Finnish teacher education has been interesting for foreign teacher educators, researchers and journalists since launching the first PISA results in 2002. For example, during 2010 altogether 72 expert delegations and international journalist groups visited the Department of Teacher Education at the University of Helsinki in order to become familiar with the teacher education programmes and implementation of the programmes.
Recently, Auguste, Kihn and Miller (2010) analysed teacher education in the top-performing PISA countries—Singapore, Finland, and South Korea. They explained that the success of the teacher education was due to successful recruitment procedures. However, they did not make careful analysis of the programmes. This paper analyses the secondary teacher education programme at the University of Helsinki and uses the physics teacher education programme as an example. The aim is to clarify how the studies support the student teachers’ process of becoming a teacher and building the knowledge base they need to act as autonomous actors in the teaching profession. The analysis will focus on the pedagogical studies including teaching practice. The studies will be analysed from the point of view of the domains and origin of teachers’ professional knowledge. The research question is: how is teacher knowledge approached in the curriculum of the pedagogical studies of the secondary school teacher education programme according to the programme’s documents?
The analysis will focus on the pedagogical studies of the physics teacher education programme and it will be done based on the analysis of domains and origin of teachers’ professional knowledge: the structural view of teacher knowledge constructed on separate knowledge domains, and the origins of the knowledge. The traditional domains of teacher knowledge are subject matter knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge and general pedagogical knowledge (Carlsen, 1999; Hashweh, 2005; originally based on the work of Shulman 1987). An additional view on these domains from the point of view of Finnish teacher education is the knowledge needed to act as consumers and producers of educational research. The Finnish education context will be described for better understanding Finnish teacher education as a part of this context.