現代フィンランド教員養成の起源

Abstract

Expanding the period of teacher education from a Bachelor’s degree to a Master’s degree is now being planned in Japan. Teacher education in Finland is famous for the requirement of a Master’s degree not only for secondary school teachers, but also for elementary school teachers. This tradition was started more than 30 years ago. Furthermore, Finnish teacher education is called “research-based” teacher education; the teaching practice is also seen as an opportunity to practice research. We must know why such features of Finnish teacher education have occurred because teacher education is based on the contexts of one’s own country. To explore the contexts of Finnish teacher education is the purpose of this paper. Especially, it focuses on the 1970s because many educational reforms took place in Finland at that time. A Master’s degree is considered as the basic degree of graduation from universities because of the reform in higher education. One reason for this is that Finnish higher education had been infl uenced by the German Democratic Republic. The discipline of education in Finland has been developed with teacher education, so didactics is the most important sub discipline of education there. This is why teacher education in Finland has a “research-based” character.