The purpose of this ongoing three year research project (Funded by the Academy of Finland 2013-2016, project number 267166) is to look into how Finnish student teachers subjectivate within existing discursive practices during teacher education. The research is informed by poststructuralist theories. Discursive practices are defined as the multiple ways in which people make themselves members of various discourses by ‘citing’ them (Youdell 2006) (e.g. by ways of speaking, silencing, physical being, taking on emotions), and thus simultaneously produce discourses. Different discourses allow a different range of available subject positions for various individual, and by taking on or rejecting these subject positions in various ways, the participants contribute to the discourse in various ways.

Finnish context provides a fruitful context for looking into implicit practices. Teacher education is extremely selective (in 2015 3,5% of the applicants were granted entrance in to the programme in the University of Oulu), yet there is no official criteria and no official control mechanisms for teachers. In this research teacher education is seen broadly, not as something done to students in a formal institution, but as something students do to themselves as they negotiate with various directions: media, teacher education institution, practice schools, peers, own past experiences… The hypothesis is that in the lack of official criteria, in teacher education there are implicit and unacknowledged discursive practices and normative identities which limit what teachers can say, do, be and imagine.

The premise of the research at hand is that in order to develop education so that it contributes to the wellbeing of various individuals and groups, it’s not enough to know what teachers should do. We must understand and know more about the discursive spaces available to teachers, and make more spaces so that they have room to respond to various pupils and societal challenges. The research looks into the role of discursive practices in 1) who student teachers can become, 2) how student teachers can think and 3) the futures student teachers can imagine. This is done in three overlapping phases in which three questions are asked:

1. Are there implicit norms that affect who teacher students can imagine becoming?
2. Are there implicit discursive practices that affect student engagement with theory and practice?
3. Are there discursive practices that affect how beginning teachers can construct wellbeing for themselves and others?

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