This edited volume explores the idea that educational success in Scandinavian countries can be attributed to the inherent connectedness of teacher ethics and teaching quality, providing inspiration to teachers and school systems outside Scandinavia. Acknowledging that Scandinavian school systems are known for mirroring the welfare systems and democratic societies with respect for both institutions and individuals, this book explores new educational demands, possibilities, and research developments taking place in Scandinavian countries such as Denmark, Norway, and Sweden that place the education system, and teachers’ professional development and identities, under pressure. Chapters address teacher ethics and quality in relation to topics such as the dialogical teacher, democratic teaching, parental collaboration, and the ethics of classroom management to inform non-Scandinavian, international school systems and teacher education initiatives. Discussing current developments in the Scandinavian school systems and the emerging educational ideas and practices within them, this book will appeal to scholars, researchers, and postgraduate students studying teachers and teacher education, moral and values education, and teacher identities more broadly. It will also be useful to policymakers and teacher educators involved with teachers’ professional development more broadly.

This open access book is the first account of the whole diversity of teacher education in the Nordic region: Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Greenland, the Faroe Islands, the Åland Islands and Sápmi (where the Sámi people live). Today, large parts of the world are looking to the Nordic model of social organization, and interest in the Nordic comprehensive school system and teacher education arrangements is no exception. A good education is a key to prosperity and well-being. And the quality of students’ education is undoubtedly linked to the quality of their teachers’ education. While teacher education in the Nordic region is globally admired, it also faces new challenges. The leading scholars writing in this volume discuss the challenges and opportunities that professional environments are facing. By providing solid portraits of each area as well as analyses across the region, this book will be a great resource to students, academics in teacher education and schooling as well as social scientists and policy-makers inside and outside the Nordic region. This is an open access book.

This groundbreaking book uses a comprehensive study of a novel Master of Education program to showcase how teachers can be engaged in authoritative equity‐based research, using comparative education theory, inquiry‐based pedagogy, and the UNESCO SDGs as powerful frameworks. By developing agency to advance culturally sustaining and humanizing practices, it demonstrates how teachers can promote equity in their classrooms and communities. The central premise of the program is that teachers must become comparative, global, and local action researchers to have agency in their practice and to become effective advocates for the cultural and learning needs of their students, especially those in disadvantaged contexts or “learning at the bottom of the pyramid.” By learning comparative framing and social science methods, reviewing the literature to select verifiable educational research, and developing and implementing a plan for action research, this book offers new ideas for how teachers can effectively respond to recent UNESCO calls to reimagine and create promising futures locally. By providing formative and summative evidence of culturally and socially transformative learning, and showcasing how teacher educators can engage teachers in authoritative justice‐inquiry‐based research, this book will appeal to scholars, faculty, and researchers of comparative education and teacher education, and development.

This Norwegian-led, internationally relevant edited collection provides new insights into the transformation of teacher education programmes of the future by collating novel and cutting-edge innovations gleaned from ProTed, the Centre for Professional Learning in Teacher Education in Norway. Presenting research findings from a 10-year funded period of innovation and practice, the book discusses the implementation and dissemination of successful innovations to other teacher education institutions, both national and international. Led by direct experiences combined with empirical results, chapters explore a variety of methods that promote best practice within universities and higher education programmes. These include the progression and coherence in programme design, the relationship and partnerships between university campus and schools, teachers’ professional identities and communities, integrated teacher education, and the advantages of using video technology in teaching practice for a digital future. Ultimately serving as a useful tool for research-based knowledge to inform policy development, this book will be of interest to researchers, scholars, and postgraduate students in teacher education, higher education, and teacher reform more broadly. Those interested in research design will also find the book useful.

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.

Does the Nordic model of education still stand by its original principles and safeguard education for all? This Open Access volume is a carefully crafted collection of chapters that investigate the different aspects of equity, equality and diversity across the education systems in the Nordic countries. Based on data from various national and international large-scale assessments, the volume provides a better understanding of both the functions and foundations of the Nordic model, along with how the concepts mentioned above are enacted in practice. Across the chapters, data from different national and international large-scale assessment studies are used for cross- and single-country analyses on a variety of issues related to equity, equality and inequality in diverse educational settings. The investigations address different subject domains (i.e., mathematics, science, reading), age and grade groups, but also issues related to teachers and the schools themselves. In addition to these empirical chapters, the book addresses the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of the ideas and tools embedded in the phenomena of equity and equality and how they have met in the Nordic model of education.

Now available in Open Access thanks to the support of the University of Helsinki. Teachers’ Professional Ethics: Theoretical Frameworks and Empirical Research from Finland is intended for international readers in education who want to learn the theoretical frameworks that guide teachers’ ethics and that help them address concrete challenges in their everyday work. Scholars and teachers from different countries can use this book to widen their understanding of the Finnish educational system and teacher ethics. The authors provide examples of concrete moral dilemmas in teaching that can be more effectively navigated with the rational principles and guidelines that philosophies of different ethical frameworks can provide. They argue that teachers require ethical skills, especially ethical sensitivity, in order to select the most beneficial course of action concerning diverse students in inclusive education. They should be purposeful in their profession to develop the motivation and resilience to continue their demanding but fulfilling work with long-term goals. Moreover, they should acknowledge their implicit beliefs and possible stereotypes to be able to provide equal learning opportunities to their students and to build democratic moral communities in their schools. In this book, ethical sensitivity, purposeful teaching, and incremental beliefs concerning learning are seen as important prerequisites for teachers’ professional ethics. We discuss these aspects with examples from our empirical studies in Finnish schools.