26 © 2018 The authors and IJLTER.ORG. All rights reserved. International Journal of Learning, Teaching and Educational Research Vol. 17, No. 7, pp. 26-42, July 2018 https://doi.org/10.26803/ijlter.17.7.2 Norwegian Teacher Educators‟ Attentiveness to Democracy and their Practices Heidi Biseth University of South-Eastern Norway Susan Catherine Lyden University of South-Eastern Norway Abstract. The aim of the study is to gain insight into teacher educators‟ attentiveness to democracy, i.e. how they understand democracy and how they describe their own practices of instilling democratic competencies and values in pre-service teachers. Through using a questionnaire modified from the Global Doing Democracy Research Project, we elicited responses from 153 respondents. The material was analysed using “thin” versus “thick” notions of democracy and three categories of citizenship. The results of this study indicate that teacher educators primarily understand democracy as a societal structure, a way of politically organizing a society in which elections are a core activity. Hence, their practice reflects this somewhat thin understanding of democracy. Overwhelmingly, they perceive the two dominant ways of promoting democracy to be to encourage students to take part in formal participatory structures and to engage students in discussions and debates within the classroom. Keywords: democracy and education; citizenship education; democratic competencies; democracy in teacher education. 1. Introduction Based on the results from the IEA International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS) 2009 (Fjeldstad et al., 2010) Norwegian teenagers display a relatively high knowledge and understanding of democracy compared to their peers in other countries. The ICCS study was repeated in 2016 and results indicate an even sounder knowledge base and understanding of democracy among the Norwegian student population (Huang et al., 2017). The performance of Norwegian students in both ICCS 2009 and 2016 is considered, among other things, a testament to the Norwegian school system and its teachers. In order to deduce that Norwegian teacher educators also contribute here, we need to establish to what degree they provide a teacher education endorsing democratic knowledge, attitudes and skills among teachers-to-be.