveal similarities and differences in their relations to knowledge. The overall research problem is: What characterizes relations to
knowledge among Finnish and Norwegian novice teachers? To investigate this, we examine
how the teachers describe their work and articulate their concerns, as well as the epistemic resources upon which they draw. Based on the similarities and differences between both groups of teachers, we also discuss how their relations to knowledge are related to the epistemic profiles of their teacher education programs.
To explore the question above, concepts and perspectives from Bernstein’s sociology of knowledge are used. This perspective takes as its primary premise that knowledge comes with structuring forces, which also constitute professional identities and concerns. At the same time, “knowledge itself” is regarded as socially organized when presented to and approached by human beings. In this article, Bernstein’s conceptual framework on the
classification and framing of knowledge, as well as a selection of concepts from his
theorization of the pedagogical device and social organization of knowledge in pedagogical practice (singulars and regions), are used. For practitioners, relationships with knowledge are embedded in discourse (Bernstein, 2000), and narratives are identified as important mediators through which relationships with knowledge are developed and expressed (Baldwin, 2010). By paying close attention to novice teachers’ ways of conceptualizing their concerns, the article explores the relations they have to knowledge and how knowledge discourses are activated as resources to make sense of their work.
The first reading of the interviews revealed a range of common themes and concerns, but further analysis showed a certain pattern of differences between the two groups. The Finnish teachers’ knowledge relations are marked by a stronger classification and framing than the knowledge relations of the Norwegian teachers. While the teachers’ knowledge relations in both cases are founded in a regionalized knowledge domain, the Finnish case seems to display a stronger disciplinary or epistemological core, based in educational psychology. With reference to Muller’s (2009) distinctions between contextual and conceptual coherence, we find that the Finnish teachers describe a field of knowledge in which conceptual coherence is given more emphasis, while the Norwegian teachers’ stories are dominated by contextual coherence. Knowledge relations brought to the fore by the Finnish teachers may allow for clearer distinctions to be made in their ways of understanding problems of practice than those identified among the Norwegian teachers, which may lead to more bounded professional identities grounded in epistemic relations.
How, then, can these disparities be related to differences in the professional educational programs? As Afdal (In press) shows, the Finnish research-based program is characterized by conceptual coherence (Muller, 2009) in the sense that the content was conceptually tied to the language of academic disciplines, with emphasis given to educational psychology and to certain subject matter domains. The Norwegian general professional program reflected contextual coherence in the sense that content was conceptually closer to the field of professional practice and to the variegated social and institutional relations in which teachers’ work is embedded. A critical issue in professional practice is the capability of defining the problem at hand in ways that are precise enough to provide directions for action or further exploration. The ‘definability’ of a problem may thus be understood as dependent upon its relation to a specialized knowledge discourse. The analysis in the present article supports the assumption that teachers educated through the first type of curriculum are more likely to identify with a common knowledge basis, while the educational programs that emphasize contextual coherence may foster greater diversity among teachers whose work is guided by a more dispersed and individualized knowledge basis. Hence, it also adds to Smeby (2012) finding that ways of engaging with knowledge during teacher education seem to continue in working life. As discussed above, a core issue in this regard is not only the types of knowledge forms and resources to which students are introduced, but also the types of discourse in which they engage, and the extent to which they develop specialized languages to address professional problems.
7 Discussion and concluding remarks
In this final section of the dissertation, I will first highlight the findings of the thesis, that is, explicate the findings across the three articles. Thereafter, new insights into and implications for policy development and teacher education will be discussed. The thesis will close with some retrospective and prospective reflections concerning this research.