School bullying is defined as an act of aggression involving repeated intentional, hurtful behaviour and an imbalance of power between a stronger student who bullies and a bullied pupil (cf. Olweus, 1993). Several curriculum texts have taken up anti-bullying measures. In Norway, teachers are obliged to do what is best for the child in accordance with the Convention on the Rights of the Child (Article 3). According to the Education Law (§9a-4) teachers shall ensure a good learning environment. Since 2017, teachers are professionally accountable to uncover, following up, and preventing bullying (Ed. law, 2017, §9A). From a professional competency perspective, it requires from teachers targeted interventions towards the students involved, as well as consistent enactment of policies against bullying at the school and community levels (Thornberg, Baraldsnes, & Sæverot, 2018; Werler & Færevaag 2017).

Quite a few studies underscored teachers as an important contributor to the success of school bullying prevention (e.g., Burger, Strohmeier, Spröber, Bauman, & Rigby, 2015; Yoon & Bauman, 2014). Whilst there significantly knowledge about how teachers cope with the issue at hand, there are just a few studies that explored how pre-service teachers learn to prevent and to respond to bullying incidents or what factors influence their responses (e.g. Begotti, Tirassa, & Maran, 2017; Boulton, Hardcastle, Down, Fowles, & Simmonds, 2014).  Overall, the studies indicate that pre-service teachers are not sufficiently prepared for this task of professional responsibility.    

This development is also reflected in Norwegian teacher professionalisation. According to the framework curriculum for primary and lower secondary teacher education, Norwegian pre-service teachers are expected to be capable of enacting research-based knowledge to prevent bullying, and of examining and implementing measures to counteract bullying (UHR, 2018). Unpublished data from the follow-up research panel on teacher education reform (FFL 2015) shows that most pre-service teachers (65%, n = 578) claims to be able to detect and counteract bullying to a large degree. At the same time, pre-service teachers argue in the public discourse that they are not able to do so.

Until now, researchers learned primarily about the scope of the phenomenon. Internationally, there is far less research about pre-service teachers’ perception and knowledge of school bullying and measures suitable to prevent or reduce students bullying behaviour. Taken together, the brief review underlines that research is needed to reveal how pre-service teachers conceptualise and perceive the results of the enactment of education policy trying to prevent school bullying. Further research should also map pre-service teachers’ expertise to prevent school bullying.

The current qualitative study investigates pre-service teachers’ conceptualisation and perception of school bullying and their competence to prevent it. As an issue of their professionalisation process it is operationalised through the following research questions: • How do pre-service teachers perceive school bullying and its prevention? • How relevant is the knowledge of school bullying/prevention of bullying in teacher training and how important is it for pre-service teachers? • What experiences of school bullying and its prevention do pre-service teacher actually have? To operationalise the research questions, we carried out focus-groups interviews, where we invited pre-service teachers to share their attitudes, values, and opinions regarding their knowledge about and their experiences with school bullying and its prevention. The interviewers ensured that the groups focused on the importance of teacher education. Since there is little knowledge about the issue at hand, the research aims at bringing out attitudes, values, and opinions of groups of pre-service teachers (Kvale et al., 2015). In order to illuminate differences in perspective between groups of individuals three focus groups (4 – 12 part.) were set up. It was ensured that group members interacted with each other (Cohen et al., 2018). The sequences relevant to the question are evaluated, analysed, and interpreted applying content analysis (Mayring, 2015). The epistemological approach of the current study is grounded in Bernstein’s theory of symbolic control and cultural production, reproduction, and change (Bernstein & Solomon, 1999), where symbolic control is materialized through a pedagogic device, which is the condition for the construction of pedagogic discourses. Specifically, we underpin the analysis of the empirical data applying the ‘Pedagogic Device’ (Bernstein, 2000), which allows linking to the macro-level policy, as in curriculum documents, and the micro-level interpretation of this through the pre-service students. We further integrate the concept of ‘policy enactment’ to explain how curriculum texts are translated into contextualised actions and understandings of the pre-service students (Ball et al., 2012), and draw on their concept of and the experiences of the teacher as a ‘policy actor’ in shaping how the subject specification is translated into practice in their specific context.

Recently, the need for analysis of the pre-service teachers’ knowledge and competence to encounter school bullying has been pointed out by several researchers (e.g. Begotti et al., 2017; Boulton et al., 2014). The qualitative data will first reveal the relevance system of the participants. Secondly, the analysis will explain how the anti-bullying education policy enactment is expressed in pre-service teachers’ understanding of and experiences. Through our research, we aim to learn not only how teacher education enacts (and possibly succeeds with) policy aims, further we aim to uncover the internal grammar of the training system in relation to bullying. Our analysis will provide insight into future teacher’s professional preparedness to understand, hinder and prevent students from bullying.

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