Reimagining initial teacher education: critical perspectives and hopeful futures

The world is facing a range of complex and interconnected challenges, including climate change, political instability, wars and conflict, widening inequalities, and rapid environmental degradation. Education is often seen as a means of helping young people make sense of the world and consider how they might respond to these and other emerging challenges. Thus, it is not surprising that education is frequently positioned as part of the ‘solution’ to pressing issues such as educational inequity (Lampert et al., 2024), social exclusion (Dadvand, 2024), declining democratic participation, and environmental degradation (Bryan, 2022). However, as Apple (2015) cautions, education does not function independently of the broader structures of power, ideology, and economic interests that shape it. While schooling can create spaces for critical engagement and possibility, it is also constrained by dominant, and increasingly neoliberal and neoconservative, agendas that can limit its potential.