Teacher Education for Sustainability in Network Society: Combining Digital and Sustainability Literacies

How should teacher education for sustainability (TEfS) respond to new information and communication technologies that can enable new forms of social and environmental relations and new forms of pedagogy? To answer that question, this article will consider the potential of Web 2.0 technologies or social media to enrich the content and pedagogy of education for sustainable development in both university and school classrooms. It will suggest that teachers should be introduced to critical social theory that seeks to explain the role of these new technologies in the recent wave of capitalist development that precipitated economic and ecological crisis, and their potential to bring about more sustainable alternatives. Such alternatives will be based on more radical and deliberative forms of democracy and citizenship enabled by the new technologies, and TEfS should equip teachers to explore these through appropriate forms of citizenship education and model them in their classrooms via new forms of critical pedagogy. Such ideas as those of Erik Olin Wright on real utopias and Manuel Castells on network society provide such TEfS with appropriate theory, while consideration of how YouTube videos might be used to develop critical digital and sustainability literacies in the classroom, illustrates how such theory might be related to practice.