The preschool teacher education plays a fundamental role for the preschool teacher profession. When planning and creating a teacher education, several factors affecting the work of preschool teacher educators which need to be taken into consideration. Among these factors are notions about the preschool profession itself, a preschool practice that is characterized by many private actors' economic and political interests (such as ownership, material production, IT systems, etc.) and political governance in the form of policy documents, etc. As part of higher education, the preschool teacher education is also affected by the political governance and the interests and influence of external, private actors regarding the education, the educational structure and regarding research funding. Even the notion of the profession of teacher educators plays an important role.

Previous studies show tensions within teacher education, on the one hand aiming to develop students’ agency and on the other train future teachers that adapt to neoliberal ideals of audit and accountability. 

The presentation is going to focus on the ongoing empirical work and reflections on theoretical concepts of my doctoral project. The aim of the project is to examine how educators construct the student within preschool teacher education. The following questions are asked: What kind of cultural conceptions of the student appear within preschool teacher education? How are these conceptions made and which roles or positions do the educators occupy in relation to different influencing factors? 

This is studied trough critical ethnography, in which observations of educators, in situations where they work with the education and its development (syllabus, course guides and so on), interviews of educators and studies of policy documents are the main empirical materials. Theoretically the study is relying on Habermas concepts ‘communicative action’ and ‘deliberative democracy’ through which I seek to understand the culture in between the professional educators and to deepen the knowledge about which figures of the student that appears. How are the student made and what factors have influence on this making of the student? The critical approach enables me to reveal hegemonic structures or mechanisms and discuss what ought to be instead of just what is.