Teacher Education in the Nordic Remake: How Transnational Policymaking Transforms Regional Collaboration

Abstract

AbstractSince the 1990s, teacher education policies and programmes in Nordic countries have been increasingly shaped by their profound involvement in international and transnational collaborations. Today, the OECD’s PISA and the IEA’s Progress in Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) and Trends in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) define how European national school policy is talked about and organized, and the Bologna Process has become pivotal for how teacher education is thought about and organized. Thus, Nordic collaboration has largely been transformed in the sense that Nordic countries gain perspective in transnational collaborations by comparing their performances with those of other Nordic countries and adapting the agendas for Nordic collaborations to larger international and transnational agendas.This chapter demonstrates how teacher education in the Nordic countries has been reshaped by these developments in three key areas: (1) the impact of the transnational turn in education policy, in particular the Bologna Process; (2) how this turn has been driven by increasing primacy of Anglo-American educational norms (evidence, standards-based education, coupling the market with education, etc.); and (3) the impact of the transnational turn in school policy reform on the framing of teacher education in both discourse and practice.