Teacher Education Research in Sweden and International Contexts:

Conversations and Networking in Research Publishing

Abstract

Teacher education is vital to educational systems and is a recurrent theme in public discourses. Various stakeholders, including policymakers, national and international organisations, teacher students, and professional organisations express their aspirations and concerns regarding teacher education issues. Different interests are at work here, expecting teacher educations to manage and solve various problems in schooling and education, located in different societal contexts. They influence teacher education research, resulting in an increasing number of research problems and intellectual research approaches—consequently, teacher education research studies complex and diverse phenomena that organise a fragmented research field.

Given this complexity in teacher education research, it is important to get an overview of the field and its organisation in different contexts. Thus, this article aims to analyse the teacher education research field in Sweden and how it interacts with the international research community. We analysed conversations in teacher education research using bibliometric resources to fulfil this purpose. We did not work with citation impact measures. Instead, we identified how publications are linked to each other – or not – to understand how teacher education research organised itself in different networks as research fronts and intellectual traditions.

Data resources available in the ISI Web of Science database were combined with VOSviewer to analyse links between publications. In Web of Science, we identified in sum 23,886 publications out of which 358 had authors affiliated with Sweden.

We identified a massive expansion of publications with Swedish and international author affiliations. There was an Anglo Saxon dominance in terms of publications, journals, and university affiliations. Explorative cluster analyses of links between publications in terms of bibliographic coupling (using the same references) resulted in a set of research fronts working with different problems – such as teacher professionalization, educational change, digital competency, or subject didactics etc. – organized by conversations in various networks. Using co-citation analyses (co-occurrence of cited references) we identified different intellectual traditions – such as symbolic interactionism, pedagogical content knowledge, or critical discourse analysis – manifested in various networks.

Research with Swedish and international research affiliations was organised similarly and often linked to each other. But we also identified distinct networking in Sweden, such as subject matter didactics and policy analyses. Many research publications focused on problems in education and society to be dealt with by teacher education, making statements about change and reforms. In comparison, little research analysed existing teacher education designs and how they function in practice. Thus, change mattered most in teacher education research!

We concluded that teacher education research in Sweden is a fragmented field of study composed of distinct networks, often with solid links inside the networks, but little recognition of conversations outside these networks. To this is added that there is a strong interaction with the international research field, primarily referring to matters of educational change.

A last conclusion: this research has presented visual maps of teacher education research and how it is organized socially and intellectually as a fragmented research field. This fragmentation is due to the actual preconditions of teacher education in interaction with teacher education research. We argue that it is of vital importance for our research community to analyse how this fragmentation is working in different ways, what the grounds are for this, and to look for conversations that connect different networks!