Läraruppdragets egenart och rollmodeller : kreativitetsregimer i hybridmoderniteten

What does learning to become a professional mean and how can the scientific study of various forms of professional education help those institutions that educate teachers understand better what becoming a professional teacher means in contemporary Swedish society? In this inauguration lecture as new professor of education at Malmo University, I argue that the traditional understanding of what it means to enter a profession that we find in the subdiscipline “the sociology of professions,” has had an unfortunate tendency to overestimate the importance of scientifically grounded knowledge and underestimate other forms of relevant knowledge and experience. In order to conceptualize such an alternative view of analyzing professional education and learning, I suggest the concepts of “creativity regimes” and “hybrid modernity.” Whereas the former concept helps us to clarify how professional education can help students to cope with new situations in a creative manner within their own profession, the concept of hybrid modernity suggests that the professional education of teachers can also gain from studying other types of professional education, as this could broaden the creative competence of future teachers. What I am suggesting is thus that rather than trying to prepare teachers for a career as researchers – which represents a particular creativity regime where critique is the dominant norm in which students are professionally socialized – the education of teachers should be organized around the dominant norm of the pedagogical creativity regime, which is dialogue. Teaching has its own role expectations, norms and identity, but in a society which is increasingly hybridized, being inspired by other models is both a virtue and necessity This role-modeling should not drive out the core competence of teaching but rather supplement it