1 Introduction: The Transnational Turn in Nordic Collaboration on Education

Since the 1990s, teacher education policy and programs in the Nordic countries have been increasingly shaped by their profound involvement in international and transnational collaborations. This represents the expansion of an established tradition among the Nordic open societies and economies of being very active in international collaborations in most policy areas (Andersen et al., 2007). The genealogy of teacher education in Nordic countries has thus to a large extent become a narrative about commitments to voluntary but nonetheless compelling reform initiatives emanating from overarching European education policy formats. These formats were negotiated mainly within the institutional frameworks of the OECD (the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), the European Union (EU), and the Bologna process, whose objective is to create a European Higher Education Area. Additionally, the IEA (the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement) has acquired considerable agenda-setting influence through its international surveys of student achievement in literacy, numeracy, science, and other areas (Hopmann, 2008; Krejsler & Moos, 2023 (in press)); Lawn & Grek, 2012; Nóvoa & Lawn, 2002; Rizvi & Lingard, 2010). As school and education rose up the international agendas in parallel with the human capital and global knowledge economy discourses, these transnational consensus-building policymaking hubs have emerged as the sites where visions, standards, and ideas of best practice for school and education reform are developed and disseminated. This applies to the Nordic countries as well (Blossing et al., 2016; Hultqvist et al., 2018; Krejsler & Moos, 2021b; Krejsler et al., 2014, 2018; Moos, 2013; Tröhler et al., 2022).

The European education policy dimension was a late addition to post-World War II efforts to rebuild a war-torn Europe by means of transatlantic collaboration centering on economic development and growth. From the 1960s onwards, these efforts were gradually transformed in ways that catapulted education higher up the transnational policy agenda. The result was to produce the imaginaries that became the school and education regimes we take for granted today (Krejsler, 2020; Meyer & Benavot, 2013; Ydesen, 2019). Today, the OECD’s PISA surveys (Program for International Student Assessment) and the IEA’s PIRLS (Progress in Reading Literacy Study) and TIMSS (Trends in mathematics and Science Study) surveys have become defining for formatting how we talk about and organize European national school policy, as the Bologna process has become defining for how we think about and organize teacher education. Transnational regimes of comparability emerged. Nation-state school and teacher education discourse and systems are obliged to comply, if they do not wish to exclude themselves from mainstream policy agendas. This regime of comparability has, however, increasingly subjected school and education to generalized fears of falling behind other nations in public and policy imaginaries.

Given that all the Nordic countries participate in these education policy collaborations – albeit following different trajectories – one result has been to reconfigure the patterns of Nordic collaboration. Thus, Nordic collaboration has largely resurfaced in the sense that Nordic countries get perspective on their performance in transnational collaborations by comparing their performance with the other Nordic countries and by adapting the agendas for Nordic collaboration to larger international and transnational agendas (Blossing et al., 2016; Elstad, 2020; Krejsler & Moos, 2021b).

This chapter demonstrates how teacher education in the Nordic countries has been reshaped by these developments, in three key areas. The first of these is the impact of the transnational turn in education policy and in particular the Bologna process. The second is how this turn has been accompanied and driven by increasing primacy of Anglo-American educational ideas about the production of so-called knowledge that works (evidence, standards-based education, coupling of the market with education, etc.). The third area is the impact of the transnational turn in school policy reform on the framing of teacher education in discourse and in practice.

2 Teacher Education, the Bologna Process, and the European Union

Teacher education, which in most Nordic countries was previously a seminary tradition, has become increasingly integrated into more academically oriented higher education strategies, albeit following different trajectories (Braad et al., 2005; Elstad, 2020; Skagen, 2006). Finland was the front-runner on this path in the late 1970s, making teacher education a 5-year master’s-level degree. Norway and Iceland, aligning with the consensus brokered in transnational collaborations since the 1990s, followed suit after the Finnish model; Sweden followed a similar but more hybrid model. Only Denmark, with its hybrid 4-year professional bachelor’s teacher education program, seems left somewhat behind. Since the turn of the millennium, these transformation processes have been explicitly shaped by the launch and further expansion of the Bologna process and its project of creating a common European Higher Education Area (EHEA). The Bologna process’s ever-increasing interweaving with the education priorities of the European Union has given it additional momentum. The OECD intensified and focused this development by joining in with its influential standards, statistics, and surveys along similar discourse and key concepts. Like the Bologna process and the EU, it has framed education in terms of ‘lifelong learning,’ ‘twenty-first century knowledge, skills and competences,’ ‘employability,’ and ‘evidence in education’ (Krejsler, 2018; Lawn & Grek, 2012).

2.1 How Teacher Education Turned Transnational: A Brief Genealogy

The Bologna process was established in 2000 as a comprehensive European process that would eventually include 48 countries. The process solemnly pledged to establish a European Higher Education Area (EHEA) by 2010 (Keeling, 2006). It was to cover higher education (including teacher education), and the aim was to make European higher education systems comparable by establishing common standards that would enable student and teacher mobility across borders and different education systems. Formally, and abiding by the dominant discourses of democracy, freedom, and diversity, the Bologna process claimed to be completely voluntary. By 2009, however, it had grown to become a formidable discursive giant, administering a set of political technologies that were increasingly compelling. This included ten performance indicators and a score-card system ranking the compliance of participating countries: included were the European Credit Transfer System (ECTS), mutual recognition of diplomas, a bachelor’s/master’s/PhD format (3 + 2 + 3), and quality assurance formats in the field of higher education (including teacher education) across borders, and so forth (Brøgger, 2018; Krejsler, 2018).

The Bologna process was originally an initiative formulated by the ministers of education from Britain, Germany, France, and Italy in the Sorbonne Declaration of 1998, formalized in the Bologna Declaration of 1999 by 29 countries and launched in 2000. It was conceived of as a larger European collaboration, explicitly excluding the European Commission. Nonetheless, as the European Commission has by far the most comprehensive institutional capacity for European collaboration, it has increasingly become the leading force in the Bologna process in terms of administrative oversight and coordination.

For the European Union, education was originally an area where individual national sovereignty ruled, according to the principle of subsidiarity. It was not until the Maastricht treaty of 1992 that a breakthrough in the form of a particular discursive maneuver – in addition to affirmation of the principle of subsidiarity – gave the EU commission a coordinating role between national governments on education policy issues, especially those issues that were deemed key in supporting economic growth in the form of qualifying labor and similar issues (EC, 1992). The link between education and economic concerns opened the door to making education a transnational concern. The Maastricht treaty was thus a predecessor to the game-changing EU Lisbon Declaration of 2000, which extols a discourse to make Europe by 2010 “the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion” (EC, 2000). The solemn inauguration of this declaration was followed up by the Lisbon Agenda, defining EU policy guidelines and portfolios which, among other key issues, imposed a tighter focus on the importance of education for ensuring economic growth (Colignon et al., 2005; EC, 2000, 2010; Lawn & Lingard, 2002). Hereafter, ‘competences,’ ‘lifelong learning,’ and ‘employability’ became dominant discursive signifiers which came to permeate national strategies for successful economies all the way down to reformed descriptions of education courses at all levels. With the turn of the millennium, the European Commission thus became in collaboration with the OECD and the Bologna process, the key discursive operator in the merging of policy discourse about economic growth and education by means of knowledge economy, human capital, and lifelong learning discourse (Hultqvist et al., 2018; Lawn & Grek, 2012; Nóvoa & Lawn, 2002).

Since then, the Bologna process and the European Union have increasingly integrated their efforts to ‘optimize’ education in what is called a lifelong learning perspective (Keeling, 2006). As the EU developed its European Qualification Framework (EQF), later duplicated in all member nation-states into National Qualification Frameworks (NQF), lifelong learning from pre-K up to PhD was divided into eight levels, with the Bologna process bachelor’s/master’s/PhD cycles integrated as levels 6, 7, and 8 (EQF, 2008; Krejsler, 2018). Participating countries and their education systems – including teacher education – grew ever more comparable; knowledge, skills, and competences grew ever more transferable.

In order to understand how transnational collaborations in education became so influential as voluntary collaborations, it is necessary to briefly introduce the so-called Open Method of Coordination (OMC). OMC is the official method of collaboration of the EU and the Bologna Process, and makes the impossible possible in terms of working by procedures that ensure gradual consensus-building instead of making decisions by voting. The Bologna Process thus started out as a framework for voluntary collaboration. The gradual build-up of consensus has, nonetheless, produced a growing framework of standards and performance indicators that became increasingly compelling by the effects of comparability. When countries commit to making themselves comparable they simultaneously subject themselves to the ‘soft powers’ of peer pressure: You must comply with the agreed standards that comparisons demand, which subsequently make you susceptible to the motivating effects of ‘naming and shaming’ that follow from being more or less successful in complying with the standards that govern surveys, score-cards and other comparative technologies (Brøgger, 2018; Gornitzka, 2006; Krejsler, 2018: 187–190).

2.2 Impact Upon National Teacher Education in the Nordic Region

The colossal impact of the Bologna process on teacher education is visible in all Nordic countries, albeit along different trajectories due to differing national contexts and histories (Braad et al., 2005; Elstad, 2020). Finland made teacher education into a master’s degree in 1979, well ahead of the Bologna process. Decades later – and under the pressure of the Bologna process – the Finnish experience became an inspiration for Iceland and Norway in particular. One might question, however, whether Finland would have become a role model if it had not been catapulted into a global model by the transnational surveys – PISA, TIMSS, and PIRLS. In 2008, Iceland followed suit by making its teacher education program into a master’s degree. Since then, Iceland has backtracked to some degree and introduced fast-track variants, as getting sufficiently many students to write and pass the master’s thesis was problematic. From 2017, Norwegian teacher education programs for primary and lower secondary school were also transformed into 5-year master’s programs, offered at regional colleges and universities. Time will tell whether there will be similar consequences as those experienced in Iceland. In Denmark, however, which adhered for longer to a less academic, Grundtvigian-inspired seminary tradition, teacher education for primary and lower secondary education remains a professional bachelor’s degree. For higher secondary school, in Denmark and Norway student teachers have to take a master’s degree at a university and a subsequent in-service postgraduate course in education, which in Norway also qualifies for teaching at the lower secondary school level. In Denmark, deliberations have been ongoing for some years about establishing a 5-year teacher education program at master’s level, albeit with little success so far. Sweden is somewhat in between: in 1977 all teacher education programs were integrated into the legal framework of higher education, although degrees concerning pre-, primary and lower secondary school were still mostly placed at separate university colleges (högskolor). In recent years, university colleges are increasingly transformed into universities, and pre-school and primary school teacher degrees qualify as bachelor’s degrees, whereas advanced lower secondary teacher degrees usually qualify as master’s degrees, as degrees aimed at higher secondary level education usually do as well. In that sense, all the Nordic countries are increasingly adapted to the Bologna process standard, albeit according to differing models, where some teacher education courses qualify as bachelor degrees, although not necessarily 3 years courses, and others as 5 years master degrees (Elstad, 2020; Klette et al., 2002; Krejsler et al., 2018; Rasmussen & Bayer, 2014; Skagen, 2006).

Consequently, the transnational impact has gradually but thoroughly transformed and increasingly aligned Nordic national teacher education programs. The European Credit Transfer and Accumulation system (ECTS) has become the standard for measuring a teacher education program: 300 ECTS for 5 years’ study are broken down into 60 ECTS for 1 year and, typically, 10 or 20 ECTS per module. The names may differ – ECTS in Denmark, ‘högskolpoäng’ in Sweden. The teacher education programs conclude with a diploma supplement, making them comparable to other Bologna signatory states’ education programs. By making education programs, including teacher education programs, increasingly comparable and transferable across national borders, this transnational policy endeavor aims to make students and teachers more mobile across – it is hoped – increasingly competitive knowledge economies within the European region and beyond. Student teachers are increasingly encouraged to do part of their studies abroad, though the fact that Nordic national teacher education programs are still, and will probably remain, closely connected to the detailed particularities of national school policies to some extent represents a barrier.

2.3 How Quality Assurance Turned Transnational

The Bologna process also increased collaboration on quality assurance and formats for accreditation in higher education, including teacher education. In 2005 the signatory states agreed their first formulation of a comprehensive set of principles in ‘Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in the European Higher Education Area’ (ESG), subsequently updated in 2012 and 2015 (ENQA, 2015). In this process the national Nordic quality assurance agencies have adapted their standards and criteria to align with and obtain membership in ENQA (the European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education), which is formally placed within the Bologna framework (ENQA, 2015). This alignment ensures comparability and mutual inspiration among the signatory states, which includes all Nordic states. The ESG principles mainly deal with ensuring that national quality assurance in higher education draws on appropriate involvement of internal as well as external stakeholders in quality assurance procedures at individual educational institutions, and also to ensure that national agencies are in place that encourage development, implementation, and monitoring of quality assurance.

As an example, the Danish Evaluation Institute (EVA) was established as a government initiative in 1999 in the run-up to the launch of the Bologna process. EVA is the most influential Danish institution in the evaluation of initiatives covering daycare facilities, school, and higher education. It produces key reports and evaluations in school and teacher education which then receive government attention. EVA is an active member of ENQA, with a seat on the ENQA board. Additionally, EVA has gained admission to EQAR (the European Quality Assurance Register for Higher Education), the framework body that handles the accreditation of national quality assurance agencies according to their implementation of the ESG principles and criteria. One indication of ardent Danish commitment to ENQA is that Christian Thune, the previous director of EVA, was acting president of ENQA and co-author of the ESG in 2005. As an offshoot of Danish participation in ENQA, the Danish Accreditation Institution (AI) was established in 2007 to handle the accrediting of university education programs. From 2013, AI took over all accreditation of higher education from EVA, including education programs (including teacher education) located at university colleges (Akkrediteringsloven, 2013). This means that the reform of higher education, including teacher education, has been made dependent upon accreditation of individual education programs and institutions according to AI criteria that conform to ENQA criteria.

The Nordic countries generally rank among the very compliant Bologna process participants, with slight differences. Sweden nonetheless succeeded in being provisionally suspended from full ENQA membership in 2012 for not complying with ESG guidelines concerning sufficient external involvement in ensuring credible quality assurance. This happened when in 2010 the Swedish government introduced a new quality assurance system against the recommendations of the Swedish National Agency for Higher Education (from 2013 the Swedish Higher Education Authority). Subsequently, in 2012, an ENQA review asserted that the new Swedish system was at odds with ESG principles. The review thus questioned whether the national agency was sufficiently independent from political interference, which is considered a fundamental requirement for becoming a member of ENQA. Further, the review pointed to flaws in the Swedish system in that it largely disregarded the results of internal quality assurance carried out by the university departments themselves. In 2014 the Swedish Higher Education Authority lost its membership, and only regained it in 2020 after another review that ensured that a new quality assurance system was once again compliant with ESG (Krejsler et al., 2018; Samuelsson, 2020: 100–101).

The Swedish case clearly demonstrates how the Bologna process and the ‘soft power’ rationalities of the Open Method of Coordination operate by, in this case, putting pressure of exclusion on a member state in order to encourage it to take measures that would enable it to be (re)included in a desired transnational space. It shows how quality assurance in discourse and in organization is increasingly framed via transnational collaborations as conditions for national reform and debate about teacher education (Krejsler et al., 2014).

3 The Paradigm Shift Toward Anglo-American School Effectiveness and Evidence

Another consequence of transnational collaborations in education with significant impact on teacher education is that these collaborations are strongly dominated by Anglo-American networks, norms and educational thinking, which frame the standards, surveys, and conditions for comparability. This predominance is most visible in the paradigms of ‘school effectiveness’ and ‘improvement’, in the ‘evidence’ and ‘what works’ collaborations, as well as in ‘human capital’ and ‘knowledge economy’ discourse (Eryaman & Schneider, 2017; Krejsler, 2017, 2020). But as the education contexts and research traditions in the Nordic countries differ profoundly from Anglo-American contexts and traditions, this creates a number of problems for Nordic school and teacher education professionals and researchers. For example, Nordic school and teacher education traditions have drawn inspiration to a large extent from a continental, particularly German heritage with a strong emphasis on didactics and which saw the larger purpose of education in terms of a German-inspired Bildung tradition (Gundem & Hopmann, 1998; Hopmann, 2015; Uljens & Ylimaki, 2017). One should not forget, however, that American progressivism at one end and Tyler-inspired Anglo-American curricular thinking at the other have also contributed greatly to developing Nordic approaches to school thinking and policy (Moos, 2013; Popkewitz, 2005; Tyler, 1949/1971). This varies nonetheless from country to country, with Denmark being more influenced by German traditions and Sweden less so.

In terms of school policy and teacher education the Anglo-American impact is also increasingly institutionalized in the ongoing displacement of ‘pedagogik’ where ideas are often – but not exclusively – drawn from German and other continental sources, and the emerging discipline of educational science (utbildningsvetenskap) that increasingly draws on Anglo-American sources. In general terms, ‘pedagogik’ here refers to the academic and professional discipline whose genealogy reaches back to Comenius, Kant, Rousseau, Herbart, Dewey, and reform pedagogy. Educational science, however, is still a cross-disciplinary field in the making crisscrossed by many stakes being placed in between science, policy, market and professional practice interests. The gradual takeover of educational science as the privileged academic discipline in relation to teacher education can thus be seen from different angles: Some mainly understand educational science as the study of education and education systems as a scientific field bringing together disciplines ranging from pedagogy over sociology and psychology to political science. Others, closer to teacher education, focus upon pedagogy, didactics/curriculum, educational work and so forth. Still others, closer to policy, focus on bringing education closer to market and employability needs in knowledge economies for which a primary guiding incentive is optimizing a nation’s human capital. At times the struggle about the identity of educational science is framed as one between an academization discourse, a democratic Bildung discourse, and a knowledge economy discourse that increasingly frames education in terms of market relevance. The debate over educational science and its Anglo-American borrowings is ongoing in all Nordic countries, albeit following different trajectories (Askling, 2006; Jarning, 2020; Korsgaard et al., 2017; Moos & Wubbels, 2018; Sundberg, 2007; Säfström & Saeverot, 2015).

The Anglo-American impact comes through most thoroughly in the turn toward the school effectiveness and improvement paradigm, which has to a large extent provided the ideas, concepts, and models for the OECD, the IEA, and other transnational organizations in their compilation of surveys, statistics, benchmarks, and imaginaries about best practices for testing and for improving student literacy, numeracy, and science achievements (Krejsler & Moos, 2021a; Scheerens, 2013; Slee et al., 1998; Townsend, 2007). This production of knowledge is compounded by an increasing interest in evidence and knowledge that works to improve a nation’s human capital so as to compete in the global knowledge economy (Eryaman & Schneider, 2017; Hultqvist et al., 2018). This combined turn has increasingly favored school and teacher education research and practices that build on empirical studies about what works, preferably large quantitative comparative international studies. A strong piece of evidence illustrating this turn can be found in the report comparing Danish teacher education programs to those of Finland, Ontario, and Singapore. That report concluded that a key explanation for low Danish performance in transnational surveys was that Danish teacher education programs were philosophical and normative in comparison to those of Finland, Ontario, and Singapore, which were based on empirical research about what works (Rasmussen et al., 2010). The report was commissioned by the center-right Løkke Rasmussen government as part of its Growth Forum initiative, which subsequently went on to launch the 360-degree service overhaul of the Danish Folkeskole. In 2010, a concluding report from this high-profile initiative made recommendations that in future PhD scholarships should be used to boost Danish teacher educators’ academic qualifications, as these educators were found to be lagging behind their Nordic counterparts in holding doctoral degrees. In 2007, only seven percent of Danish teacher educators held a doctoral degree; by 2018, the level had risen to 13%. The report’s recommendations unambiguously pointed to the ‘school effectiveness’ and ‘evidence’/‘what works’ approaches in its advocacy of PhD project topics focusing on empirical research about what works in areas like literacy, numeracy, science, and reducing the influence of social background on school results. In particular, it is telling to note what counts as scientific references in the report: top-scoring PISA is referenced 63 times, TIMSS 17 times, PIRLS 15 times, and there are references to ten reports from the ENQA-aligned Danish Evaluation Institute (Skolens Rejsehold, 2010).

School effectiveness and the evidence/what works discourse has thus increasingly come to displace the often German-inspired pedagogy and didactics traditions that were previously influential. This trend has been institutionalized in the evidence-gathering organizations that contribute to setting the new agenda. This conspicuous turn in the politics of knowledge about what counts as educational research worth funding was, in Denmark’s case, preceded by a number of developments, among which an OECD country report in 2004 on the state of Danish educational research and development studies is well worth highlighting. This, commissioned by the Danish government, concluded that Danish educational research was of too little utility for policymakers and practitioners, having too little focus and capacity in relation to the key areas for improving school performance (OECD/CERI, 2004). The report was commented on in detail by the ministry of education as well as the ministry of innovation and research. It recommended the establishment of a clearinghouse for educational research about what works in education, and explicitly mentioned two sources of inspiration: first, the American What Works Clearinghouse, established in 2001 with substantial steering and support from the Campbell Collaboration in order to serve as an evidence knowledge repository for teaching professionals in the wake of the ‘No Child Left Behind’ school Act, and, second, its rather similar British counterpart, the Evidence for Policy and Practice Information and Coordinating Centre (EPPI). The report led to the subsequent establishment of a Danish Clearinghouse for Educational Research in 2006. The Danish Clearinghouse had some limited success in influencing educational policy agendas, but only after adapting somewhat to established educational research in Denmark; however, the closure of that institution in 2019 highlighted the difficulty of re-contextualizing largely Anglo-American agendas in a Danish context (Krejsler, 2017; Krejsler & Moos, 2021a). Similar trajectories and attempts to change how educational knowledge is produced were seen with the establishment of the Swedish Institute for Educational Research in 2015: this was the product of similar pressure exerted by the Swedish government and educational administration authorities to base Swedish school and education more extensively on evidence for what works. Here, too, established Swedish educational research was bypassed and seen as non-cumulative, non-transparent, methodologically flawed, and – in addition – unresponsive to practitioners’ needs for guidance about ‘what works’ (Adolfsson & Sundberg, 2018). In 2011, the Norwegian Knowledge Center for Education was established, commissioned by the ministry of education and research (from 2019 the Center was part of the University of Stavanger). It serves a similar purpose to its Swedish and Danish counterparts in assembling and disseminating national and international research, ranging from pre-school to higher education, as well as developing the genre of systematic reviews of educational knowledge.

In summary, the largely Anglo-American school effectiveness and evidence ideas and practices had to be re-contextualized in the various Nordic contexts, where, however, qualitatively oriented traditions were already dominant and no broad tradition existed of conducting randomized controlled trial experiments or systematic reviews on the basis of neopositivist methodology in educational research. The confrontation illustrated that broader approaches to evidence are preferred in the Nordic countries (Adolfsson & Sundberg, 2018; Rieper & Hansen, 2007). This being so, approaches based on systematic reviews of more diverse primary studies, like those conducted by John Hattie in New Zealand under the badge of ‘visible learning,’ have therefore achieved considerable success in Nordic contexts. These offer more room for professional judgment in relation to specific contexts, which is considered crucial when such knowledge is to be implemented (Hattie, 2009, 2013). This approach also resonates well with a strong German tradition, represented by Hilbert Meyer and Andreas Helmke among others, that has had traction in Nordic contexts for considerable time. This tradition elaborates more inclusive narrative syntheses of what the wider educational research says about what works (Helmke et al., 2008; Meyer, 2004). Hilbert Meyer has concluded that research on what characterizes good teaching demonstrates consensus on the following points. It is well structured; the teacher knows his/her subject; methods cannot be chosen independent of context; and teaching that works takes individual differences and learning needs among the students into account. Syntheses of this latter kind have been criticized as too general and providing too little guidance and direction for teachers. The counter-argument, however, is that the context-dependent ‘nature’ of most problems related to education and teaching means that one must speak in general terms when one wants to say something at a context-independent level.

This cultural struggle over the politics and production of knowledge that counts came to a head in 2004 at an OECD meeting on evidence in Washington, DC. Here a debate was enacted between an Anglo-American Campbell-dominated voice on how evidence and what works should be understood, counterpoised to a Nordic voice that was more inclusive about what knowledge could be included in educational research aimed at reforming and improving school (OECD/CERI, IES, & Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy, 2004; Rieper & Hansen, 2007; Ydesen, 2022).

Altogether, the Anglo-American-dominated turn in the politics of how to produce knowledge that counts in educational research has had very considerable implications for teacher education in two important areas: in the organization of teacher education programs, and in what discourse is considered legitimate when it comes to content and conceptualization of how good school and teacher practice can be conceived (Krejsler, 2020). 

4 The Effects of Transnational School Policy on Teacher Education

National school policies in the Nordic countries are therefore increasingly framed by the keen participation in transnational collaborations (Krejsler & Moos, 2021b, 2023 (in press)). However, because school policy is closely connected with national identity and nation-building, this is a sensitive area. For this reason, it is regulated at the level of detail by national policy in all Nordic countries. The result is that school policy reform guided by transnational policy advice frequently encounters strong and vocal resistance when implemented in the national context (Blossing et al., 2016). And as teacher education was always intended to produce teachers who would realize the national aspirations behind increasingly frequent national school reforms, teacher education – like school reform – is by implication subject to continual reform. As seen in this volume, all teacher education programs in the Nordic region have in their different trajectories from a seminary toward a more academic university model been subjected to numerous reforms in recent decades, with the sole exception of Finland (where change after 1979 was limited to adaptations to the Bologna process in 2005 and 2016). In Sweden, reforms were launched in 1977, 1988, 2001, 2011, and 2021; in Denmark in 1991, 1997, 2006, 2012 and 2022. In Norway in 1973, 1994, 1999, 2003, 2010, and 2017, and in Iceland in 1971, 1978, 1988, 1993, 2008, 2011 and 2019 (e.g. Andersen et al., 2017: 25; Arstorp, 2012; Elstad, 2020: 38).

Against this background, it makes sense to mention a few key points where transnational school policy has transformed Nordic national school policies. Before the year 2000 and the OECD’s PISA surveys and IEA’s PIRLS and TIMSS surveys, Sweden and Denmark were traditionally looked upon as international champions of a Nordic model of progressive and child- and equity-oriented pedagogy which attracted considerable international attention (Telhaug et al., 2006). Since the turn of the millennium, however, the balance in reputation between the Nordic school and teacher education systems has been turned around, in the sense that Finland now occupies the position of the high-achieving, envy-producing school system and the focus of high-level international attention and visits, proving that East Asian achievements in literacy, numeracy, and science can be achieved with Nordic strategies (Andersen, 2007; Sahlberg, 2011, 2016). Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Iceland have fallen behind, for the most part only achieving average or below-average scores. This change in fortunes has not, however, as previously mentioned, diminished the Nordic countries’ passion for comparing themselves to each other. On the contrary, the comparisons have just been reconfigured, drawing now upon transnational surveys and statistics instead – the PISA and IEA surveys and OECD statistics such as ‘Education at a Glance’ (Hopmann, 2008; Jónasson et al., 2021).

The acceleration in reforms of school policy took off in particular with the launches in 2000 of PISA, the EU Lisbon Agenda, and the Bologna process, sustained by the similar but less well known IEA surveys of TIMSS (from 1995) and PIRLS (from 2001). PISA may serve as a particularly illustrative case of mutual adaptation. Since the launch of the first PISA survey in 2000, the discursive effects of the so-called PISA shocks have been regularly administered to the various member nations, with resounding effects on their self-perceptions and policy agendas. Under the impact of the PISA shocks, Germany’s agenda for school and teacher education policy has been changed (Hopmann, 2008; Waldow, 2009). Among the Nordic countries, as mentioned, while Sweden and Denmark used to believe that they had world-class progressive school systems and that it was Finland that was traditionally somewhat behind (Hopmann, 2008; Sahlberg, 2011; Telhaug et al., 2006), under the impact of the now-dominant political technologies, these perceptions have been turned on their head – notwithstanding that PISA, TIMSS, and PIRLS represent a narrow set of subjects (literacy, numeracy, science) and that measuring with an emphasis on testing and numbers is subject to inherent limitations (Hopmann, 2008; Meyer & Benavot, 2013). These transnational surveys generate a never-ending stream of criticism of teachers and teacher education as insufficiently fit to produce the next generation of highly skilled lifelong learners, and the criticism is then followed up by further school and teacher education reforms (Bales & Hobbel, 2018; Furlong et al., 2009).

The Danish case illustrates well how the logics of school policy contributed to setting and amplifying tendencies that generated teacher education reforms. The Danish self-perception of having ‘the best school in the world’ suffered its first devastating blow following the 1991 IEA literacy test of fourth-grade students. The mediocre performance of Danish students was termed the ‘Togo shock’ in the press, with the implication that Danish students were performing at the level of students in countries Denmark does not usually wish its students to be compared with, and considerably worse than any of the Nordic peers Danes usually compare themselves with (Mejding, 1994). This awareness of being the new underdogs in Nordic literacy comparisons intensified when the Nordlæs surveys contributed to concerns in the economic ministries that Danish investment in education was underperforming to a worrying extent (Finansministeriet, 1997). These events in the run-up to the launch of PISA and the Bologna process, and the subsequent tightening of school reform to commit to standards-based education and introduction of testing had predictable consequences for teacher education. Literacy and numeracy majors for student teachers were emphasized, at the expense of educational subjects such as pedagogy, citizenship, and general didactics, a key tendency in the teacher education reforms of 1997, 2006, and 2012. As standards-based education and the passions for data-driven improvement expanded in school policy and reform, pressure increased for teacher education to be increasingly based on empirical and evidence-based knowledge about what works. As mentioned above, these were the key conclusions in the OECD country report that led to the establishment of the Danish Clearinghouse for Educational Research (OECD/CERI, 2004), the comparative survey of teacher education programs in Denmark, Ontario, Singapore, and Finland, and the subsequent reorientation of priorities for new PhD scholarships with the 360-degrees service overhaul of the Danish Folkeskole from 2010 to 2012 (Rasmussen et al., 2010; Skolens Rejsehold, 2010).

But teacher education reform continues to be haunted by ambivalence in the Nordic countries as they move from a seminary tradition toward an academization driven by transnational policy advice and the school effectiveness and evidence discourse. One of the most consistent criticisms of teacher education has always been the supposed lack of coherence between what is called ‘theory’ and what is called ‘practice’: teacher education programs are supposedly too focused upon theory and normative ideals, with the result that they do not prepare student teachers adequately for their coming professional duties. To what extent these allegations make sense has been debated for years. It does, however, point to the need of justifying how the increasing academization of teacher education programs by integration into universities, as stipulated by the Bologna process, can fit with the need to prepare teachers better for their professional lives. As underlined by Tyack and Cuban (1995), school reform and associated teacher education reform seems to produce their own particular inertia, where policy reforms follow the general political and educational waves of the times, whereas practice in school and in teacher education pays lip service to the demands without, however, changing at nearly the same speed.

5 Conclusion: How Transnational Collaboration Intersects with Nordic Collaboration and Teacher Education

This chapter has focused upon how teacher education policy and programs in the Nordic countries have increasingly been aligned with consensus-building transnational policy forums. The Bologna process has been particularly influential in reframing standards for teacher education, working in alignment with the school and educational priorities of the European Union and the OECD and influential surveys of student performance in literacy, numeracy, and science that emanate from the OECD and the IEA. Surprisingly, however, this does not mean that Nordic collaboration has diminished. What it does mean is that Nordic collaboration has been reconfigured, in the sense that transnational agendas increasingly affect, inform, and shape how Nordic agendas are construed. Nordic policymakers, practitioners, and educational researchers still maintain their tradition of collaborating in manifold ways – as also within other policy areas (Andersen et al., 2007; Krejsler & Moos, 2021b; Telhaug et al., 2006). This collaborative process takes place in formal collaborations within the Nordic Council, the Nordic Educational Research Association, and so forth, and it takes place in long-established informal collaborations in professional and personal networks between schools, teacher education institutions, and municipalities. This means that when Nordic school and teacher education policy develops and we look for rationales for improving in comparative terms, we practically always compare ourselves to the other Nordic countries –whether in the form of extensive use of data from PISA, TIMSS, and PIRLS about the other Nordic countries, or by reference to sizable participation in the Northern Lights conferences and Nordic publications (Jónasson, 2016).

As mentioned, Denmark suffered its first pre-PISA shock following the comparative IEA literacy survey of 1991. An important aspect of the reaction to Danish fourth-grade pupils’ mediocre literacy skills was that Danish policymakers and the public at large noticed that Danish pupils had performed considerably worse than the Nordic neighbors with whom the Danes usually compare themselves (Mejding, 1994). This led to further Nordic comparative projects with the ‘Nordlæs surveys’ from 1996. Finland became the envied Nordic role model for teacher education, with Finnish school catapulted to the top of PISA, TIMSS, PIRLS, and other transnational surveys. Finland had made teacher education into a 5-year master’s degree program in 1979, long before the launch of the Bologna process. This move later became not only an envied inspiration for Iceland and Norway in particular, but also an agenda-setting point of departure for comparisons and debates about school and teacher education reform in Sweden and Denmark.

Ongoing experience with cycles of transnational collaborations and surveys thus supplies narratives of school and, by implication, teacher education that Nordic policymakers, educational researchers, and public debates take in and continue to churn, their gaze trained sternly on the other Nordic countries and, in never-ending amazement, at the Finns. Whether this can be called a Nordic model or, more modestly, a Nordic dimension remains a contested and never-ending debate in all the Nordic countries. There is certainly plenty of mutual inspiration, including in school and teacher education. It is plain to see, nonetheless, that each individual Nordic country chooses its own trajectory, resonating with what is politically and educationally possible within each national context and its historical and educational conditions.