Teachers are expected to be able to work professionally in complex and differential circumstances, requiring a multidisciplinary and diversified curriculum that challenges the coherence of teacher education. Fragmentation, isolated courses, and perceived boundaries between campus and school-related studies are likely to counteract coherence and thus thequality of teacher education. On the contrary, connectedness within and between courses as well as relatively to strong relations to professional practices have been regarded as principles for improving quality (Canrinus, Bergem, Klette, and Hammerness, 2017; Hammerness, 2006; Hudson, 2017).Coherence may be conceptual and/or contextual (Muller, 2009). The former can be referred to verticality, principles of cumulative knowledge building, and how theories are combined and abstracted in critical practice. Contextual coherence, on the other hand, can be referred to horizontal connections, embedded in ongoing practices related to daily knowledge structures without any systematically expressed strategy. This paper aims at exploring how conceptual and contextualcoherence are (a) exposed in policy documents at different arenas of teacher education, and (b) perceived by teacher educators and students in practice. The governmental regulations of teacher education in Sweden, together with evaluating studies (Hansén & Wikman, 2016, 2017; Lilliedahl, 2017), constitute the empirical base of the study. In this presentation, we focus on the educational core courses common to diverse programs of teacher education in Sweden.Findings indicate that the administrative organization and universities’ different emphases concerning theoretical focus may affect conceptual coherence and the relative status of curricular content. Regarding contextual coherence, students complained that subject matter studies were weakly linked to educational themes, and the extrinsic relations to classroom practice were experienced as weak. The latter addresses a cracking issue in the design of teacher education nationally as well as in Europe.