In our earlier studies we have found four different organizing themes of Finnish teacher education which have reflected what kind of teachers have been required. The era from 1950’s to 1970’s the normative teacher was predominant idea of teacher education. Teachers were to be patriotic and to behave in an exemplary way. In the next period from 1970’s to 1980’s old tradition-based normative view was replaced with didactically-thinking teacher whose practice was to be based on personal pedagogical thinking rather than tradition. Third phase is labelled as Research-oriented teacher which was dominant from 1990’s to 2000’s. Now teachers were expected to actively process their work and not just to apply ready-made solutions. At that time schools were given more autonomy regarding to curriculum work and teaching methods. Teachers and schools were also expected to develop their own work and school community.  Eventually, the Research-based teacher education was launched in the 2000’s which meant that teachers’ developing activities were to be more systematic and continuous, and pressure to also participate in the small-scale research was presented. In the previous phase teachers were expected to take a positive attitude towards research whereas in the last phase they were actually positioned as active researchers.

So, nowadays research-based teacher education is the predominant idea of finnish teacher education. We Finns, or at least some of us, tend to see that our system has coherent forty years old history. It is said to be unique and able to produce high-grade educational professionals for day-to-day school work. Also, every finnish teacher educator is expected to have the doctorate and to perform research. These are factors which are said to be behind our PISA-success. In Finnish papers our teacher education system is sometimes said to serve as an international example of high-quality training, which make it even more interesting case in an international scale.

Research-based teacher education is our primary concern. We are interested how this research-based agenda has developed during last forty years and how it is presented and argued in committee reports, teacher education documents and scientific journals. We see that Finnish discourse in this matter has been quite uncritical and that tendentious interpretations have been made in order to prop up teacher education. There is a plenty of rhetoric to be studied, which seem to reveal some recurrent mechanisms.

We see that research-based teacher education is a desirable tradition and are aware that there are many positive sides when education, whether for prospective teachers or for adolescents, is not based solely on tradition or dictation by educational researchers but rather based on teachers reflecting their own work. But when teachers work is one-sided labelled as research-oriented this could sound as unconvincing and unrealistic. Secondly, it must be remembered that since every Finnish teacher student earn master’s degree in their education they are educated to be researchers. So, why to emphasize research which has become sort of mantra? We have also found expressions in which promotion of research-based activity has produced sort of “quasi-researcher attitude”.  

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