The Ministry of Education accepted in June 2012 a revised curriculum for Norwegian early childhood teacher education. From an international perspective the Bologna declaration is one of the shareholders for ways of becoming a professional preschool pedagogue in Norway/Europe. In this paper I want to unpack what the objective of being “research-based” teacher education could be, which is one of three educational goals in the curriculum. I will investigate how “research-based” might be “represented”, which imply how research-based is written forward in official documents (Ny Forskrift for barnehagelærerutdanningen, 2012), along with three research-overviews reports published over a period of ten years.
When the objective for a revised curriculum for early childhood teacher education emphasizes research as a base, I want to elaborate on this in connection of what sort of research-based education the curriculum produce. The educational location in Norway is connected internationally to neo-liberal thinking (Ball, 2012), which creates specific European/Scandinavian standards and objectives for research. Travelling and transnational aspect of research methodology is here crucial to investigate. I will examine epistemological tendencies for early childhood educational research in Norway entangled with international trends (Fenwick & Edwards, 2010). I will examine dominant discourses in research to identify national and international methodological tendencies in ECEC.