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Sustainability and Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) are evolving concepts shaped by varying interests, influencing perceptions of sharedvalues and future visions. This chapter examines ESD policy and its integrationinto teacher education (TE) curricula and university policy discourses in Sweden. Using a discursive institutionalism approach, the study explores the content of policy ideas and the interactive processes of policy coordination and communication. Despite Sweden's long history of ESD engagement, the interpretation and enactment of the ESD framework remain sites of compromise and negotiation. Higher education institutions (HEIs) face challenges in conceptualising and evaluating ESD, with limited representation in course syllabi. International research also highlights that climate change education frameworks are the weakest in teacher training. Focusing on TE in Sweden, the study explores: What are the policy ideas on ESD as formulated in TE curricula? How are ESD policy ideas discursively constructed and communicated across different institutional policy discourses? The analysis uses data from two Swedish universities, including 52 syllabi and six key policies. Findings suggest that while ESD ideas are well elaborated in university policy discourse, their representation in the TE curriculum is narrower. The social dimension appears to stand out, while the action competence domain and transformative education are not highly noticeable. Meanwhile, there exists some degree of tension between interdisciplinarity and specialisation, and international and local outlooks, mirroring conflicting priorities between academia, the economy, society and global and local needs. The chapter provides insights into how ESD is interpreted, negotiated and communicated in Swedish TE.

Internationalisation has increasingly become a key dimension of quality in initial teacher education (ITE) programmes. Although it is recognised as a means to strengthen future teachers' competencies and expand their professional knowledge, it remains underdeveloped in practice. This article examines the internationalisation of the ITE curriculum in Sweden. Using disciplinary lenses, we conducted a content analysis of the curriculum for grades 4–6 and interviews with student teachers at a major course provider. Our findings reveal two distinct patterns. First, while the curriculum emphasises critical thinking, it is predominantly framed within local and national narratives, with limited engagement in international or global perspectives. Teacher education is largely treated as context-specific and embedded within national frameworks. Second, student teachers express a desire for more visible and systematic integration of international and intercultural dimensions into the content of courses and pedagogical processes. We argue for a more systematic operationalisation of internationalisation and interculturality within ITE content and pedagogy.

In this chapter you will find the answers to the following questions:

What is anti-bias education? Why is anti-bias education important? How is anti-bias education connected to inclusion? Why should anti-bias education be an essential part of teachers’ everyday work? What is intersectionality? How can teachers implement anti-bias education in the classroom?

Part of Section 1: Developing Inclusive Educators

Despite its undoubted potential to generate profound insights into individual experience, self-study risks solipsism and 'talking to oneself'. Yet moving beyond oneself is not easy philosophically or practically. Paradoxically, the move from self-focus to embracing difference and otherness can be facilitated by an emphasis on assuming an outsider's perspective on such difference and otherness—what the Russian thinker (Bakhtin, M. M. (1986). Response to a question from the Novyi Mir editorial staff. In "Speech genres" and other late essays (C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Ed., V. W. McGee, Trans.) (pp. 1–9). University of Texas Press.) called "exotopy". This chapter posits exotopy as a methodological innovation in collective self-study through its capacity to integrate intensely personal self-experiences and shared understandings with others. This argument is illustrated by analysing the three authors' collaboration in the form of co-authoring this chapter, where we use three pairs of organising questions to frame our respective approaches to contemporary education research.

Gender contents, textual or visual, in instructional materials can be considered as a hidden curriculum, and may either hinder or advance equality. How teachers interpret and respond to this hidden curriculum in their classroom discourse, however, can play a crucial role in creating positive change. This research seeks to understand how teachers work with gender-sensitive contents in a newly-published English textbooks series for lower secondary education in Vietnam. To what extent are teachers aware of genderedness in textbooks, and how do they respond to it? Approaching gender as a social construct, using multi-dimensional methods, the study critically explores teachers’ experiences with the textbooks – their classroom practices and underlying perceptions – through 18 classroom observations and 12 follow-up interviews with 12 teachers in four lower secondary schools. Results indicate that neither the hidden curriculum of gender was recognized nor a critical mediation of it was practised. Gender content, whether ‘traditional’ or ‘progressive’, was largely absent from classroom discourse, as teachers prioritized transferring linguistic knowledge. Little space was allocated for promoting students’ critical thinking and self-reflections, including those about gender-related content. Teachers did not often pay full attention to different nuances and dimensions of gender issues, while sometimes their teaching design and interaction were found to be affected by their own bias – consciously and unconsciously. The study reveals that although teachers were later willing to reconstruct their perceptions and future practices, and were able to concretize their pedagogical intentions, enacting teacher agency in relation to critical pedagogy and gender equality in the contemporary English as a foreign language (EFL) classroom in Vietnam might remain a challenge. Based on the study’s findings, pedagogical implications that may enable teachers to be potential agents of change were suggested.

Preparing student teachers for work in increasingly diverse Nordic schools has brought attention to thevalue of internationalisation that, until recently, was debated primarily in other disciplinary contexts withinhigher education settings. In this article, we examine how internationalisation is introduced and integrated in two teacher education providers in Finland and Sweden. Drawing on internationalisation as a policy idea with distinct cognitive and normative properties, we explore rationales, values and attitudes that underpin internationalisation positions and practices. The comparative study identifies different ways that the two providers introduced internationalisation into their existing practices, and, to some extent, different meanings and emphases internationalisation has in the two institutional settings. In both cases, the filtering ofthis policy idea and its embeddedness into teacher education is contingent upon curricular and organisational structures; university and faculty leadership; attitudes and commitments of academic staff. 

Die zunehmende Diversität nordeuropäischer Schulen, für die Lehramtsstudierende ausgebildet werden,lenkt die Aufmerksamkeit auf den Wert von Internationalisierung, die bis vor Kurzem vor allem in anderendisziplinären Kontexten der Hochschulbildung diskutiert wurde. In diesem Artikel untersuchen wir, wieInternationalisierung in zwei Lehrerausbildungsinstitutionen in Finnland und Schweden implementiert wird.Unter Rückgriff auf den Begriff der Internationalisierung als Policy-Konzept mit spezifischen kognitiven undnormativen Dimensionen untersuchen wir die zugrunde liegenden Begründungen, Wertvorstellungen undEinstellungen, die Internationalisierungsstrategien und -praktiken prägen. Die vergleichende Analyse zeigt,dass die beiden Institutionen Internationalisierung auf unterschiedliche Weise in ihre bestehenden Strukturen integriert haben und dass dem Konzept in den beiden institutionellen Kontexten teilweise unterschiedliche Bedeutungen und Schwerpunkte zugeschrieben werden. In beiden Fällen wird die Einbettung diesespolitischen Konzepts in der Lehrerausbildung durch curriculare und organisatorische Strukturen, die Führungsstrategien von Universitäten und Fakultäten sowie die Haltungen und das Engagement des wissenschaftlichen Personals bedingt.

Gender bias in teaching materials may influence students’ development and contribute to social inequalities. This study investigates possible gender bias in a newly published English textbook series in Vietnam. Holding gender as a social construct, the research uses a multimodal critical approach to examine language and ideological systems. The results show despite some effort for gender equity, the making of textbooks in today's Vietnam is still affected by patriarchal Confucian values. Males inhabit bigger verbal space and have more social properties. Females are portrayed as less independent; their choices are more limited, and with less resources. Textbook author interviews show the writing was influenced by conscious and unconscious bias, but they agreed gender equality is important, although male domination beliefs still seem to be deeply ingrained in the society. The study raises questions on challenging the status quo and creating a new cultural narrative for women’s rights recognition and enactment.

If enhancing the connection between teaching and research has been highlighted in the general English language teaching profession, does English teaching at university – the ivory tower characterized by research – face the same issue? And how might this affect how the profession is perceived? This study provides an in-depth examination of how university English language teaching (ELT) teachers conceptualize research and their doing research, and discusses the issue in connection with the notion of profession. The study uses teacher cognition semi-structured interviewing with faculty members teaching English at a university in Vietnam. The results show ELT faculty construct different versions of research to rationalize their attitudes, self-awareness, and practices: research as irrelevant impositions, research as desirable but unfeasible goals, and research as practical, inner calls. Revealing this group's dilemmas between two worlds – practitioners and academics, external pressures and internal values, visions and realities, – the study argues that to increase research engagement, practical support is needed, but a reconceptualization of research is also an important factor. Also, understanding and realizing the teaching-research nexus in ELT hold implications for the profession's status and the professional’s identity and autonomy.

How stereotyped gender-specific expectations and norms are depicted in teaching materials may negatively influence students’ development and even contribute to social inequalities. In Vietnam, an inclusive growth that ensures girls’ and women’s rights to equal access to resources and services remains a challenge for the country – a Confucian-heritage society that values patriarchal traditions. 

This project critically investigates if and how gender bias is presented in English textbooks in Vietnam, and how it is interpreted and practised by teachers in the classroom. How is gender represented in the English textbooks? How do teachers interpret gender-sensitive content as presented in the textbooks and how do they respond to it in their teaching practices? 

Holding gender to be a social construct, which means women’s and men’s behaviour is influenced by social-cultural environment with its ideologies, perceptions and power hierarchy and distribution, the research uses critical discourse analysis to create a “productive suspicion” of text interpretation, asking questions about our notions of gender to examine how or when the feminine or masculine is constructed as powerful, to explore genderedness. A multimodal critical qualitative analysis, combined with analyses of quantitative traditions, was employed. The textbooks analysed are a newly published English textbook series for lower secondary education English 6, English 7, English 8, and English 9 currently in use in junior secondary schools in Vietnam. This series of English textbooks is part of Vietnam’s ongoing National Foreign Languages Project (NFL Project), Vietnam Ministry of Education and Training. The project also studies the interaction between textbooks and teaching by conducting classroom research. Teaching observation and teacher interview were selected as the methods to investigate classroom interpretation of textbook gender-related content. 

The results suggest that the depiction of gender in the textbooks, though starting to provide girls with more life opportunities, is still affected by gender norms and bias. Males not only inhabit bigger verbal space, they are also depicted as having more social properties than females: They have better knowledge, are more socially influential, enjoy higher status in both occupational roles and domestic roles, receive more opportunities, and aim for more ambitious goals. In contrast, although girls are seen as participating on more or less equal terms in some specific areas, they are portrayed as less independent; their choices are more limited, and they seem to receive less development resources than boys. The interview with the textbook authors shows although some efforts were made to ensure an equal presence of female and male characters, gender was not a priority during the textbook writing. Field observations of school English lessons reveal that teachers are not quite sensitive to possible gender issues in the textbooks and in the classroom. Gender content is largely absent from classroom discourse, as teachers prioritise covering and “transferring” textbook contents – mostly in terms of linguistic knowledge. In many cases, teachers’ teaching design and interaction are found to be affected by their own gender bias – both conscious and unconscious. However, textbook authors and teachers all agreed that gender equality is important in society and education, though breaking traditional norms can be difficult. 

The study raises questions on the possibility of challenging social norms and stereotypes against women, and, at the same time, creating a new culture narrative in which women’s agency is better recognised and enacted. The research helps increase the awareness of gender equality among societal community and professional groups (textbook writers, teachers, students, etc.) and enable them to recognise gender bias to respond to its challenge. Basing on the results, three main areas to respond to gender inequality are suggested: awareness raising, capacity building, and behaviour change. The current efforts towards gender equality are acknowledged, but better progress needs to be made so that girls’ and women’s empowerment is realised now and in the future.