Practice and Academic Knowledge Colliding in Teacher Education

The aim of the paper is to discuss and problematize the relation between knowledge generated within the framework of preschool practice, and academic knowledge about the same practice. Two cases where students produced under- and post graduate theses were analyzed. In both cases the students were expected to re-contextualize their professional experiences and knowledge into valid academic knowledge. Bernstein’s (1971, 2000) concepts of classification and framing of knowledge and his distinctions between horizontal and vertical knowledge were used in order to analyze the regulation of educational knowledge. The result shows that horizontal and vertical knowledge ultimately did not meet in the analyzed cases; instead, the two different discourses formed competing and colliding frameworks