The tension in turkish teacher education: Conflict and controversy during the transformation from an academic approach to a professional approach

Most of the reforms, which have been undertaken in the last 30 years in the Turkish educational system, are about teacher education. When we examine the teacher education curriculum from the perspective of these reforms, it has been observed that there is a controversy between the academic and professional approaches used in these curricula. While the reforms undertaken in 1982 and 1997 were in favor of the academic approach, the latest reform undertaken in 2006 was made to strengthen the professional aspects of teacher education curriculum. In this paper, Turkish teacher education reforms are introduced in the light of the professional and the academic approaches, which have always been the topic of discussions about teacher education.