ABSTRACT
Teacher education (TE) in Norway is nationally mandated and subject to much political attention because education is an important social and cultural phenomenon with a significant place in policy and everyday life. A main purpose of the latest TE reform implemented in 2017 is to raise the status and professionalism of teachers. The ambition of the Norwegian government is to permanently strengthen the teaching profession, thereby strengthening the quality of schooling overall by introducing a five-year master's degree as a requirement for all newly qualified teachers in primary and secondary school. This chapter describes the Norwegian TE context of today and the national requirements for the five-year integrated master programs for primary and secondary schools. To give the reader a background understanding of the various innovations in our TE programs presented in Chapters 4–16, we exemplify how the various programs are organized and structured at UiT and UiO.
