Recent tensions and challenges in teacher education necessitate reforming the curriculum. There is the need to increase collaboration and boundary crossing across disciplines (Hökkä, Rasku-Puttonen & Eteläpelto, 2008; Margolin, 2007). Additionally, Bologna process has brought new demands for highlighting the quality and research-based orientation in teacher education (Niemi, 2007). These tensions and challenges are realised in the local discourses of curriculum process. However, there is only a limited understanding of the multiple voices, perspectives and tensions that shape the process of curriculum development, and how this is realised in interdependent relationships between local and global contexts and individual actors. In order to have a more elaborated understanding of the curriculum process and how it is implemented in teacher education, we need to address on the nature of discourses constructing the curriculum. Our aim is to analyse and describe the diversity of discourses in the curriculum process, as negotiated and constructed in one Finnish teacher education department. We are interested in (i) what kinds of interpretative repertoires are produced in teacher educators’ talk, and (ii) what these discourses reflect in terms of the general cultural resources, ideologies and disciplines. Socio-cultural approach is used as a theoretical framework. Methodological approach draws upon discursive psychology, which emphasise the individual’s possibilities for negotiating meanings, subject positions and identities in different interactional contexts (Potter & Wetherell, 1994).

The curriculum process under study was connected to reforms implemented as part of the Bologna process. In Finland, national working groups planned the new curriculum and offered national guidelines to teacher education departments. However, each university department implemented the curriculum reform independently (Jakku-Sihvonen & Niemi, 2006). The data for this study were gathered through open-ended interviews with eight teacher educators in one large teacher education department. The interviews took place during 2005, when curriculum development was actively in progress.

Based on the analysis, we identified a variety of different interpretative repertoires that were constructed in the negotiation of the curriculum. We illustrate these repertoires and show how these construct and shape the social reality and hence, the culture of the teacher education. Additionally, we describe how the different repertoires reflect the intertwined tensions between local and global cultural resources and ideologies. Prominent tensions were found, for example, between a subject matter orientation and an interdisciplinary orientation, and between research-based knowledge and practical knowledge. We will further describe the different kinds of subject positions these repertoires produced for teacher educators and student-teachers. Based on our findings, we will discuss theoretical and practical implications for the development of teacher education.