Conference Agenda

Preparing teachers for uncertain futures has become an urgent concern in an era marked by artificial intelligence, ecological instability, and accelerating sociopolitical change. While teacher education has increasingly emphasised transversal skills such as collaboration, critical thinking, and adaptability, far less attention has been paid to foresight competency as a distinct and learnable professional skill set. This study addresses that gap by examining how foresight-oriented pedagogies can cultivate pre-service teachers’ capacity to anticipate, interpret, and act within conditions of uncertainty.

Foresight competency is understood here as the integration of rational and intuitive cognitive processes that support anticipation, sense-making, ethical judgment, and design under uncertainty (Hines et al., 2017). Unlike predictive or planning-oriented approaches, foresight competency enables educators to work with multiple plausible futures, question default assumptions, and translate anticipatory insight into pedagogical action. This competency aligns with UNESCO’s (2021) framing of futures literacy as a foundational human capability, while extending it through concrete professional practices relevant to teaching.

The study draws on qualitative data from foresight workshops embedded within pre-service teacher education programmes in India and Finland. Participants engaged in futures scanning, scenario development, and science-fiction prototyping, producing speculative graphic narratives, visual identity maps, futures matrices, and reflective texts. These pedagogical activities were designed to function as structured yet imaginative learning experiences that foreground uncertainty as a productive condition rather than a deficit to be managed.

Data were analysed using constructivist grounded theory (Charmaz, 2014), allowing analytic categories to emerge inductively from participants’ meaning-making across multimodal artefacts and dialogic reflection. Futures literacy and transformative learning theory functioned as sensitising concepts rather than deductive frameworks.

Findings reveal four interrelated patterns that illuminate how foresight competency develops as a professional skill set. First, uncertainty functioned as a catalyst for reflective agency: participants moved from anxiety and linear thinking toward plural, conditional interpretations of educational futures. Second, participants shifted from technological anxiety to ethical stewardship, repositioning teachers as mediators of human–technology relationships rather than technical operators. Third, professional identity evolved from content delivery toward design-oriented roles focused on shaping humane learning ecologies. Finally, hope was reframed as critical intentionality—a disciplined commitment to act ethically within uncertainty rather than naïve optimism.

Together, these findings demonstrate that foresight competency can be cultivated pedagogically through structured futures-oriented practices. Rather than remaining an abstract disposition, foresight emerged as an actionable skill set linking anticipation to ethical judgment and pedagogical design. The study contributes empirical evidence to futures literacy scholarship by showing how anticipatory capacity can be embedded within teacher education, and extends transformative learning theory by foregrounding imagination and future-facing identity formation.

The paper argues that integrating foresight competency into pre-service teacher education strengthens the profession’s capacity to respond meaningfully to global uncertainty. By equipping educators with tools to engage ethically and imaginatively with multiple possible futures, teacher education can move beyond reactive adaptation and prepare teachers as intentional designers of humane educational futures.

Digital teaching has become a taken-for-granted component of teacher education across Europe. Beyond questions of infrastructure or instructional design, digitalisation increasingly shapes how teaching, learning and professional responsibility are modelled within universities of teacher education. In this context, higher education teaching does not merely transmit knowledge or skills, but functions as a professionalisation context in which future teachers develop orientations, beliefs and normative understandings of “good teaching”.

While European and international research has extensively examined digital competences, technology integration and effectiveness of digital formats, comparatively little attention has been paid to how teacher educators themselves conceptualise the quality of digital teaching, and how these conceptions implicitly structure professional learning processes. This study addresses this gap by focusing on lecturers’ didactic orientations in digital higher education teaching and their relevance for professionalisation in teacher education.

The study is guided by the following research question:

How do lecturers in teacher education conceptualise the quality of digital teaching, and how do these conceptions function as implicit professionalisation conditions for prospective teachers?

This overarching question is specified through three objectives:

1. To reconstruct lecturers’ understandings of “good” digital teaching in teacher education.
2. To identify recurring didactic orientations that structure how digital teaching is designed, justified and evaluated.
3. To analyse how these orientations implicitly model professional norms, values and expectations for future teachers.

The study contributes to European discussions on teacher professionalisation by shifting attention from digital competences to professional orientations and modelling processes within higher education teaching.

The study is theoretically grounded in professionalisation theory and research on teacher beliefs and orientations. Teacher education is conceptualised as a professionalisation space, in which professional development is understood as a long-term, biographical process rather than the acquisition of discrete competences. From this perspective, professional learning involves developing the capacity to deal with uncertainty, normative tensions and conflicting demands inherent in teaching practice.

Didactic orientations are understood as relatively stable, often implicit interpretative frameworks that guide how lecturers perceive teaching situations, make pedagogical decisions and define quality. Drawing on research on beliefs and orientations in teacher education, these orientations are assumed to be shaped by biographical experiences, institutional contexts and disciplinary cultures, and to exert a strong structuring influence on professional learning processes.

Digital teaching is not conceptualised as a separate pedagogical domain, but as a context in which existing didactic orientations become particularly visible. International research suggests that digitalisation rarely transforms teaching practices in a linear way; instead, digital formats tend to reinforce or accentuate underlying pedagogical beliefs. In teacher education, this has specific relevance, as teaching practices simultaneously address students as learners and as future professionals.

The concept of implicit modelling is central to the framework. Higher education teaching is understood as modelling professional practice not only through explicit instruction, but through implicit norms embedded in teaching design, assessment practices and the use of digital technologies. In this sense, quality conceptions held by teacher educators function as implicit professionalisation conditions that shape how future teachers understand legitimate teaching practices.

The study follows an explorative qualitative design informed by the Grounded Theory methodology. Data were collected through open-ended written responses from lecturers at two Swiss universities of teacher education. The sample includes lecturers from different subject areas and professional backgrounds, reflecting the diversity of teacher education contexts.

Data analysis proceeded iteratively through open, axial and selective coding, aiming to reconstruct shared patterns of meaning rather than individual attitudes. The analysis resulted in a typology of three ideal-typical didactic orientations towards digital teaching: technology-enthusiastic, pragmatic-functional and sceptical-traditional. These orientations are not understood as fixed types, but as heuristic constructs that capture dominant patterns of meaning.

Swedish teacher education institutions (TEIs) are situated in a postdigital society increasingly infused with generative artificial intelligence (GAI) tools (Örtegren, 2026). However, as Laba (2025) argues, GAI is not a neutral digital tool; rather it has the potential to reshape educational practices, professional responsibilities, and societal expectations in non-neutral ways. For young people to participate in an AI-infused society, they need to develop critical digital competence (Örtegren & Olofsson, 2024). In relation to young peoples’ development of digital competence, TEIs carry a dual responsibility: first, to educate student teachers who can engage with GAI in critical and pedagogical informed ways and second, them being able to create the educational conditions that enable pupils to develop this critical digital competence (Lindfors & Olofsson, 2023). For this dual responsibility to be realised, appropriate organisational conditions that support continuous professional development (CPD) in professional digital competence (PDC) are required, with institutional leaders within Swedish TEIs playing a central role in establishing these conditions. This is necessary so to ensure that teacher educators’ (TEDs’) levels of PDC enable them to fulfil this dual didactic task (Uerz et al., 2018). At the same time, political rhetoric in Sweden calls for a reduction in the use of digital technologies, such as GAI, in schools, while the proposed new steering document for Swedish teacher education (SOU 2024:81) gives only limited attention to GAI. Consequently, TEI institutional leaders face a delicate challenge in balancing these policy signals with the need to secure CPD in PDC and thereby maintaining teacher education that reflects and responds to contemporary society.

PDC captures an integrated view of the teaching profession that encompasses subject content, pedagogy, and digital technology (Starkey, 2020). PDC is neither a single, fixed, nor static competence; rather it is a multi-dimensional and evolving competence required to engage with the ‘not-yetness’ (Ross, 2017) of emerging technologies, such as GAI, in educational practice (Skantz-Åberg et al., 2022; Willermark et al., 2024). Of particular relevance to this study is that, despite a growing body of research on PDC in teacher education, considerably little is known about how institutional leaders understand, prioritise, and organise the conditions for CPD in PDC among TEDs (Maaranen et al., 2023). Against this background, the aim of this national qualitative study is to explore how institutional leaders across all 20 Swedish TEIs offering programmes for grades 4-6 discuss the conditions that support TEDs’ development of PDC.

The paper analyses how institutional leaders conceptualise PDC, how they describe CPD, and how organisational conditions enable or constrain sustained development over time. Rather than treating CPD and PDC as separate phenomena, the analysis foregrounds their interrelationship. Preliminary findings reveal recurring patterns across institutions. First, leaders consistently emphasise PDC as a core professional competence for TEDs, closely linked to democratic responsibility and the capacity to navigate rapid development in AI. PDC is talked about as essential for fulfilling the dual didactic task of TE. Second, leaders describe substantial variation in PDC among TEDs, which they primarily attribute to uneven organisational conditions, such as access to time, resources, structured CPD, and collegial support, rather than individual motivation. Although CPD is widely recognised as important to address this variation, it is often characterised as fragmented, reactive, and dependent on short-term initiatives rather than embedded in long-term strategies. Third, the findings point to a tension between centralised CPD initiatives and local educational practice, as leaders report difficulties in integrating generic workshops and support structures into sustained, programme-embedded CPD. Overall, leaders express a growing concern that current CPD approaches are insufficient to support the level of PDC required in an increasingly AI-infused educational landscape.