The highly digitalized and media saturated lives of people around the world has engendered the need for media education across every stratum of society. This media landscape has created some unique opportunities as well as challenges, thereby warranting the implementation and integration of media education. Arguably, the best place to begin introducing comprehensive and systematic media education is in the classroom, at the school level, and within the curricular scaffolding of the compulsory education system. Towards this end, The Finnish National Core Curriculum for Basic Education was designed to include media education elements in the form of the transversal competencies of ‘ICT Competence’ and ‘Multiliteracy’. The curriculum requirement for the inclusion and assimilation of media education in comprehensive schools, combined with the aforementioned media landscape which children and youth inhabit, logically entail that teachers in Finland be prepared and equipped to teach about the media as well as with the media. Contrary to this, recent studies have shown that pre-service teachers in Finland do not receive adequate training and education in media education. This study seeks to elucidate this conundrum by investigating the presence of media education in the class teacher education programme at a local university in Finland from the perspective of pre-service teacher students. It will shed light on the understanding of media education among these pre- service teachers, their experiences and challenges with media education, their perceptions regarding their own media education competencies, as well as their needs and opinions relating to media education. In doing so, this study will also explore their willingness and preparedness to incorporate the transversal curricular components of ICT Competence and Multiliteracy into their future classrooms. This thesis is positioned within the theoretical framework of media education theory and conceptualized within the Nordic approach to media education. It will also provide a conceptual model for media education which is based on the Nordic perspective. This is a collective case study employing in-depth qualitative interviews, and is approached through the lens of the interpretivist research paradigm. The findings of the study show that from the perspectives of teacher students, the presence of media education in the curriculum of teacher education is limited, undervalued, invisible, outdated, and shallow, among other things. This study reveals the need for the integration of media education into the teacher education curriculum as well as the need for further research in this area
