Transforming higher education teaching for twenty-first century skills

Using the critical lens of Paulo Freire (1921–1997), this chapter explored the dual transformational and standardising imperatives of tertiary education, focusing on teacher education. It proposed that initial teacher educators should reconsider the process of creating teachers and, by implication, other graduates, by engagement with relational agency, a human-focused understanding of the social, cognitive and emotional connections between teachers and learners. The chapter begins by considering the processes by which teachers are accredited in Australia, suggesting that a reductive emphasis on standards is insufficient for creating teachers as relational agents who must address the ‘inertia’ outlined by the World Economic Forum (WEF, 2017). It then locates relational agency in the discourse of the teacher education and twenty-first-century skills. The chapter concludes by outlining, in relation to the WEF’s three interconnected features stymying the ‘development and deployment of talent’, strategies for reconsidering teacher education and proposing that relational agency be further explored in relation to teacher education and tertiary education more broadly.Linda Westphale