Understanding how student teacher professional agency (STPA) develops during teacher education is crucial for educators and curriculum developers interested in strengthening it. To explore this process comprehensively, environmental factors (i.e., curriculum coherence between theory and practice and the learning environment) and individual factors…

Teacher education in Finland has followed a research-based approach for decades, but the approach has rarely been investigated from the viewpoint of in-service teachers. This study explores how in-service teachers experienced the meaning of educational science, research and theory (ESRT) and how teachers engage with educational research as part of…

The present study applied Video Enhanced Reflective Practice (VERP) to promote and assess Finnish professionals' interactional competence by means of stimulated recall during three group-based shared review discussions. A VERP trainer guided the professionals to reflect on children's, their own, and colleagues' actions and mental states based on…

This article presents a design for supporting theory-practice reflection in teacher practicums. This design is based on three design principles that promote a transformative stance towards the creation of novel pedagogical approaches: mutual transformation of theory and practice, co-design among supervising teachers, university lecturers and…

This article presents a model for teacher education based on an ongoing action research project at a Finnish university. This model draws on the educational theory of Dewey and the pedagogical sensibility of Bakhtin to critically consider the concepts of teacher identity and agency and to highlight the role of community in teacher development. Our…

In this article, we investigate first-year student teachers' teacher identities through their practical theories and ask what these practical theories reveal about their emerging teacher identities? This study approaches teacher identity from a dialogical viewpoint where identity is constructed through various positions. The empirical part of this…

The purpose of this study was to explain teachers' perceived efficacy for teaching in inclusive classrooms by using a sample of 1911 in-service teachers from China, Finland, and South Africa. Bandura's theory of self-efficacy was used as a starting point to develop distinct models for each country. We found that in all countries, experience in…

This article investigates a piano-playing subject called "keyboard harmony." The subject was initially developed in the 1980s to give (K-12) schoolteachers the skills needed for accompanying singing in classrooms. Since keyboard harmony today has an official status in all Finnish music schools, both piano and general music teachers ought…

The aim of this paper is to discuss intercultural competence (IC) from a languacognitive perspective, whose main assumption is the interface between language, cognition and culture manifested in meaning construction. The article first emphasizes the centrality of language in the process of meaning construction. As a result, in the following…

Students of education encounter a range of pedagogies yet how future teachers' appropriate moral principles are little understood. We conducted an investigation into this process with 10 international students of education attending an intensive course on "dialogic pedagogy" in a university in Finland. The data comprising student…

Mobile devices have become attractive learning devices for education. While the majority of the existing research has focused primarily on the value of mobile learning for students, researchers have recently started exploring its potentials within teacher development. The present qualitative synthesis of quantitative and qualitative research aimed…

This study is part of a research project concerning perceptions of competence among RE student teachers at different stages of their pedagogical studies. This article focuses on the perceptions of RE teachers' competence at the beginning of their training. According to the qualitative data the RE student teachers discerned various areas of…

Playful learning environments (PLEs) have been constructed in schoolyards in Finland with the aim of increasing learning through play in curriculum-based education. In order to better understand and inform this development, the Hyvonen sets out to ascertain how teachers view and use play in kindergarten and elementary education. Fourteen teachers…

Schools are facing challenges to meet the demands of the information society and the student generation of today. Not only are students carrying their mobile phones everywhere, they are also familiar with different online environments, especially social software. This situation can be seen both a challenge and a chance for schools, as mobile…

In recent years, Finnish research-based teaching, according to international surveys, has been shown to lead to excellent results. Previous research has demonstrated that teacher education has often had difficulties in incorporating theory into practice, and that the effects of teacher education on the prior beliefs and views on teaching and…