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The ETC conference focuses on teacher education for the learning of practice. In this paper, we discuss the challenges of a practice-re-turn in teacher education and argue for a purpose-turn – a stronger focus on conceptual discourses in which to critically engage both content and practice. We illustrate the importance of a focus on purpose in the narrower sense of mathematics teaching, which highlights its relevance to teacher education. Next, we draw on studies within our wider projects t oillustrate that the educational purposes and functions of practice are often not critically engaged with student teachers. We argue that teacher education should have a stronger focus on critical engagement with the educational purposes of teaching, and that research on teacher education should have a stronger focus on critical engagement with the purposes of teacher education.

I kapitlet redovisar vi en fallstudie av en nybliven lärare, Tanja. Tanja har gåtten kompletterande pedagogisk utbildning (KPU) och i det här kapitlet stude-ras inspelningar av intervjuer med Tanja och två av hennes matematiklektio-ner på högstadiet. Syftet med studien är att belysa hur hennes undervisninghar förändrats under hennes första år i yrket och om/hur lärarutbildningenkan ha bidragit till detta. I studien jämförs två lektioner, som ägt rum med sexmånaders mellanrum, med utgångspunkt i olika aspekter av undervisningen.Dessa är kopplade till tidigare forskning och teoretiska ramverk och handlarom: (i) matematikuppgifternas karaktär och variation, (ii) hur lärare kan stäl-la frågor och (iii) ge återkoppling till eleverna samt (iv) hur lärare kan utgåfrån elevernas förkunskaper och utmaningar som de kan befinna sig i.Resultatet visar att undervisningen har förändrats i relation till de fyra as-pekterna. Förändringarna handlar bland annat om att Tanja, under den se-nare lektionen, inleder denna med att ta reda på elevernas förförståelse kringlektionens centrala begrepp och gå igenom grundläggande idéer. I den förstalektionen uppmanas eleverna att börja med uppgiften utan någon liknandeintroduktion. Ett annat resultat är att Tanja under den senare lektionen, ge-nom sina frågor och sin respons, i större utsträckning uppmuntrar elevernaatt motivera sina metoder. För att få insikt i vilken roll lärarutbildningen kanha haft i utvecklingen, analyserar vi därför även intervjuer som genomfördesefter de inspelade lektionerna och ett handledningssamtal som ägde rumunder VFU:n. I dessa intervjuer framgår att Tanja har förändrat sin syn pålärarens och elevernas roll. Lärarutbildningens spår är dock väldigt diffusa.Sammantaget aktualiserar analyserna av lektioner och intervjuer frågor om i vilken utsträckning lärarutbildningen har förmått ge lärarstudenten möjlig-het att utveckla en professionsdiskurs.

In this chapter, we present a case study of a new teacher, Tanja, based on interviews with her and observations of two of her mathematics lessons at a secondary school. The study sheds light on how her teaching changed during her first year in the profession and whether/how teacher training may have contributed to this. The study compares two lessons, which took place six months apart, with respect to: (i) the nature and variation of mathematics tasks, (ii) the type of teacher questions, (iii) the feedback to learners and (iv) how to base teaching on learners’ prior knowledge and current challenges. The results describe how Tanja’s teaching changed in relation to the four aspects. The interviews show that Tanja changed her view of the role of the teacher and the learners over time. However, the traces of teacher education are very diffuse. Overall, the analyses of lessons and interviews raise questions about the extent to which teacher education has been able to give Tanja the opportunity to develop a professional discourse.

To understand and to enact teachers' practices, these practices must be made visible to pre-service teachers, and this happens through representations. This paper focuses on representations in teacher education, and on representation of lesson planning in particular. Lesson planning is a core practice in teachers' work and a critical component of teacher education curricula. However, there is limited knowledge regarding how planning for mathematics teaching is addressed in teacher education, including how representations of teachers' planning practice are used in the teaching of planning. This mapping review aims to identify the types of representations of lesson planning used in mathematics teacher education as these are visible in research on the development of planning skills for mathematics teaching in primary school. Searches were done in ERIC and Scopus for empirical research studies conducted between 2000 and April 2023 and written in English. After applying inclusion/exclusion criteria, 25 publications were included. Representations made visible in the included studies related to both representations of planning as a process and representations of products of planning. The majority of process-focused representations involved joint planning together with teachers or teacher educators, and product-focused representations involved complete lesson plans by more experienced teachers or teacher educators, or written examples of learner activities/tasks, but also some cases of pre-planning. Overall, there were few studies that addressed the representations used, and future research may benefit from making the use of representations more explicit, as well as exploring how different representations might influence pre-service teachers' learning opportunities and understanding. © 2026 The Author(s). Review of Education published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of British Educational Research Association.

I boken samlas aktuella skandinaviska studier om matematiklärarutbildning och ger en översikt över hur delar av forskningsfältet ser ut i dag. Boken bjuder in till ett fördjupat samtal om matematiklärarutbildning: vad vi gör, hur vi gör det, och varför – samt vilka konsekvenser det kan få.

Boken är organiserad kring tre teman. Det första fokuserar på matematiklärarstudenters lärande. Vad upplever studenterna att de tar med sig från sin utbildning? Ger lärarutbildningen dem tillräckliga möjligheter att utveckla en didaktisk diskurs?

Bokens andra tema behandlar hur forskning och teori används i lärarutbildningen. Studierna argumenterar för att undervisningsmetoder med förankring i teori eller forskning måste ingå i utbildningen om lärare ska kunna utveckla ett professionellt omdöme i relation till sin undervisning.

Det tredje temat presenterar teoretiska och metodologiska bidrag till forskning om matematiklärarutbildning. Vi får bland annat en inblick i kritisk matematikundervisning ur ett norskt perspektiv och insikter om samarbeten mellan lärare och forskare i Sverige.

Utbildningen ser olika ut i de skandinaviska länderna och olikheterna bidrar till att vi kan lära av varandra. Samtidigt är det viktigt att det är forskningen som informerar utbildningarnas innehåll och utformning.

Studier om matematiklärarutbildning i Skandinavien riktar sig till matematiklärarutbildare, forskare och andra som intresserar sig för matematiklärarutbildningens möjligheter och utmaningar

Student teachers learn in many ways, one of which can be through analysing teaching. For this, analytical frameworks that are accessible yet theoretically grounded are useful. The increasingly accepted characterisation of mathematics as a discourse has been developed into a fully-fledged theory—commognition—but the theory is hard for novices to access without additional operationalisation. In this paper, I explore theoretically whether a framework developed both to inform and analyse practice, Mathematics Discourse in Instruction (MDI), is compatible with commognition. Since MDI was developed in a particular context, I also consider the extent to which the framework is broadly applicable to different types of instructional organisation. I examine the application of MDI to two qualitatively different Swedish mathematics high school lessons. The results indicate high compatibility of MDI with commognition, making MDI a candidate for the analysis of mathematics lessons, which can be made available to student teachers. Application of the framework to the Swedish mathematics lessons suggested some limitations to the MDI framework’s wider applicability, wherefore some adjustments are suggested.

Teaching and supervision invite students to study and make sense of the world anew. The practices of study and research enable this work of students. To learn the practice of research, the processes and products of research and the relationships between them must be made visible to novice researchers both conceptually and operationally. To learn doctoral supervision, the processes and products of supervision and the relationships between them must be made visible to novice supervisors. This implies clearly linking supervision processes to the core practices of research that must be “taught” to the novice researchers. In this paper, I touch on two practices of research in the humanities and social sciences that many doctoral students experience as challenging: (i) synthesising literature, and (ii) operationalising theory. For each, I will discuss how the pedagogies of representations, decomposition, and approximations of practice may be utilised in the supervision. Hence, this paper aims to contribute to a strengthening of the discourse of doctoral supervisory pedagogy.

A research-based teacher education rests on research on the practices of teacher education. We undertook a survey of the opportunities to learn mathematics pedagogy and to teach mathematics perceived by students in their last year of teacher education. Questionnaires were distributed to 753 students graduating in June 2020 from 13 Swedish universities, and the response rate was 11.2%. Overall, new graduates perceived good opportunities to learn mathematics pedagogy, but there were substantial variations in opportunities to learn specific competencies of teaching, such as analysing learners’ answers or leading a mathematical discussion. A similar unevenness in perceived opportunities to learn from the practicum experience was found. These results point to less-than-optimal opportunities to learn core practices of mathematics teaching. We recommend that institutions take a more systematic approach to programme coverage, and to create opportunities to use theory/research to deconstruct practice and to inform rehearsing ‘approximations of practice’ in campus-based activities. 

Instructional technology implementation is increasingly being addressed in teacher education, though research literature on its implementation remains limited. This literature analysis draws the Anthropological Theory of the Didactic to map what and how instructional technology is integrated into preservice mathematics teacher education and to identify conditions that facilitate or hinder the adaptation. Drawing from 22 peer-reviewed articles published between 2010 and 2022, the study maps empirical studies of instructional technology integration in mathematics teacher education. Key findings reveal that preservice teachers consistently engaged in lesson planning, practiced teaching peers in 13 cases, and taught actual learners in three instances, while reflection occurred in seven cases. However, the underlying reasoning (logos) behind the didactical practices were not presented to the preservice teachers, remained implicit, or were not clearly linked to the praxis. Furthermore, the decomposition of teaching practices was an underused pedagogical practice. Learning opportunities included rehearsals, the use of exemplary curriculum materials, teamwork, and constructive feedback. A key challenge in adapting the didactical praxeologies was the participants’ lack of prior experience with technology. The analysis highlights the need to make the reasons behind teaching practices explicit and calls for more intentional integration of teacher education pedagogies to enhance learning outcomes.