The development of community competence in the teacher education curriculum

Teachers are expected to frequently collaborate within teacher communities in schools. This requires teacher education to prepare student teachers by developing the necessary community competence. The present study empirically investigates the extent to which teacher education programmes pay attention to and aim to stimulate the development of community competence in the intended curriculum, the implemented curriculum and the attained curriculum. Various types of data are gathered and analysed in respect of these three curriculum representations. It appears that community competence is weakly conceptualised in the intended curriculum. In the implemented, and especially the attained curriculum, this results in no systematic and explicit practice in terms of the development of community competence. © 2013 Association for Teacher Education in Europe.