How do the stakeholders in teacher education understand professional diversity competency, professional research & development competency and professional digital competency? analysed in a knowledge-typology perspective.

Teacher educators (TEs), student teachers (STs) and practice teachers (PTs) can be expected to emphasise various types of knowledge when reflecting on teacher education (Ben-Peretz, 2011; Puustinen et al., 2018). A previously developed typology refers e.g. to modes of knowledge like theory or empirical evidence arguing that both modes can be either local, experience-based, or more global (authors 2020a; 2020b). STs can, according to McGarr et al. (2017), be expected to have strong emotions related to theory, and tensions in the meeting between STs, TEs and PTs when referring to theory have been shown (Kalgraf & Lindhart, 2018).
The aim of the study is to compare and contrast stakeholders’ reflections on teacher knowledge and competencies. The research design is a mixed methods QUAL-quan design (Creswell & Clark, 2018). STs have in a survey answered the question: “What is relevant diversity [research & development; digital] competencies for teachers? Data from two cohorts is included. The first cohort spring 2020, where also focus-group interviews were made with STs, TEs and PTs. The second cohort august 2020. For cohort 1, n=128, the answering % for the three items are 36% in professional diversity competence, 16% research & development competence and 20% about professional digital competence. The answering % for cohort 2 is respectively 52%, 33%, 48% (n=116). The open reflections and the interviews were analysed thematically by two researchers developing and refining themes (Braun & Clarke, 2006).
Findings show that STs refer to humanistic values and the student-teacher relation or tolerance to religious background when reflecting on professional diversity competence. Opposite, professional digital competence is mainly referred to in terms of an effective teacher proficient in using specific tools. Research & development competencies is for example reflected in terms of a reflective teacher using new evidence to back practice.
Hence, their appear to be differences in relation to what Menter et al. (2010) call paradigms: the effective teacher, the reflective teacher, the enquiring teacher and the transformative teacher, also in the reflections from the same ST.
The interviews reveal additional differences comparing STs with TEs and PTs.
TEs primarily use global theory (authors, 2020a; 2020b) in their argumentation while student teachers and practice teachers mainly refer to local evidence and experiences. `Research´ is by all groups implicitly or explicitly referred to research articles, not so much to practitioner inquiries. Implications points to educational benefits from explicitly addressing a knowledge typology in teacher education.