Over the last decades, the importance of transnational organisations and associations like the OECD and EU has increased significantly in the making of educational policy (Robertson & Dale, 2015; Wahlström & Sundberg, 2017). In the changing global landscape of education, ideas, policies and reforms ’travel’ or are ’borrowed’ between countries (Steiner-Khamsi, 2010; cf. Alexiadou, 2014). One of the influential trends that can be identified is a strong emphasis on teacher quality and accountability rooted in a neo-liberal discourse, where educational success and world-class knowledge performance is directly linked to the quality of teachers and teacher education (Cochran-Smith & Villegas, 2015; Smith, 2012). Parallel to this, there is an emphasis on standards where learning outcomes and a focus on general competences have become a central part of current education policy (Young, 2010). A topical issue in the discussion about teacher education is the relation between school practice and academic research (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999; Darling-Hammond, 2006). Over time, different discourses of teacher professionalism have developed, stressing either practical teacher training for forwarding functional competence or emphasising continuous intellectual learning and research as key components of teachers’ professional competence (Sachs, 2016). In a study on the meaning of research-based teacher education in Sweden, we could conclude that teacher education in general is a strongly framed professional education with a relatively weak and adapted research base. Different meaning potentials are made available to the students and shape their pedagogic identities (Alvunger & Wahlström, 2017). Considering the historical, cultural and political relations between the Nordic countries, it is likely to assume that there are convergences – but of course also divergences – between the teacher educations in the different countries. Drawing on a theoretical framework of four different typologies of teacher professionalism outlined by Sachs (2016), the aim with this paper is to explore and compare the discourse of research-based teacher education in Sweden and Finland over the last 20 years. The empirical material for the study is research publications on teacher education in the two countries from around the year 2000. The comparative analysis is focused on underlying assumptions and different emphases of knowledge regarding research-based teacher education. From Sachs’ (2016) typologies of ‘controlled professionalism’, ‘co-operative professionalism’, ‘professionalism as performance’ and ‘activist professionalism’ a related queston is what approaches to teacher professionalism that emerge from the discourses of research-based teacher education?