Two different education programs for upper primary school. Is there correspondence between the curricula and the teacher mentors' experiences with students' knowledge in the 1-7 and 5-10 programs?

Abstract

In 2010 UiT The Arctic University of Norway started two new teacher education programmes as a national pilot. The programmes were five-year integrated masters for grade levels 1-7 and 5-10. In this qualitative study we interviewed eight in-service teachers with experience of mentoring pre-service teachers (PSTs) in these two programmes. We explored the differences in types of knowledge between the two groups of students. To highlight prospective differences, we also compared the two teacher programmes and performed a document analysis of the pedagogy curriculum. The educational programmes had several differences: the grade levels 1-7 programme had higher emphasis on pedagogy and included courses in one more school subject, compared to the 5-10 programme. The latter programme had more emphasis on subject matter and didactic knowledge. The in-service teachers' mentoring experiences revealed that the PSTs in the 5-10 programme had higher subject and didactic knowledge, showed more interest in and identified with their chosen subjects. The PSTs in the 1-7 programme appeared to have a better theoretical base in pedagogy and a greater focus on pedagogical principles in their school practice. The in-service teachers also experienced attitudinal differences between the PST groups when the PSTs were teaching subjects for which they were not formally trained from the campus. The PSTs in the 5-10 programme were more reluctant to do this. This study shows that there is consistency between the structure and content of the two teacher programmes and the in-service teachers' experience of the type of knowledge that the students possess. This article thus contributes to the debate on how different teacher education models contribute to the teacher students' knowledge.