Education research was institutionalized as an academic field at the University of Oslo in 1938, primarily to establish a research-based foundation for teaching and teacher education. This initiative led also to the development of a research portfolio and degree programs that qualified graduates for diverse roles within the education system. In contrast, teacher education institutions—organized through university seminars and regional colleges—were expected to integrate research generated at the university while simultaneously cultivating their own knowledge base in collaboration with school authorities, schools, and teachers. Within this framework, pedagogy (and Didaktik in the German tradition) emerged as a bridging discipline, mediating between the university and teacher education institutions. Over the past decades, the shared responsibility for general education at universities and teacher education has shifted significantly. Teacher education has evolved into a scientific, evidence-based domain, driven by its integration into universities in the late 20th century and by substantial investment in research training (Elstad, 2023; Smith, 2020). Supported by the Research Council of Norway, teacher education programs have established their own doctoral programs (Smith, 2020), participated in general doctoral programs (Ludvigsen & Ulfsnes, 2013), and joined Nordic networks of collaborating institutions. These developments have repositioned general educational research as a core academic field within universities, introducing new disciplinary tracks and educational expectations for evidence-based practices. General didactics appears to loose its significance as a key bridge between academia and schools due to an epistemic drift toward evidence-based knowledge in teacher education institutions, and it seems no longer to hold the same authority among scholars. However, nuances can also be found by encouraging hybrid approaches (Smith, 2022). The change is seen as a consequence of political strategies and academia itself, and their numerous efforts to change the scientific rationales and the division of labor between general educational sciences and teacher education as an institution and practice (Caspersen & Smeby, 2023). This paper presents the historical trajectories of general and teacher education in Norway. By drawing on a historical analysis of documentary sources, including doctoral programmes, it traces the development and disciplinary differentiation of doctoral education in Norway from its inception in the 1990s to the present, and examines how institutional and conceptual bridges have been re-constructed between the academic-scientific and practical knowledge domains. It concludes by discussing emerging implications of a more evidence-based approach for the field of pedagogy/didactics.

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