Towards a teacher education for the Anthropocene

This chapter is co-written by a team of experienced pre-service teacher educators in one university in the UK (at the time of writing). Together, we are re-envisioning what it means to be teacher educators in a time of increasing global connectedness and apparent impending global crises. We look to the future of sustainability education in relation to working with pre-service teachers and consider potential futures and opportunities for our practice, resisting the temptation to offer sets of skills as a desired ‘end’ for teacher education. Rather, this chapter exemplifies the principle of engaging with the idea of the Anthropocene as a mechanism to shift our teacher education practice towards a deeper entanglement with sustainability, starting from a subject perspective. We use history, science and mathematics as examples here but challenges apply equally to the contributions and perspectives of other subjects. The concept of the Anthropocene provides a trigger for us, as professionals, to open ourselves to re-examining our practice of teacher education. We conclude that a future of uncertainty and crisis calls for open-ness to the new and re-examination of the present to become a continual process, part of our way of being in the world as educators.