**3. Research site and methods**

In connection with two undergraduate courses entitled "Inclusive Education" and "Teaching Practicum," the current study was conducted at a multidisciplinary research university within the Primary School Teacher Education (PSTE) program in Finland. All participants were enrolled in both courses. The participants were 115 pre-service teachers who were completing their teacher qualification for primary school. The "Inclusive Education" course focused on discussing the theoretical underpinnings of student diversity (such as language, abilities, background, religion, and gender) and the current instructional support system as a means of enhancing inclusive school culture. The students were encouraged to work in small teams to construct a shared understanding and build new ideas of how to enhance inclusion in daily school curriculum.

In addition, the course included a week-long field experiment that asked students to visit one school community and find out how the inclusion principle was implemented in accordance with the NCC [9]. They were encouraged to observe the school community and classroom practices, conduct interviews with the in-service teachers, special needs teachers, school principals, and welfare staff, take part in teacher meetings, and so forth. The students also wrote reflective journals based on the coursework and field experiments. They were challenged to express their beliefs, attentions, and values on what had caught their attention relating to the ongoing reform.

The data from the "Teaching Practicum" were collected through the pre-service teachers' written narrative reflections, which allowed them to examine their lived experiences, biases, and assumptions about teaching. These two types of writings provided a window through which to understand the essence of the pre-service experience of teaching in inclusive settings. The data set thus comprised 230 reflective texts written during and after these two courses. Participants were numbered 1–115 with an acronym PRE, which refers to reflective journals, and a different acronym PRAC, which refers to narrative reflections.

Through the content analysis (cf. [28]), it was possible to articulate variations of students' meaning making and varied ways of experiencing and interpreting their curriculum ideologies from the perspective of inclusive reform. The meaning unit was determined as either a complete description of an individual's lived experience or a brief notional statement called an "episode." Thereafter, I divided the episodes into topics, which consisted of repetitive reflections that emerged through several readings of the data. The topics were then classified and reduced into themes. Finally, six main themes emerged to describe the pre-service teachers' belief stances toward inclusive education (reported elsewhere). However, in this chapter, I do not follow the study analysis as such but rather examine the data from the perspective of thinking with theory [29], which method uses the data to think with, and use theory to think about the data. I interpreted the data through the lens of Schiro's [20, 21] framework by connecting the data and the curriculum ideologies to each other from the perspective of inclusive reform.

The analysis of thinking with theory revealed two main tensions between pre-service teachers' curriculum ideologies [20], namely "knowledge versus experience" between the scholar academic and learner-centered ideology and the "adoption versus reconstruction" between the social efficiency and social reconstruction ideology. I picked crucial episodes that serve as examples of how the pre-service teachers interpreted the inclusive reform and what types of curriculum ideology they reflect. In this way, I was able to highlight the teachers' belief stances and prerequisites for working in inclusive settings and ways to interpret the NCC's [9] inclusive agenda.
