Teacher education plays a key role in the development of teachers’ societal thinking. Teachers’ ability to critically examine the different societal dimensions and connections of their work and educational institutions is needed in fast-changing and plural societies. In addition to teaching, in their classrooms, teachers tackle politically charged topics, such as the climate crisis and social inequality. These and other societal, political and value-related questions increasingly require European teachers to be able to understand and work with societal issues.

International literature has suggested that today's teacher education programs in the Western world often focus more on teachers’ future students’ learning rather than on their own learning, which tends to rather emphasise learning the subject content over other aspects of teaching (Werler & Tahirsylaj 2022). For example, in mathematics or history studies, the focus may be more on how to teach the subjects to future students than on how they relate to the student teacher's teacher identity. Often in their approach to curricula, teacher education programs follow either the German Didaktik tradition or Anglo-American curriculum tradition, or both. The two traditions differ in their approach to education and its goals: The German tradition focuses on conveying knowledge that is considered valuable in society to the growing person, and with that elevate the individual towards Bildung. The American tradition emphasises rationality, measurability and evaluation, focusing less on the individual’s meaning-making process as part of learning (e.g. Pantić & Wubbels 2012). 

The empirical context for our research is the Finnish class teacher education. Recent research has found evidence that teacher education may not address enough societal and sometimes contested topics such as human rights, gender, and multiculturalism – issues that also interact with the values and identities of teachers and teacher students. Some studies also suggest that the societal orientation of Finnish teacher education tends more to adapt to the existing society than becoming aware and critically examining it (Fornaciari 2020). Even though for many pre-service teachers societal relevance is one key factor of the profession, societal or ethical perspectives can be overshadowed by other topics in education (Metsäpelto et al. 2021), raising the question of how does the teacher education prepare pre-service teachers for their societal role (see Juvonen, 2024).

In this study, we examine Finnish class teacher education programmes through the question what pre-service teachers are prepared for and how. Our research question is what goals are set and what kind of learning and change the curricula aspire to produce in teacher students? To this end, we apply Fred Korthagen’s (2014)  “onion” model of teacher reflection levels in our analysis. Korthagen (2014) sees teacher reflection as a necessary link between practice and theory. However, teacher reflection can easily become superficial, focusing on observable actions and not reflecting the values, attitudes, beliefs, motives and goals that underlie actions and behavior. According to Korthagen’s holistic model, actions and behavior are the outer layer of being a teacher, but teacher reflection should also reach more core levels of the “onion” model, like teacher’s values, identity, and mission. In this study, we test the application of Korthagen’s model on teacher education curricula.

Methodologically we combine theory-driven content analysis with data-driven qualitative content analysis (Hsieh & Shannon, 2005). As data, we use the curricula of eight (8) Finnish class teacher education programmes. These documnts were in use in 2025 in universities that provide teacher education in Finnish. The study programmes are 5-year-long and include both bachelor’s and master’s degrees. Graduates are qualified to work as classroom teachers (teaching all subjects on grade levels 1-6, ages 7-12). Our research task is twofold in testing Korthagen’s “onion” model: we examine how the class teacher education curricula goals of teacher programmes can be located on the 7 different levels of Korthagen’s model, i.e. core qualities, mission, (work-)identity, beliefs, competencies, behaviour, environment (theory-driven approach). We also examine how the programmes aim to affect the different layers and what the goals on different levels relate to (data-driven approach). In the first phase of the analysis, the authors coded the goals of the curricula according to Korthagen’s model with a theory-driven approach. As a unit of analysis, we used goal statements (i.e. “can prepare a lesson plan”), each of which were coded belonging to one (or in some cases more) level of the onion model. For this, we used Korthagen's definitions on each level of the onion. For example, the goal according to which the teacher student "develops...professional identity now and in the future" was coded at the identity level, and the goal "is able to …, express, and regulate emotions and behavior" was coded at the behavior level. In the second phase of analysis, we read and categorised the goals categorised to each level with a data-driven approach, to answer the question, what kind of qualitative goals are present on different levels. For example, at the identity level, the curricula aimed to develop teacher students into pedagogical experts who have worked on their own role, identity, and position as teachers and who develop their expertise in a research-based manner, sometimes also taking into account their societal role. In both phases the authors worked first individually and then together, in order to challenge and validate each other’s interpretations.

Firstly, we argue that Korthagen’s model works as an analytical tool in the research of teacher education curricula, since all levels of the onion model were represented in the data. Secondly, our results show, perhaps expectedly, that the curricula do focus strongly on the competence and belief levels of Korthagen’s onion model, and more rarely touch on the inner layers of the student teachers – meaning, that on the level of explicitly set goals, teacher education programmes do not necessarily attempt to reach the core levels of pre-service teachers such as their values, mission or identity. This may have implications for in-service teachers in their induction phase, if their existing values and preconceptions regarding education have not been met and challenged sufficiently during their studies. This prompts the question, how are teachers able to implement the value base of the national curriculum in their work if value questions are left nearly untouched during their studies. In the presentation we discuss teachers assuming their societal role and the value-friction they may encounter in the field, and what a break with the value base of education during teacher studies could mean for preparing teachers for the education system of a democratic society.

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