Jordan King

There is a dearth in research on how practicing teachers understand and grapple with whiteness during critical professional development (CPD). To address this, we explored P-12 educators’ sense-making around whiteness as they learned about the theories that underpin Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) during CPD. Utilizing a critical whiteness studies lens, we found that educators recognized the connection between systemic racism and student harm, and both named and avoided naming whiteness as they navigated its influence. Our findings highlight the complexities of how educators engage with whiteness during CPD, revealing both an awareness of systemic racism and its consequences and the challenge of explicitly naming whiteness. We underscore the need for CPD to help educators interrogate and name whiteness, without centering it, and to build teacher capacity to support students of Color. Future research should explore how CPD can sustain these efforts and support educators in developing actionable anti-racist practices.

As students are increasingly confronted by complex social-ecological challenges, such as climate change or social injustice, higher education is compelled to prepare students to navigate these chal...

Teacher Education for Sustainable Development (TESD) is a niche innovation in teacher education that empowers teachers to prepare learners to address global socio-environmental challenges. To advance the diffusion of this niche innovation into general teacher education, this article offers a systematic literature review based on a qualitative analysis of 158 peer-reviewed publications on TESD research. Our results show that TESD research is a growing field characterized by five types of inquiry: designing learning environments, understanding learner attributes, measuring learning outcomes, promoting systems change, and advancing visions for the field. Major innovation potentials of TESD for more general teacher education are its emphasis on the grand socio-environmental challenges of our times, methodologies to engage with knowledge diversity (e.g., inter/transdisciplinarity), and sustainability science learning approaches (e.g., backcasting). We suggest that future work builds from this review to strengthen links between teacher education and TESD in enhancing quality education.