ABSTRACT
Danish teacher education is presently engaged in a process of reform, and a commission has since 2022 been developing a new program and hereby been placing Bildung as a centerpiece. Bildung denotes personal and social development in which personal, academic, and professional judgments are transformed into a multifaceted and lifelong exchange between the individual and the social world. Obvious questions hence arise: How can teacher-training colleges realize such broad intentions? What should be the focus of the education and training they provide? To answer these questions, I draw inspiration from the work of the German philosopher Wolfgang Klakfi who has argued that students’ processes of Bildung should engage with the historicized present and the future by involving themselves ethically in addressing the issues and dangers facing society. In this chapter, I will propose two epochal key questions for Danish teacher education by providing a careful description of the background and reasons for each suggestion. (1) With a departure in a combination of Klafki’s key questions of ‘the ecological crisis’ and ‘peace,’ I suggest an ethical awareness when teaching about global crises is addressed in Danish teacher education. The multiple world crisis forces teachers into an ethical dilemma of what and how to talk about these issues with the students. (2) With a departure from Klafki’s key question of ‘communication technologies,’ I suggest teachers’ critical uses of online teaching platforms, which threatens the teachers’ professional and ethical judgment. Online platform solutions are mandatory in Danish schools; meanwhile, research has criticized the intense digitalization in Danish schools, arguing that the autonomy of teachers is being lost, leading to a homogenization of teaching methods and narrowly steering teaching through performance appraisals.
