In Europe today there is a trend to provide all teacher education in university-level institutions. A long-standing debate concerns the relation between ‘theoretical’ and ‘practical’ knowledge. Some research findings indicate difficulties for teacher students to apply their knowledge from academic courses in practice, and therefore, they sometimes feel that their education do not prepare them for their future profession in an adequate way (e.g. Klette 2002). Darling-Hammond  (2006, p. 6) argues for an approach to teachers as ‘classroom researchers and expert collaborators who can learn from one another’ as essential for encountering the ever increasing demands of a deepened knowledge base for teaching in classrooms characterized by diversity, and developing their disposition to seek answers to difficult problems of teaching and learning in current research (2006). However, not much is known about the content in different national teacher education programmes and its relation to research. Hence, there is a need of more research on the actual content of teacher education and in what ways it might be understood as research-based.

The purpose with this paper is to examine the pedagogic discourse on teacher education in terms of the significance of a research-based, or scientific, approach and its different meaning potentials through an analysis of the research base in a number of teacher education programmes in Sweden. The following two research questions have been formulated to capture the aim of the study:

-       In what ways can the content the students encounter in teacher education be characterized as research-based?

-       What different meaning potentials and pedagogical identities can different teacher education programmes provide opportunities for?

In the paper we approach teacher education from the perspective of a sociological conceptual apparatus developed by Basil Bernstein (2000). The meaning potential is regulated by what Bernstein (2000) expresses as ‘the pedagogic device’, which basically controls the selection of potential meaning by regulating what communication becomes possible. In Bernstein’s theoretical framework, power relations are codified through the concept of classification, that is “the insulation between the categories of discourse which maintains the principles of their social division of labour” (Bernstein 2000, p. 6). While classification concerns power relations and is concerned with the ‘what’, the concept of ‘framing’ deals with the ‘how’ and the control of communication in pedagogic practice. When the framing is strong, the transmitter controls communication and the pedagogic practice is distinctly visible; when the framing is weak, the acquirer has more control and the pedagogic practice is invisible in terms of more implicit rules within the discourse.

In the study we analyze selected parts of teacher education through document analyses of course plans and course literature and explore the result of a survey on in what ways teachers and students understand teacher education as research-based. Altogether this concerns the recontextualization of a societal/ideological understanding of what teacher education is and what teachers need to know. The concept of ‘pedagogic identities’ is a kind of ‘outcome’ of the pedagogic device. Based on Bernstein’s conceptual work, McLean et al. (2013), have found three distinct aspects forming undergraduate students’ identities in the discipline of sociology: disciplinary, personal/societal and performative. The disciplinary aspect has to do with the classification of the knowledge content and the personal/societal aspect focus on the future in terms of how the students can bring together specialized and everyday knowledge in a deepened understanding of their professional task. The performative aspect concerns both competence of performing the knowledge content through text work and the dispositions of “being questioning, critical, analytical and open-minded” (McLean et al. 2013 p. 14). 

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