Synergizing Innovative Practices in Teacher Education for Sustainable Learning and Living to Meet the Local and Global Challenges

Abstract

Sustainable development is achievable through the concerted efforts to ensure economic, social, and material advancement for the present generation while preserving the rights of future generations to survive. The UN SDG seeks to ensure a high-quality living environment for all individuals by utilizing human enterprises, thereby fostering sustainable economic, social, and technological practices for the evolutionary and developmental progress of humanity. Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) is a pedagogical approach that prepares individuals to make informed choices and undertake actions that promote sustainable utilization of resources for the present and future as well as adopting anthropocentrism. Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) is essential to quality education and is pursued at all educational levels. Teacher and teacher development is having a crucial role in the dynamics of ESD for moving towards SDGs. In the present techno-driven, ephemeral, socio-economic, and cultural landscape where the educational paradigm is moving from a pedagogical to a cybergogical approach, teachers' roles have to be reframed to equip the learners to meet the changing demands of the 21st century. At present, the curriculum is evolving to a Universal Design System with multiple approaches from a site-bound axiom. It is highly essential to probe into the sustainability of the system of teacher formation and metamorphosis to validate that the teacher education is accountable to accommodate the changing culture of innovation, collaboration, and integration—cultural, disciplinary, and technological.

This study examines current practices prevailing in teacher education at both global and local levels, evaluating their corroboration with sustainability—social, economic, ecological, aspirational, and technological. A pluralistic approach, where there is a mixing of quantitative and qualitative paradigms of research, has been utilized. To delve into the existing practices and developments in teacher education, a rigorous review coupled with content analysis has been used. The compatibility of these practices, along with sustainable conceptualization, was derived by collecting data from a sampled group of teacher educators employing a focus group discussion. The outcomes of these techniques were further corroborated using the derivatives obtained from an interview with a group of experts. The educational landscape of India in the post-globalized, post-pandemic era is moving to a rigorous and dynamic shift, objectifying knowledge as the prime economy. In this context, the study also examines the notion of sustainable education, the NEP 2020 framework for teacher education, and the impediments and the suggestive strategies to overcome the same pertaining to Indian teacher education. It underscores the deficiencies in curriculum transactions and proposes avenues for synergising the varied innovative methodologies to make the teacher education system more sustainable by overcoming its fragilities.