Over the last decades, the importance of transnational organisations (OECD, EU) has increased significantly in the making of educational policy (Robertson & Dale, 2015; Wahlström & Sundberg, 2017). In the changing global educational landscape, policies and reforms ’travel’ or are ’borrowed’ between countries (Steiner-Khamsi, 2010). There is an emphasis on standards, where LOs and general competences have become central part of current education policy (Young, 2010). A topical issue in the discussion about TE is the relation between school practice and academic research (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999; Darling-Hammond, 2006). Over time, different discourses of teacher professionalism have developed, stressing either practical teacher training for forwarding functional competence or emphasising continuous intellectual learning and research as key components of teachers’ professional competence (Sachs, 2016). In the Sweden, the curriculum of TE programmes contains LOs that are a combination of generic skills and professional areas of relevance to the teacher profession within the ‘educational science core’ such as assessment and grading, curriculum theory and didactics, social relations, conflict management and leadership, development and learning, evaluation and development work. In a study on the meaning of research-based teacher education in Sweden, we could conclude that TE in general is a strongly framed professional education with a relatively weak and adapted research base. A strong professional framing and weak classification of research and vice versa implies that different meaning potentials are made available to the students in the different teacher education programmes and shape their pedagogic identities (Alvunger & Wahlström, 2017). Against the backdrop of the current trends in TE policy and drawing on a theoretical framework of four different typologies of teacher professionalism outlined by Sachs (2016), the aim with this paper is to explore and compare the discourse of research-based TE in Sweden and Finland over the last 20 years. Considering the historical, cultural and political relations between these countries, it is likely to assume that there are convergences, but also divergences between them. The empirical material for the study is research publications on TE in the two countries from around the year 2000. The comparative analysis is focused on underlying assumptions and different emphases of knowledge regarding research-based TE. Sachs’ (2016) typologies of ‘controlled’, ‘co-operative’ ‘activist’ professionalism, and ‘professionalism as performance’ inform our questions relevant to the symposium on the kind of LOs and approaches to teacher professionalism which emerge from the discourses of research-based TE in the two Scandinavian countries.

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