Scandinavian Approaches to Continuing Science Teacher Education: What Can We Learn from an International Literature Review?

The importance of continuing science teacher education is receiving increasing political awareness in Scandinavian countries recent years. This is due to a declining enrollment at science education studies. Evaluations investigating this tendency show that Danish science teachers experience the need for further skills and competencies to successfully engage and further motivate their students (Rambøll, 2018). The Danish Academy of Natural Sciences (NAFA) is therefore exploring new designs of continuing education programs. However, maybe
new education programs should not be inspired purely by their local contexts and usual sources of knowledge, maybe we should also look towards other cultures and practices of continuing education for new insights and inspiration? This led us to carry out a literature review focusing on mapping international practices and programs of continuing education for science teachers. The strategy has been to investigate how different characteristics of programs in other cultures can be used to further advance Scandinavian approaches to continuing science teacher education within the structure of the Scandinavian school system and the existing culture of learning and teaching. The preliminary findings suggest that teachers across the world especially benefit from education programs with the ability to adapt to the situated context, school system and the local team culture. Implementation and sustainable
organizational learning regarding continuing education seems to rely on invested time, clear communication strategies, support from management and, above all, it needs to make sense in the everyday practice of the science teachers. These findings and using them to develop new strategies of continuing science education in a Scandinavian context are what we look forward to presenting and discussing at the conference.