This paper explores the potential to teacher education, of drawing lines between professional discretion, ethics of care and inclusion as a decolonial (indigenous) practice (Gaudry & Lorenz, 2018). In the face of accountability demands, increasing diversity, and teachers expressing powerlessness, professional discretion is challenged. Inclusion understood as decentring of dominant knowledges and world views and prioritizing experiences of marginalised groups may, reveal a potential for, and possibly contribute to, change through disrupting existing power structures. The context: Norwegian teacher education has been described as existing in a field of tension between policy and research (Brevik & Fosse 2016), and between responsibility and accountability (Smith 2018). A revised national curriculum was issued in 2017, emphasising a research-based foundation and expanding the length to include a masters’ degree. The teaching profession is, despite a comparably soft version of control, similarly described as positioned between accountability and autonomy (Lennert da Silva & Mølstad 2020), and professional ethics as mired in paradox of choice between two ethical positions of which one protests the accountability system but offers no support for action, and the other offers guidance in action whilst accepting the system (Afdal & Afdal 2019). Teachers’ professional discretion (no: “skjønn”), described as making good choice in the face of uncertainty, is seen as developed in the nexus between theory and experience emphasising the intertwining of differing knowledges and contextual sensitivity (Grimen & Molander 2008), though in practice to a lesser extent found to emphasise value-based reasoning (Suzen 2024). Recent developments in initial teacher training prioritizing scientific knowledge, can be expected to prioritize research to experience and structural demands to ethical reflection. Through a document analysis of current policy documents on, and a recent evaluation of, teacher education, we uncover the understandings of, and conditions for promoting professional discretion in teacher education in a Norwegian context. Our preliminary results suggest a lack of emphasis on experiences, values, or world views within teachers' education in Norway, and professional competence as based on scientific knowledge. We discuss the findings considering research on decolonial movements in Norwegian teacher education. Building on bell hooks ideas about theory, love and dialogue (hooks 2014) we then explore the potential of a predominant ethics of care (Afdal & Afdal 2019) as a site of resistance, providing an opening to a wider set of epistemologies and counter-hegemonic ideas promoting thinking against the grain.

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