As professional development has become a key goal in educational policy around the globe teacher learning and their attitudes of students learning has come in focus. However, the focus itself involves a shift. It was already noted in 1990’s as a paradigm shift from teaching to learning, indicating the task for educational institutions to produce learning instead of provide instructions (Barr & Tagg, 1995) or, as claimed by Wilson an Berne (1999), to activate instead of delivering learning and thereby make teachers active participants in educational reforms (Riverox and Viczco, 2015).

Paradigm shifts such as these comes not in isolation, not without supporting mechanisms and practices and, additionally, they can’t bee understood outside their contexts of their justification. Thus, the pedagogical re-orientations mentioned and addressed in this paper are to be viewed in tandem with intense and global educational restructuring (institutional, economical etc.) that altogether has produced what Rizvi and Lingard (2010) refer to as a dominant global imaginary about the means and end of education. It is within such a context, and within its intense educational restructurings, the new discourses of learning has been produced, supported and highly influenced by official discourses used by transnational organisations such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Here, and from the perspective of stakeholders and policymakers, teacher, teacher students as well as pupils in school become key targets for change – subject for re-form in thinking’s as well as acting’s.

It is with such a focus and within such a context that our paper aims to investigate pre-service teacher approach to “the learner”. We address the students in the beginning of their teacher education according to their beliefs about what is the most important competence their pupils should learn and relate this also to their beliefs of intelligence (Carr & Dweck, 2011; Dweck;1999) and performativity (Ball; 2003; Beach & Dovemark, 2009).

This choice of terminology is not accidental but relate to the above discourses and activities. “Competence” and an interest for “the learner” are key concepts in present days policy discourses and policy initiatives, dominated by ideas of neo-liberalism and performativity (Ball; 2012, Meyer &Benavot; 2013). The 21 century competences are described by Dumont, et al. (2010), reporting an OECD project where an adaptive and self-regulative learner should 1) self-regulate and develop metacognitive skill, 2) monitor, evaluate and optimise the acquisition and use of knowledge, 3) regulate their emotions and motivations during the learner process, 4) monitoring study time well and 5) set higher specific and personal goals, and be able to monitor them.

While, on a general level, we can expect that our pre-service teacher students have been exposed to such a discourse, the discourse itself must be considered complex, and the possibility of enactments multitude. With the purpose of analysing the complexity of the discourse and its enactments, the theoretical orientation of our paper is an alternative reading of discourse and performativity found in  “agential realism” (see Barad, 2007). Our overarching research questions are:

-       Firstly, does pre-service teachers preferences of single competences form different patterns of meaning that could develop our understanding of the policy discourse and the enactment process?

-       Secondly, does these patterns of competence-preferences also have relations to the pre-service teachers subjective beliefs about the nature of intelligence and approach to performativity in the context of “the learner”?

-       Thirdly, in terms of discourse and the imagery of the learner we will ask, and discuss, the possible powers and influence of official pedagogical discourses, embodied, manifested and enacted by transnational agencies such as the OECD.

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