This study presents a qualitative empirical study examining case-based professional learning within a university master's seminar in teacher education. The study focuses on how pre-service teachers collectively engage with pedagogical cases arising from school practice, particularly in contexts where inclusive educational aspirations encounter structurally non-inclusive school conditions. In doing so, it situates professional learning within ongoing debates on inclusive pedagogy as a normative and practical challenge for teacher education (Ainscow, 2005; Florian & Black-Hawkins, 2011).

The seminar was designed as a case-oriented community of practice rather than a mentoring or skills-based induction format (Wenger, 1998). This design reflects approaches to teacher education that conceptualise professional learning as a situated, collective, and interpretive process rather than as the acquisition of predefined competencies. Pre-service teachers worked with Critical Incidents drawn from their own experiences, which were collaboratively analysed, discussed, and revisited over time, building on established case-based and incident-based approaches in teacher education (Tripp, 1993). The empirical material comprises written case narratives, group discussions, collective case analyses, and individual reflective texts produced throughout the seminar.

Using an interpretative qualitative approach, the analysis investigates how pre-service teachers registered in this master's level seminar construct what counts as a pedagogical case, how meanings are negotiated collectively, and how professional judgement develops through shared reflection (Fenwick, 2010). Participants of the study were pre-service teachers who were relatively advanced in their master's studies. The master's program in teacher education, in the country where research was conducted, is a two-year program that should be completed within 8 years after graduation from Bachelor degree to get the full title of teacher profession. However, the graduation from a master's degree is not a requirement to start a teaching profession, and several master's degree students already work as teachers and have exposure to real-life classroom experience. In the seminar, 16 students, 10 of whom work in schools as teachers, worked in groups of four, and special attention was given to the point that groups are heterogeneous in terms of teaching experience. The students with and without teaching experience worked in groups together over a semester. Also, particular attention is paid to shifts in interpretive patterns across the seminar trajectory, especially in relation to how inclusive pedagogical concerns are articulated, problematised, and reframed over time.

The findings indicate a gradual move away from individualising and deficit-oriented explanations of professional challenges towards relational, structural and context-sensitive interpretations (Cochran-Smith et al., 2016). Pre-service teachers increasingly framed critical situations not as personal inadequacies, but as expressions of systemic tensions inherent to schooling, especially during the transition from teacher education into professional practice (Pillen et al., 2013). Collective case work supported participants in tolerating ambiguity, articulating uncertainty, and maintaining professional agency under conditions of normative and institutional contradiction, which are characteristic of inclusive educational contexts (Biesta, 2015; Edwards, 2010). Rather than generating solutions or prescriptive guidance, the community of practice functioned as a space for shared sense-making and for re-orienting professional commitments, including sustained engagement with inclusive principles understood as a pedagogical stance rather than a set of techniques (Florian, 2012; Wenger, 1998). The study contributes to research on teacher education and early career professional learning by conceptualising case-based communities of practice as a form of professional support that complements established induction and mentoring models (Ingersoll & Strong, 2011). The paper discusses implications for teacher education programmes aiming to prepare new teachers for complex, contradictory, and structurally constrained school environments, and reflects critically on the limits and tensions of collective case-based professional learning in relation to inclusive pedagogical aspirations (Darling-Hammond, 2017; Zeichner, 2010).

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