Schoolteachers and the Nordic Model

Schoolteachers and the Nordic Model examines the cultural distinctiveness of the Nordic teaching profession and teacher training compared to examples from Europe and North America. The book explores the concept of these 'teacher cultures' as various dimensions of professional identities, recruitment patterns, teachers' social status, values and knowledge. It considers how Nordic teachers- socio-cultural backgrounds and their shifting societal roles compare with continental European examples, analysing the societal consequences of teacher cultures for the current Nordic welfare states. Offering a unique focus on teachers, the book uses a shared comparative and historical approach to add new knowledge to the analysis of global convergence and divergence in educational systems. The book will be of great interest to researchers, scholars and post-graduate students in the fields of comparative education, educational policy, the sociology of education and the history of education. It will also be of interest to policy makers, teacher educators and school leaders. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Jesper Eckhardt Larsen is Associate Professor in the History of Education at the University of Oslo, Norway. Barbara Schulte is Professor in Comparative and International Education at the University of Vienna, Austria. Fredrik W. Thue is Professor in the History and Theory of Professions at Oslo Metropolitan University, Norway.

Introduction: Of myths and models: the unity and diversity of Nordic educational cultures. 1.Nordic elementary schoolteachers: organic intellectuals, agents of a colonising state, emancipatory groups, or all of these?. 2. Preaching and teaching: the religious origins of Nordic teacher cultures. 3. Peasant amongst peasants: the role of the Scandinavian teacher as farmer in the nineteenth century. 4. The Nordic model from afar: Chinese scholarly projections of Nordic education and teachers. 5. Finnish primary teacher training and Nordic comparisons in Committee Reports from the 1860s to the 1960s. 6. Becoming universities? Academisation and the integration of Finnish and Swedish teacher education institutions in the system of higher education. 7. Approaches to pedagogy in Finnish and Danish pre-service teacher education: historical paths and contemporary divergence. 8. Teacher education reform in Sweden, Germany, and England. 9. Teacher unions, teacher cultures, and teacher education in Sweden and Finland 1970-2020. 10. Elitist tradition and democratic reform: Norwegian and Danish upper-secondary teacher cultures in transition, 1960-1994. 11. Discourses of teacher professionalism in Norway. 12. Teachers' autonomy in assessment between perceived fairness and institutional framings: Sweden and Germany in comparison. 13. Integration, fragmentation and complexity: governing the teaching profession and the Nordic model. Conclusion- Schoolteachers and the Nordic model.