Current Issues and New Trends in Teacher Education: Navigating Challenges Through Transformative Learning

Teacher education may have entered one of the most turbulent and consequential periods in its history. Global crises, rapid digitization, cultural diversity, widening inequities, and shifting societal expectations have reshaped what it means to become and remain a teacher. This edited volume brings these challenges into sharp focus by positioning transformative learning as the unifying framework of the volume, linking identity, ethics, sustainability, technology, methodology, and curriculum and instruction through a shared focus on how teachers’ meaning-making structures are disrupted, examined, and reconstituted in response to contemporary educational challenges.

The book examines seven interconnected domains that define the future of teacher education. Section I reframes teacher preparation and development through transformative learning, emphasizing identity, epistemic change, critical reflection, and dialogic pedagogy. Section II foregrounds the moral and relational dimensions of teaching, exploring ethics, peace education, and inclusive pedagogy as essential foundations for equitable and caring classrooms. Section III expands this ethical project into the environmental sphere, highlighting sustainability, eco-pedagogy, and global citizenship as urgent competencies for teachers navigating the challenges and meeting the demands of the current arena. Responding to the accelerating pace of technological and methodological change, Section IV integrates the rise of digitization and the analysis of AI-supported pedagogy, datafication, digital assessment literacy, and simulation-based learning in teacher education, while Section V presents the diversification of research methodologies, including narrative inquiry, autoethnography, self-study, design-based research, digital ethnography, mixed methods, and participatory approaches. Section VI addresses systemic and contextual pressures, including teacher burnout, post-pandemic shifts, global teacher shortages, and rapidly evolving policy landscapes, offering forward-looking perspectives on how teacher education programs must be restructured to support reflective, resilient, and ethically grounded practitioners. Finally, Section VII brings these discussions together by focusing explicitly on curriculum and instruction, examining how transformative learning, ethical commitments, sustainability concerns, and digital innovations are translated into coherent curricular designs and instructional practices.

By bridging philosophical foundations, empirical insights, and practical implications, this volume offers teacher educators, policymakers, and researchers a roadmap for navigating the complexities of contemporary teacher education and development while cultivating transformative, compassionate, and future-ready professionals.