This paper problematises LOs as a powerful pedagogic device of multi-scalar education governance, operating at the local contexts of teacher education curricula. We draw upon recent sociological work that, putting Bernstein’s conceptual work on symbolic control and identities ‘in the world’ (Robertson & Sorensen, 2017: 14), gives strong analytical insights on the governmental shifts in teachers’ knowledge base and professional roles in the globalised fields of education policy (Robertson, 2016). Such work enables the study of a possible emergence of hybrid identities as distinctive and tension-ridden outcomes of multi-scalar governance, as well as stresses the importance of exploring the ways these are played out in specific fields of recontextualisation (Robertson & Sorensen, 2017: 15). This is in accordance with the need indicated by the findings of our previous research in Cyprus and Greece for further systematic analysis of TE curricula at the micro level of their development, reform and implementation (Sarakinioti & Tsatsaroni, 2015; Philippou, et al., 2015). Our findings indicating that TE curricula continue to draw upon academic foundations and strong professional rationalities, require us to consider that even though the establishment of learning outcomes, as a policy and pedagogic device, pushes towards certain kinds of generic and competence-based understandings of teacher identities, weaker disciplinary rationalities and narrower constructions of the profession, these LOs are intensely hybridised. This informs our approach on two levels. Firstly, at the theoretical level, we reflect on the dualistic descriptions on the epistemic shift from disciplinary knowledge to competences as it has mainly arisen from critical realism’s assumptions on Bernstein’s theory. We argue that however analytically important, the fact that this analysis has dominated critical interpretations of LOs, tends to re-establish rather than destabilize the normative assumptions underlying attendant LOs policy regimes. Secondly, at the methodological level we develop a language of description on the distributive, recontextualising, and evaluative rules – which, in combination, constitute the pedagogic device of the curricula under investigation (Bernstein, 2000; Moss, 2001). The focus on the specific discourses of inclusion and exclusion articulated in the pedagogic discourse of relevant courses (e.g. sociology of education, inclusive education) is crucial for the further investigation of whether and how the prominence of pedagogy, especially constructivism, and the eschewing of disciplinary knowledge, as these emerge through relevant research at the international (Robertson & Sorensen, 2017) and curricular levels (Sarakinioti & Tsatsaroni, 2015), are played out in specialised areas of knowledge and practices.

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