improve teacher education, but entirely on the needs of humanistic disciplines
themselves.
As a result those disciplines in themselves or through‘subject didactics’(in
Swedish:ämnesdidaktik) risks forcing educational research backwards, moving
into picturing educational issues mainly as instrumental problems to be solved
instrumentally. That is if subject didactics is to be understood as the knowledge
accumulated by the disciplines and teacher education as learning teacher students
how this knowledge is‘learnt’by the pupils in schools, focusing on what methods
that are subject specific and which most effectively enhance‘learning’, then teacher
education easily becomes reduced to an administration without any significant
meaning for educating teachers. Teacher education then becomes reduced to a
system for channelling money for the benefit of all disciplines at the university
regardless if they have any idea or not about thefield of teacher educational
research or educational traditions of thought. In effect reducing educational issues
to the application of subject knowledge through the concept of learning. But
‘learning’is a process itself empty of content, which means that if learning is that
which make issues educational, nothing makes them educational.
And second, if those disciplines do not engage in educational traditions of
thought but see their involvement in teacher education as based on subject specific
methods combined with theories of learning, they push utbildningsvetenskap even
further into the hands of psychology instead of pedagogik(k).
As‘learning’is a psychological concept,‘utbildningsvetenskap’is ironically not
dependent on pedagogical knowledge but psychological. Through the ignorance of
traditions of educational thought,‘utbildningsvetenskap’tends to defining the entire
scope of‘utbildningsvetenskap’in terms of‘learning’.
‘Psychology of learning’is also what tends to dominate educational research that
wants to be funded by the Committee for educational sciences. This is more than
clear if one takes the description of what constitutes the field of ‘utbild-
ningsvetenskap’at the home webpage of the Committee for educational sciences
(UVK) at Swedish research council (VR) as a legitimate description of thefield.
‘Utbildningsvetenskap’is defined in a short text of eight and a half lines, in which
learning is mentioned seven (7!) times, and always as a concept framing all other
possible themes and concepts (see also Säfström and Månsson 2015 ). It is therefore
questionable if it iseducationalsciences at all that are defined—but rather‘learning
sciences’.
When in 2008 the report on‘Sustainable teacher education’(SOU 2008 : 109)
was presented by the main investigator Sigbritt Franke—it could more than any-
thing else be read as a blueprint of how educational research was perceived at the
point in time by those in power to define thefield of‘utbildningsvetenskap’from
the‘outside’, including researchers of neuroscience as well as the political sphere.
That the new subject‘the core of educational sciences’(Den utbildningsveten-
skapliga kärnan) as the new‘subject’in teacher education programs in Sweden
replacing pedagogik was called, could be read as a mix of partly outdated educa-
tional research with neuroscience and a political will to transform the entire edu-
cational system from its core. The result, as we understand it, is a particular kind of
186 C.A. Säfström and H. Saeverot