In the modern university of the 20^th century, a degree project has been the final examination of higher education. This was not always the case for tertiary education of what is today called the semi-professions, like teaching and engineering. These professions were based on a more practice-orientated education and did not include a degree project. Since the end of the 20^th century degree work has become a mandatory part of these education programs. There are few studies about the content of the final degree projects, especially in teacher education and engineering education where students often have been perceived as having problems of writing good theses. Most research in the area has highlighted production process, like supervising (Jansson et al., 2019), students’ or experiences, (Råde, 2019) or assessment of quality of these projects (Stolpe et al., 2021). Vocational programs at universities struggle with meeting the demand of professional knowledge and academic skills when fulfilling the criteria of the Higher ordinance. In case of engineering education, Asplund and Bengtsson (2020) show that degree projects within that field of engineering often contain potential contribution and innovation in relation to engineering profession and that thesis work often is connected to certain companies and their needs. Regarding the academic quality of the projects in teacher education this is not the case (Råde 2014, 2016).

The theoretical framework used in this study was based on research about prominent orientations of higher education identified in Finnish and Swedish teacher education (Furuhagen et al., 2019; Hansén, Eklund and Sjöberg, 2015). Orientations were originally developed to analyse and map the various aims of teacher education in a historical perspective, which goes beyond the scope of this article. For the purposes of this article, we derive the three orientations: academic, vocational, progressive:

• The academic orientation with an emphasis on subject knowledge. 

•  The vocational orientation with an emphasis on practical work.

• The progressive orientation with an emphasis on social change and societal improvement.

By applying these three orientations we construct an analytical model for categorising projects with a focus om aim(s) and results. Projects categorised as having an academic orientation emphasised knowledge within subject discipline(s); vocational orientation emphasised knowledge that useful for practical work; and progressive orientation emphasised knowledge that highlight societal issues that could contribute to social change. A more detailed description of the characteristics of projects included in each orientation will be provided in the method section below.  

 In contrast to the above-mentioned studies, we neither want to evaluate the quality or investigate the processes surrounding writing the project. Rather, our interest lies in the content of the projects which can be the starting point for at critical discussion about what content that is legitimate in teacher education. Considering that students spend one eighth of higher education on doing degree project work, there is a gap of knowledge and research results regarding what kind of knowledge student teachers chose to develop in their theses. The aim of this study is therefore to mitigate this gap by analysing the content of final degree projects in primary teacher education and engineering. Our research questions are:

What methods do teachers and engineers use in degree projects?

What topics do teachers and engineers investigate during their degree project work?

Which orientations can be identified in primary teacher education and engineering?

First, we analyse the content of 264 final degree projects in primary teacher education program, 61 final degree projects in mechanical engineering program and 96 final degree projects in landscape engineering program. The projects are selected to mirror a ten-year period, between 2011 and 2021. The data collection takes place at three universities in Sweden, where teacher education programs and engineering programs are predominant. Each project consists of a 15–60 pages written thesis, composed in line with structure and style of an academic text in educational science. Second, an inductive content analysis (Prior, 2020) was carried out. The topics of the projects in teacher and engineering education were generated from the key words used in the degree projects, with focus on the results of the degree projects. For the purposes of mapping, we clustered the projects with similar topics into topic areas. The topic areas were developed inductively, in an iterative process going back and forth between topic area categories and the content of the projects. As the projects will be coded, we put a particular focus on the title, research question(s), topic, and results of the projects. The projects were read thoroughly with a special focus on results, implications and conclusions. Descriptive statistics was used to map the projects. The analysis in relation to the third research question remains to be made. Our idea is to use the orientations described above as a starting point for the analysis. We have constructed an analytical model. In this model the analytical method using the three orientations mentioned above projects will be categorised. Projects categorised with an academic orientation focused on knowledge within the subject disciplines, such as mathematics, physics, mechatronics and technology. Projects categorised with a vocational orientation focused on knowledge related to the professional practice. For example, projects about how to teach in the classroom and in construction processes. Projects categorised with a progressive orientation focused on knowledge related to societal problems and dilemmas of social change. For example, projects about sustainable development, social problems and climate change. The feasibility of this model will be tested in the coming analytical work.

The main knowledge contribution of this paper is how the three important goals, subject knowledge, vocational knowledge, and understanding of societal issues in relation to professional work, were expressed in degree projects. The results show which issues were investigated degree projects, which reflects on what is considered as legitimate knowledge in teacher and engineering education. While future engineer focus on solving problems connected to real-life issues future teachers develop knowledge related to teaching skills as described by in-service teachers. In the analysis it was shown that about half of the degree projects at teacher education programs were interview studies with teachers. This can be problematic, not least when it comes to addressing topic areas such as Learning and instruction. It is evident at both universities that projects in Learning and instruction often use interviews, which can be a mismatch in relation to the aim(s) of the projects. In a similar vein, the degree projects in engineering will be analysed. In contrast, in engineering education the most common methods were interventions, questionnaires or document analysis of juridic documents. In mechanical engineer program, the focus was on problem solving or optimization while in landscape engineer program there was an emphasis on contributing to the local community, investigating juridical processes, and conducting document analysis of maps and charts. In the paper presentation we will further discuss the themes that emerged from the data during the thematic analysis and discuss them in the light of previous research on professional knowledge in vocational education at university level. However, already at this stage of the analysis, from this and similar projects in landscape engineering.

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