Subtitle: Perspectives from Professional Diversity Competency, Professional Research & Development Competency, and Professional Digital Competency.

The qualifications and competencies that teachers need, and that must be developed through initial teacher education, are ever evolving. The future-ready teachers need to exercise agency and develop their transformative competencies. To succeed in a rapidly changing and digital society, skills such as deeper learning, analytic reasoning, complex problem solving, and teamwork are required (Binkley et al., 2012). Teachers’ professional competence can be defined as professional practice based on a knowledge base that enables the handling of complex issues related to learning and teaching (Smestad & Gillespie, 2020). This knowledge base is likely to include elements from a variety of areas, including practical experience. Research has highlighted how teachers’ professional competence build on a range of knowledge types, and Hargreaves & Fullan (2012) emphasise both an individual and a collective component. Hence, student teachers’ professional competencies can be expected to be developed in the interplay with peers and with teacher educators and school-based mentor teachers at the different learning arenas in teacher education, e.g., both at campus and at placement schools (Raaen & Thorsen, 2020). 

The constitution of professional competence is an integrated relation between theoretical, scientific and practical experience-based modes of knowledge (Grimen 2008; Nielsen & Lund, 2020). Hence, developing professional teacher competencies requires integrating different modes of knowledge, rather than engendering conflict between theory and practice. On-campus learning, which tends to emphasise theoretical knowledge – requires a cognitive understanding that includes analytical and critical reflection (Grimen, 2008). Learning in practice placements involves practical knowledge, which differs from theoretical knowledge by being developed and implemented by the learner themselves (Heggen, 2008; Gee, 2000). Moreover, student teachers will encounter different knowledge cultures, both on campus and at placement schools (Raaen & Thorsen, 2020). Such encultured knowledge, which establishes itself in social contexts, is collective, normative and tacit. On the other hand, laws and regulations – embedded knowledge – are operationalised in local institutional structures and procedures like curricula and lesson plans, assessment practices and teaching methods, thereby framing professional practice (Klette & Carlsten, 2012, p. 71). 

Increasingly, teacher education programmes stress transdisciplinary goals (Johannesen & Øgrim, 2020), learning outcomes that transcend subject boundaries and cannot be reduced to a sum of goals in discrete subjects. The aim of this symposium is to present new research examining three specific areas of teachers’ transdisciplinary professional competencies: professional diversity competency, research & development competency and professional digital competency. In a recent review (Smestad & Gillespie, 2020), tensions in relation to how to understand transdisciplinary professional competencies in general, and these three important areas specifically, are emphasised calling for more research. A focus on transdisciplinary competencies is crucial to develop a coherent teacher education program and the three identified areas oftransdisciplinary professional competencies are not just individually important but are also sufficiently different to contribute to a nuanced view of transdisciplinarity. 

The empirical data presented in this symposium includes perspectives from both student teachers, teacher educators and mentor teachers. The main data is from the Norwegian large scale and longitudinal project Teacher Qualifications for the 21^st century (TEQ21), but perspectives from researchers from Denmark and Uganda are included as well.

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