Arctic Inclusive Teacher Education - dream or reality?

Arctic inclusive teacher education – dream or reality?
We will discuss the Arctic teacher education programme at the University of Lapland. There is a need for teachers who are familiar with inclusive education in the Arctic area, and education must be locally bounded and culturally relevant. This requires educating reflective practitioners who consciously construct professional knowledge and practice through inquiry, observation, documentation, analysis and reflection in inclusive learning contexts. At the University of Lapland, inclusive education is the thread running through the research-based teacher education programme. In Finland, all teachers complete a master’s degree in teacher education studies. When graduating, all teachers need to have attitudinal and educational resources to engage diverse learners from different cultural backgrounds. They also need to be able to recognize pupils’ individual needs and prerequisites and must be able to support individual and collaborative learning processes. On the grounds of our research results, we perceived that teachers’ socio-emotional competences may enhance pupils’ learning outcomes, participation and welfare at school. We suggest that student teachers’ learning processes need to touch the student teachers emotionally and that they need to develop socio-emotional competences. As Korthagen (2017) notes, student teachers’ learning improves through possibilities to combine theory, practice and person. We will discuss what adding the fourth element (person) to our current teacher education model, which consists of the integration of theory, practice and research, would mean for our teacher education programme.
Keywords: teacher education, inclusive education, socio-emotional competences