Decontextualizing Teachers’ Knowledge: Finnish didactics and teacher education curricula during the 1980s and 1990s

Abstract

The subject of this article is the pedagogical knowledge which is seen as essential and ‘true’ enough to be offered to students in the course of modern, academic class‐teacher training. In the first section, didactics will be analysed as the hard core of Finnish pedagogic discourse. Then the changes in the Finnish state educational discourse will be related to recent developments in department‐level curricula in class‐teacher education at Finnish universities during the 1980s and 1990s. The analysis of changes which have taken place in Finnish teacher education discourse shows clearly that there has been a tendency towards pure didactics, a kind of abstract, non‐historical and decontextualized science of teaching. Although contextual studies have been increasing in some departments since the middle of the 1990s, the historical dimension of schooling in particular still appears to be lacking.