Expectations, disillusionment and wishes: pre-service teachers’ collective sense-making of teacher education given the current nature of the teaching profession

Teacher turnover and shortages remain pressing global concerns, influenced in part by the characteristics of teacher education and teachers’ satisfaction with its quality. While discussions about pre-service teachers’ perspectives on teacher education are scattered across a multitude of studies in teacher education research, relatively little has explicitly focused on how pre-service teachers make sense of the preparatory role of teacher education. Drawing on group discussions among Finnish pre-service primary school teachers (n = 17) and employing a narrative approach, this study explores pre-service teachers’ collective sense-making of teacher education given the current nature of the teaching profession. The findings present a multivoiced, emplotted narrative that captures pre-service teachers’ expectations, disillusionment, and wishes, while also highlighting that the seeds of teacher attrition may already be planted in teacher education. We conclude that addressing the shortage in the teaching profession requires a reconfiguration of teacher education.