Exploring potentialities for cosmopolitan learning in Swedish teacher education

Abstract

This study aimed to explore student teachers’ experiences of learning in teacher education, with a focus on how students describe their ways of thinking about their own learning in relation to their future professional role as teachers and how these descriptions relate to emerging cosmopolitan visions for student learning in teacher education. Data were collected through qualitative interviews with a small sample of student teachers at two Swedish universities. Thirty student teachers writing their final exam papers were invited to participate in an interview. Of these, 14 volunteered for audio-recorded, individual interviews exploring the students’ experiences of studying and learning. The analysis drew on a conceptual framework developed in research on students’ approaches to studying and learning and focused on how students described their experiences of learning in the course of studying, with an emphasis on the ways in which students reflected on their own emergent understandings of knowledge that they believe to be central to the process of becoming a professional teacher. These reflective accounts were subsequently analysed with a focus on the ways in which they connect to current philosophical ideas of cosmopolitan learning in teacher education. While the student teachers did not explicitly link their own understandings of what is involved in becoming a teacher to any cosmopolitan views raised in their teacher education, their ways of thinking about their own emergent professional understanding of teaching revealed a certain reflexive potential that can be linked to ideas of cosmopolitan learning in teacher education. This study contributes to educational research by linking an empirically derived conceptualisation of student learning in higher education to broader philosophical visions of higher education specifically addressing the challenges that teacher education faces in the light of the globalisation of society as a whole.

Keywords

Globalisation Swedish teacher education student teachers interviews approaches to learning cosmopolitan learning

Introduction

The past 30 years have seen a dramatic expansion of higher education in many countries around the world. In the European Union, between 1998 and 2008, on average the number of students enrolled in courses in higher education increased by 25%. In several EU member states, such as Sweden and the Baltic States, the growth of higher education has been quite remarkable, involving a rise of at least 50% in terms of the number of students taking courses at the university level (EURYDICE, 2009). This expansion has meant great challenges for higher education, which has had to cope not just with the task of providing education for masses of students, but also with responding to an increasing heterogeneity among students entering tertiary education. Generally, students tend to vary in terms of their backgrounds and previous experiences of formal schooling. They enter higher education with differences in prior knowledge, learning styles (Vermunt, 1996), learning orientations (Beaty et al., 1997), conceptions of knowledge (Belenky et al., 1986; Clinchy, 2002; Hofer and Pintrich, 1997, 2002; see also Perry, 1970), conceptions of learning (Säljö, 1979; see also Marton et al., 1993) and approaches to studying (Entwistle, 2009; Entwistle and Ramsden, 1983) – aspects that are known to influence learning in higher education. The challenge facing higher education today, to provide high-quality education for heterogeneous groups of students within a mass-education system, has prompted discussion about the knowledge and skills that students need to develop in the course of studying at university. While this discussion applies to higher education in general, it has been particularly lively in teacher education – an area that has grown considerably over the past decades to meet the increasing demand for educated professionals within the school sector (Freiberg, 2002). At a policy level, the spirit of innovation runs high in relation to the knowledge and skills that student teachers should be able to develop in order to meet the demands put on them by an increasingly globalised society. Recent research into the sociological dimensions of the impact that globalisation is having on teacher education points to an interesting trend across various countries to use reform strategies that typically emphasise:

… teacher effectiveness and well-shaped teacher profiles for the purpose of establishing [an]? improved and clear alignment between teacher knowledge and skills and the clearly defined tasks of schools. They view teacher development as a lifelong task, and they aim at making teaching a more flexible career choice. They seek to transform the teaching profession into a knowledge-rich profession anchored in the academic disciplines and scientific research. They also stress the importance of developing accountability systems for promoting student outcomes. (Rönnström, 2012: 197)

While the emphasis of many reform strategies seems to be on creating competitive conditions for teacher education to produce professionals that can efficiently facilitate the procurement of expected learning outcomes in students, learning to become a teacher is not just a matter of acquiring factual knowledge and skills to impart such factual knowledge to students. It is about coming to know the profession of the teacher and to reflect on aspects of teaching and learning that can have an impact on how students think about their own learning in relation to the perceived demands put on them by the learning environment, and more generally, by society as a whole. So the real challenge of educating teachers goes well beyond the effective production of knowledgeable professionals, to include the fostering of qualities that can prepare future teachers for dealing with the unknown and complex challenges posed by an increasingly globalised society.

Educating for the unknown and learning for the future

Perkins (2010), in addressing the topic of what students need to know in relation to the demands that will put on them by society in the future, underscores the importance of educating for ‘the unknown’. While much of today’s schooling focuses on transmitting information and knowledge, what is worth knowing in the future will require students to engage in learning processes enabling them to reflect critically on implications, think relativistically and adapt to new circumstances. Being able to reflect critically on one’s own perspective in relation to others and being able to adapt flexibly to rapidly changing demands stand out as particularly important qualities that higher education in general, and teacher education in particular, has to develop in order to meet the demands put on the individual by the increasingly globalised society. However, Perkins is not alone in stressing these critical dimensions of learning for the future. Barnett (2009) also discusses the role that higher education is currently playing, and what role it should be playing, in preparing students for life beyond university. Looking across the ideological landscape of the past 30 years of higher education, he observes an ontological shift in higher education involving the idea of students’ acquisition of knowledge being gradually played down in favour of a view emphasising ‘the performative student’, that is a view that emphasises vocational, generic, transferable and proactive skills and the capacity to learn how to learn in the face of an uncertain and rapidly changing society. However, Barnett (2009) argues that doing away with the question of knowledge, replacing it with a primarily vocationally oriented and performative educational ideal, misses the important point of recognising higher education as a milieu for a more profound process of knowing, being and becoming – a process of moral and intellectual growth. Moreover, Barnett (2009) underscores the importance of valuing students’ processes of coming to know phenomena in the world, and argues that this coming-to-know process in itself brings forward “desirable human qualities […] distinct from knowing itself” (Barnett, 2009: 433). For teacher education, such a process of coming to know – given a well-thought-out pedagogical framework – may open up for the development of what Barnett calls ‘epistemic virtues’ consisting of dispositions and qualities that can sustain an ethically worthwhile form of being in the world:

A deep and personal encounter with knowledge calls for and helps to nourish certain ethically worthwhile forms of human being. In turn, a programme of study in higher education may be seen as an educational device for bringing on these epistemic virtues in effective and efficient ways. That is to say, an individual could effect such self transformations as an autodidact; but a well-orchestrated course of study in higher education at least has this prospect before it: that it can engender the formation of epistemic virtue; which is to say virtue itself. (Barnett, 2009: 435; for a discussion along similar lines see Hansen, 2011; Rizvi, 2009; and Roth, 2011).

Emerging ideas of cosmopolitan learning in higher education

Such a view of higher education as a lever for developing ‘epistemic virtue’ and stimulating ‘ethically worthwhile forms of human being’ resonates strongly with ideas expressed by Rizvi (2009) in his discussion on ‘cosmopolitan learning’ in higher education. Rizvi (2009) underscores the importance of recognising that globalisation of the political, economic and cultural arenas has had a huge impact on people’s daily lives in terms of how we relate to the surrounding world. These global shifts have brought with them new rules for responding to and exerting influence on the actions taken within the political, economic and cultural spheres. For that reason, student learning needs to become cosmopolitan to enable students to enter modes of thinking that can foster epistemic virtues such as criticality, involving the ability to think critically about ideas that they are confronted with, historicity, involving an ability to understand historical events in relation to the historical contexts in which they took place, relationality, implying an ability to relate to other human beings and develop and sustain such relationships over time, dialogicity, involving an ability to actively initiate a dialogue with the surrounding world, and last but not least, reflexivity, involving an individual’s ability to take the perspective of the Other towards her/himself and to adjust her/his own perspective to adapt to the social circumstances in hand (see for example Roth, this issue; cf. also Mead, 1934). According to Rizvi (2009), together these qualities bring to the fore an important cosmopolitan epistemological stance that allows individuals not only to respond flexibly to changing circumstances but also to consciously and continuously reflect on the implications of their own actions and beliefs in relation to other individuals’ values and actions – an epistemological stance that make students well prepared to cope with the challenges of an unknown future and meet with the rapidly changing demands of globalised society. The qualities mentioned by Rizvi are, of course, just examples of qualities that may be mentioned in relation to emerging cosmopolitan visions for higher education. Hansen (2010) takes an even broader view when discussing cosmopolitanism in relation to education, describing the purpose of such cosmopolitan education as providing ways of thinking about

ways in which people can respond creatively to shifting patterns of human interaction generated by migration, rapid economic and political change, and new communication technologies. [Scholars] perceive in cosmopolitanism a vibrant alternative to forces in globalization that uproot established ways of life, entrench consumerist individualism, undermine notions of collective responsibility, and degrade the physical environment. (Hansen, 2010: 2, brackets added)

Linking back to Barnett’s (2004, 2009) lines of reasoning, the real challenge for education in school and higher education posed by the vision of creating a broader and reflexive cosmopolitan basis for student learning is enabling students to “prosper amid supercomplexity, amid a situation in which there are no stable descriptions of the world” (Barnett, 2004: 252); in short, to cope with the unknown.

However, while it is easy to take the qualities described above at face value and to argue for their importance in steering higher education in a more cosmopolitan-oriented direction, the actual nature of such understanding and how it is empirically manifested in students’ learning remains rather elusive.

Aim

The present paper forms part of a larger research project aiming to explore the relationship between cosmopolitan visions for higher education, expressed in policy documents and in the discourse of philosophy of education, and the actual approaches adopted in teacher education towards the kinds of learning qualities sketched out by, for instance, Barnett (2004, 2009), Rizvi (2009), Perkins (2010) and Hansen (2010, 2011) among others. The aim of the present paper was to approach the matter from an empirical angle and to explore student teachers’ experiences of learning in Swedish teacher education, with a focus on how students describe their ways of thinking about their own learning in relation to their future professional role as teachers. However, before illustrating the findings of the study, it will be necessary to describe its conceptual framework – a framework that was originally derived from research on student learning in higher education.

Concepts describing students’ approaches to learning

One of the most influential strands of research focusing on students’ learning and studying at the university level has its origins in Sweden but has been further developed in Britain and Australasia. This research strand – sometimes labelled the Student Approaches to Learning (SAL) Framework (Biggs, 1993) – was fuelled by the insight that students’ personal learning experiences may provide valuable data for exploring the nature of student learning. The research carried out within the SAL framework has produced results indicating that the content and structure of students’ learning processes may be understood as functions of variations in students’ ways of approaching learning material that they are confronted with in the teaching. In their now famous investigation into student learning, Marton and Säljö (1976a, 1976b) introduced a fundamental distinction between deep and surface level processing (later referred to as a deep or a surface approach to learning) in relation to students’ reading of an academic text. In a series of studies based on a naturalistic design, Marton and Säljö (1976a, 1976b; see also Marton and Säljö, 1997) asked undergraduate students taking courses in the social sciences to read and summarise the content of a short academic text. They then carried out extensive probing interviews with the students, exploring how they had gone about reading the text. Careful analysis of the interview transcripts revealed that the students had not only adopted distinctly different ways of reading the text but had also acquired qualitatively different understandings of what the text was actually trying to convey. Some students seemed to have grasped the point fully while others had completely misunderstood it. Looking at the students’ ways of reflecting on their own reading processes on the one hand, and the reflections on the content of the text on the other, Marton and Säljö (1976a, 1976b, 1997) discovered a surprisingly strong and consistent relationship between the sorts of understandings that students had managed to achieve and the ways in which they had approached the text. More specifically, some students had focused on the text as a text to memorise, more or less trying to reproduce its precise wording. Such a surface approach to learning was driven by an intention to memorise and reproduce, emphasising facts and details to an extent that often made it difficult for students to see relationships between ideas and arguments presented in the text, and even more difficult to grasp the general point of the text. Other students had tried to look beyond the wording of the text, focusing on the underlying meaning, trying to clarify the point that the author of the text was trying to get across. These students testified to a deep approach to learning, showing a clear intention to seek meaning and understand the ideas presented in the text, and a systematic effort to grasp the whole picture that the text portrayed through the complex interplay between ideas and arguments presented in support of those ideas (Marton and Säljö, 1997; see also Entwistle, 2009).

The original study by Marton and Säljö (1976a, 1976b) was followed by a range of similar investigations that supported the validity of the distinction between deep and surface approaches to learning, and later research made it clear that students who adopted a deep approach to learning were more likely to achieve a more profound and elaborated academic understanding than those students adopting a surface approach (Marton and Säljö, 1997). Based on this qualitative research on approaches to learning, Entwistle and Ramsden (1983) went on to expand on the notions of deep and surface approaches in relation to university students’ everyday studying. Drawing on a mixed-methods design combining large-scale inventory data with in-depth interviews with 57 undergraduate students from different course settings, this research identified approaches to studying among the students that were similar to the categories that Marton and Säljö (1976a) had described in terms of deep and surface approaches to learning. Again, students who adopted a deep approach to studying sought to understand learning material for themselves, critically questioning and analysing arguments to create a structure that would help them pin down central ideas and to relate these ideas to each other to create a holistic overview. In contrast, students who adopted a surface approach to studying were more focused on the learning material as a body of information to be memorised and reproduced in upcoming exams. Entwistle and Ramsden (1983) also identified a third strategic approach to studying, describing students’ tactical responses to the assessment procedures used by teachers in different course settings. This strategic approach included what previous research had described in terms of ‘cue-conscious’ (Miller and Parlett, 1974) behaviour in students, describing various ways in which students tried to cope with assessment requirements by probing their teachers for hints about the form and content of upcoming exams.

Over the past 40 years, approaches to studying and learning have become essential components of the conceptualisation of student learning in higher education. From the literature, it is clear that although students may prefer a certain approach to studying, approaches are in fact fairly flexible and context sensitive and so cannot be seen as stable characteristics of students. Recent research, however, has indicated that students may harbour underlying thinking dispositions that strongly influence their approaches to studying and have a profound impact on the academic understanding achieved in the course of studying at university (Entwistle and McCune, 2009; cf. Perkins and Ritchhart, 2004). However, although the idea of thinking dispositions indicates that there is a certain stability in students’ ways of approaching academic tasks, the actual approaches that students adopt in relation to a particular task in a particular learning environment is essentially dependent on those students’ intentions:

Students adopting a surface approach see the task as no more than second-guessing the examiner, they decide what type of questions they expect and then trawl through the article looking for likely questions. They then memorize just those pieces of information and are total floored by any question that demands an understanding of what they have read. Students adopting a deep approach set about the task with the intention of understanding it for themselves which, for course, makes it much more likely that they will grasp the author’s meaning. (Entwistle, 2009: 33)

Conceptual framework

The intentions linked to the different approaches that students adopt in a particular learning environment can be seen as related to personal motives for studying which steer the learning activity into either rote learning or meaningful learning (see for example Ausubel et al., 1978). What makes a deep approach to learning of specific interest to the present research is the strong connection between intentions to understand for oneself and the profound quality of understanding that usually flows from the learning activities fuelled by such intentions. In its most developed form, a deep approach to learning opens up for an academic understanding of topics presented in the teaching, characterised by a broad, integrative way of thinking about topics – a way of thinking that draws on explanatory frameworks used within a particular discipline or professional area and includes a recognition of how evidence is being used to reach conclusions (Entwistle, 2009).

Deep approaches to studying and learning may thus enable the development of a personal understanding that in turn can encourage the development of qualities in students’ ways of thinking that may relate to the qualities described earlier in terms of cosmopolitan learning (Rizvi, 2009). It is against this conceptual background that the present research should be seen. To recap, the aim of the present study was to explore Swedish student teachers’ experiences of learning with a focus on how students describe their ways of thinking about their own learning in relation to their future professional role as teachers.

Data collection

Data were collected through qualitative interviews with a small sample of student teachers at two Swedish universities. These universities were selected on the basis of providing differences in the framing of the teacher education programmes offered. One of the universities was a younger and smaller establishment which had a specific and explicit profile geared towards multiculturalism, whereas the other university was a large educational institution providing a broad spectrum of courses within many different subject areas. Thirty student teachers writing their final exam papers were invited to participate in an interview. Fourteen of them (three men and 11 women) volunteered for an individual interview exploring the students’ experiences of studying and learning. The interviews were conversational in style, inviting the students to talk in general about their experiences of studying to become teachers. But students were also prompted specifically to address issues concerning what they saw as being important knowledge for a teacher to develop, and to reflect on their own experiences of learning and understanding in the course of studying to become a professional teacher. The interviews lasted between 30 and 70 minutes (50 minutes on average) and were audio-recorded and later transcribed in full.

Data analysis

The analysis of data drew on the SAL framework described earlier, focusing specifically on how students described their experiences of studying and learning as student teachers. In particular, and linking to current cosmopolitan ideas for learning in teacher education, the analysis sought to identify instances of the students’ descriptions that clearly indicated whether cosmopolitanism had been made an explicit topic of study in the degree courses taken by the students. Apart from trying to identify such explicit links to cosmopolitan ideas brought up in the teaching, the analysis also explored how the ways in which students reflected on their own future professional role as teachers could potentially be seen as aspects of cosmopolitan ways of thinking around the role of the teacher. To briefly describe the procedure of the analysis, the transcripts were read through several times, and sections addressing the topic areas above were marked. These sections were subsequently analysed in detail and examples were selected illustrating the main findings; in what follows, illustrative examples from the analysis will be presented. It should be noted that these examples, while foregrounding the main points emerging from the analysis, are not exhaustive of the entire variation of students’ experiences present in the data. The examples should nevertheless serve to invite reflection on topics of specific interest to this research concerning links between cosmopolitan visions for learning in teacher education and the students’ actual experiences of learning in teacher education.

Findings

Looking at the interviews, from the students’ ways of describing their experiences of studying and learning in the two teacher education settings, it was clear that the notion of cosmopolitanism had not been made an explicit topic of study in their teacher education programme. None of the students mentioned cosmopolitanism, nor – when explicitly asked whether they had come across this notion in their teacher education – recognised the term or could describe what it meant. However, while this connection to the term cosmopolitanism was not openly recognised by students, it became clear – from the analysis of how students described their own views of teaching and of the teacher’s professional role – that the experiences they had gained from studying and working as student teachers in school had prompted reflection on aspects that went well beyond understanding facts within particular subject areas. In particular, students reflected on the importance of relating to learners’ experiences to be able to enter into a dialogue with the learners and understand their perspectives. As one of the student teachers explained:

[the teacher’s role] is about facilitating rather than teaching … that you’re there and try to get [learners] to ask relevant questions themselves. [it’s important to] create a teaching environment that makes this possible [---] you have to be sensitive to … and use what students bring with them and it’s also about being a co-investigator … that you’re present and let yourself be fascinated together with the children.

Being able to relate to students and understand their perspectives was indeed considered to be a crucial aspect of being a professional teacher. Several of the student teachers underscored the importance of holding back their own ambition to give students the correct answer and actively refrain from stepping in to correct and regulate the learning process. But at the same time, student teachers also underscored the importance of the teacher having a clear idea of why teaching activities organised in school are organised in a certain way:

I’m here because I want them [the students] to be able to express what they know beforehand and have an influence on their education … [for instance] how we investigate water this time … what is this particular group in this particular class interested in? It doesn’t have to be the same thing that I taught the year before [---]. I must ask myself why am I doing this? It may be because I want to get at a particular aspect [of the topic] … because I want to give them an opportunity to talk about this and to argue for their ideas … or I want them to be able to perform this … not just read from a paper … that they get to present their ideas in the way they want to the rest of the class.

In addressing this importance of being sensitive to learners’ needs to develop their own ideas around the topics studied, the interviewees did so in relation to a more overarching recognition of the importance to develop the ability to communicate with others:

[It’s important] that students can develop a communicative ability to present and argue for their ideas … that they’re able to verbalise ‘how I understand something’ but also be able to listen to how you understand this … and think: ‘we think differently – that’s interesting!’ You have to start to practise these [communicative skills] early on. Knowledge nowadays can be understood in many different ways … it’s more important to know how to argue for your [own understanding] … how I can argue for why I think this is the case.

In particular, it was in relation to experiences gained when working as pre-service teachers in schools that the student teachers reflected on these matters: relating to learners’ experiences and the teacher’s responsibility to encourage learners to formulate their own ideas and argue for these ideas. One of the interviewees reflected on her own teaching approach in relation to an example drawn from a particular occasion when she had acted as a pre-service teacher at preschool:

Very often they [the learners] have an idea of why they think the way they think … just to give an example. A boy was thinking about air and whether air has weight or not and who thought that if you drop two balloons — one with air and one without air — the one with air had negative weight because the balloon with air drops more slowly than the empty balloon. And so that gave you a natural opening to talking to him about air resistance and saying that ‘in ancient times those who were the most knowledgeable in the world had exactly the same idea as you!’ and sort of approach it from [the learners’] viewpoint … see the value of their thinking, and try to make them interested in learning more.

Several of the student teachers gave similar examples of ways in which they tried to actively relate to learners’ experiences and explicitly reflect on personal ideas expressed by the learners in light of more conventional ways of reasoning, so that the learners themselves might discover that there is a connection between their personal views and broader ways of knowing, within particular disciplines.

Discussion

The present study, in illustrating how a small sample of students describes their own experiences of studying and learning to become teachers, points to a certain potential for learning worth reflecting on in view of current cosmopolitan visions for teacher education. In particular, it is the communicative and reflective aspects that stand out as important in the students’ descriptions of their personal views of teaching, and it is interesting to consider these in relation to cosmopolitan views of learning in teacher education. While cosmopolitanism as a notion may not be familiar to the student teachers, the ways in which they describe their own future professional role as teachers, drawing on experiences from working as pre-service teachers at school, reveal an interesting reflective dimension addressing both the importance of relating to learners’ perspectives on topics brought to the fore in the teaching and of entering into a dialogue with learners in order to encourage the formulation of personal ideas and arguments in support of these ideas. Another interesting aspect worth mentioning is the explicit recognition in the students’ description of the importance of sparking learners’ interest in engaging with differing viewpoints, and the potential of exploring such differences in the process of learning by engaging in training communicative skills (‘[…] be able to listen to how you understand this … and think: ‘we think differently – that’s interesting!’). Arguably, such an approach to teaching – that emphasises both relational and dialogic aspects of the teacher’s work – has the potential to open up a context for critical reflection that may enable cosmopolitan aspects to be foregrounded in the process of learning to become a teacher within a teacher education programme. Moreover, in their reflections of what is involved in becoming and being a teacher in school, students also, to some extent, did make connections to historical circumstances and arguments for certain approaches to teaching a particular subject, for instance, mathematics (“[…] that gave you a natural opening to talking to him about air resistance and saying that ‘in ancient times those who were the most knowledgeable in the world had exactly the same idea as you!’”). However, these historical connections were rather rare in the students’ descriptions, and in most cases such explicit historical referencing did not occur at all. Given the emphasis put on the importance of reflecting on one’s own perspective in relation to other people’s ways of thinking, and so being able to relate to students and engage in a learning dialogue, this relative lack of historicity seems surprising since it clearly involves similar qualities of being able to relate to historical circumstances and understand historical events in relation to the historical conditions that shaped them.

However, Roth (this issue), in analysing the extent to which literature that takes an explicit cosmopolitan outlook is used in compulsory courses at seven different teacher education programmes in Sweden – including two of the programmes from which the students in the present study were selected – concludes that such literature, despite the increasing emphasis being placed on the importance of cosmopolitan education in policy documents and in the philosophical discourse on education, is largely absent in these programmes. This scarcity of systematic and explicit reference to cosmopolitan perspectives obviously makes it difficult for student teachers to engage with cosmopolitan ideas beyond the individual, local and national to explore, in cosmopolitan terms, the potential of the plurality of perspectives brought on by different spheres present on the global arena of thought. This in turn may hamper students’ potential in preparing for, in Barnett’s words, ‘an unknown future’ (Barnett, 2004, cf. Perkins, 2010). This lack of explicit reference to cosmopolitan ideas in the repertoire of literature that students are expected to engage with in the course of studying to become teachers may partly explain why students were so unfamiliar with cosmopolitanism as an idea, and may perhaps also explain the relative lack of historical arguments and references in their reflections on what is involved in becoming and being a teacher in school.

Concluding remarks

Nevertheless, looking at the interviews and linking them more broadly to research on student learning in higher education, it is quite evident from the student teachers’ ways of describing their own views of teaching and the teacher’s professional role that the approaches adopted by the student teachers to the educational challenge of becoming a teacher can be characterised as deep in terms of the explicit emphasis on the importance of relating to and understanding learners’ experiences and needs in particular educational settings (Entwistle, 2009). Deep approaches to learning are normally characterised by students’ intentions to seek meaning and understand for themselves in relation to a particular learning task that students are confronted with in a particular learning environment (Marton and Säljö, 1976a, 1976b, 1997). However, recent research (Entwistle and McCune; 2009, 2013; see also McCune and Entwistle, 2011) suggests that adopting a deep approach may also carry students’ learning processes well beyond the immediate scope of coping with academic tasks and solving problems, and may in fact contribute to forming a disposition to understand for oneself that can further strengthen the development of a deep conceptual understanding and cater for powerful personal learning experiences that may have a significant impact on students’ outlook on and approaches to life. Indeed, and in view of the empirical examples presented here, adopting a deep approach to the broader project of developing as a professional teacher may potentially serve to open up a pathway for developing not only specific academic understandings of topics presented within particular subject areas foregrounded in the teacher programme, but also of more general ways of thinking around and practising their future teaching profession that will enable student teachers to engage in thoughtful reflection on their own viewpoints in relation to students’ beliefs and experiences as learners in school. For student teachers, in the short run fostering a disposition to understand for oneself (McCune and Entwistle, 2011) and engaging in reflexive ways of thinking around teaching and the teacher’s role will most likely enhance their experiences of learning and cater for deep and personal encounters with knowledge (Barnett, 2009; Entwistle and McCune, 2013). In the long run, it may have a critical impact on the way student teachers relate to and communicate with learners in school and find ways to create a positive learning climate for students – a climate that enables both teachers and students to engage in mutual, thoughtful and critical reflection on topics brought to the fore in the teaching.

However, fostering deep approaches to studying and learning in teacher education, as well as a disposition to understand for oneself, is not itself enough to provide a basis for realising cosmopolitan visions for higher education, as touched on by Barnett (2004, 2009), and explicitly expressed by Rizvi (2009), Hansen (2010, 2011) and Roth (this issue). Such a venture presumably requires going beyond the disciplinary boundaries of teaching and learning in a particular setting and establishing a cosmopolitanised target for students’ understanding involving ways of thinking that encourage students to engage with topics from a certain viewpoint. This will promote the criticality, historicity, relationality, dialogicity and reflexivity that may potentially lead to the openness needed to successfully cope with the unknown challenges facing future teachers in an increasingly globalised and supercomplex world.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author gratefully acknowledges the valuable input provided by the team members involved in the research project Teaching students to become cosmopolitan citizens? Prospects and challenges for Swedish teacher education: Professor Klas Roth, Dr. Niclas Rönnström and Associate Professor Eva Erman. Thanks must also go to Professor Noel Entwistle, Drs Anna Forsell and Adrian Thomasson and Ms Anki Bengtsson, and to colleagues within the Higher Education Seminar at the Department of Education, Stockholm University, for constructive feedback on earlier drafts of this paper. Finally, the author also wishes to thank Ms Ingrid Andersson and Ms Victoria Gustafsson for their professional assistance in collecting interview data for the present study.

Funding

This research has been carried out within the research project Teaching students to become cosmopolitan citizens? Prospects and challenges for Swedish teacher education, and is financed by the Swedish Research Council. Professor Klas Roth is the scientific leader.

Max Scheja is Professor of Higher Education at Stockholm University. His research and teaching interests focus on how university students develop their academic understanding in relation to how they perceive their teaching-learning environment as a whole. He has directed several research projects funded by the Swedish Research Council and currently serves on the Expert Panel for the Humanities and Social Sciences at the Swedish Foundation for International Cooperation and Research in Higher Education. He has been a Senior Research Fellow and Acting Director of The Centre for Cognition Understanding and Learning at the Karolinska Institutet. He has also been a Visiting Research Worker at the University of Edinburgh in the UK.

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