Chapter 49
Co-configuring Design Elements
and Quality Aspects in Teacher
Education: A Research Agenda
Jon Magne Vestøl and Andreas Lund
49.1 Introduction
The teaching profession and, consequently, teacher education is characterized by
increasing transformation and complexity: The turnover rate of what is considered
valid knowledge within specific disciplines escalates, knowledge is increasingly
distributed between agents and (most often digital) artifacts with implications for
how we assess competence, learning communities are heterogeneous and
multi-cultural, and higher education (HE) institutions and schools seek new types of
partnerships in order to draw on diverse but complementary sources of knowledge.
The implication is that teacher education, as a specificfield within the largerfield of
HE, needs to be future oriented, innovative, expansive, research informed and
relevant in ways that may not be found in existing practices. As Ellis and
McNicholl ( 2015 ) observe,“Around the world, ITE [Initial Teacher Education]
continues to be in a state of almost continual reform, even crisis”(p. 6).
If this is the case, and there are strong indications it has been for some time (Ellis
and McNicholl 2015 ), it will have implications for how we envisage teacher edu-
cation but also for our research agenda and how we conduct research on teacher
education; in particular how we capture emerging practices and how such practices
are constructed and enacted by agents involved: student teachers (individually and
collaboratively), teachers and supervisors in HE, mentors and teachers in schools,
and—at least to some extent—policy makers at various levels. In order to examine
and further cultivate emerging practices where they indicate promise and relevance
we propose a research agenda that rests ondesignprinciples (Hauge et al. 2007 ;
J.M. Vestøl(&)A. Lund
University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway
e-mail: [email protected]
A. Lund
e-mail: [email protected]
©Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2017
M.A. Peters et al. (eds.),A Companion to Research in Teacher Education,
DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-4075-7_49
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