Responsibilities and practices of mathematics teacher educators for sustainable futures: the case of a communal mathematics teacher education

The world has entered a new climatic regime, in which past regularities no longer hold. We are likely heading into several decades in which drought, floods, harvest failure and all the political and social upheaval these will cause become the norm. In such a context, this paper asks, what are the responsibilities and practices of mathematics teacher educators in initial teacher education contexts? We begin by reviewing past research and identify themes which include the importance of critical reflection. We then report on data from narrative interviews with nine such mathematics teacher educators in the UK about their practices relating to sustainable futures. The findings indicate a strong desire to bring issues of climate justice into initial teacher education programmes and a range of systemic barriers to this happening, including time and curriculum constraints. We then move to offering the detail of one example of an initial teacher education programme, which sets out to develop a communal mathematics teacher education, as relevant to supporting teachers in the face of issues such as climate change. We argue for the salience of the notions: educating awareness, deliberate analysis and subordinating teaching (of teachers) to learning (of teachers).