Envisaging a new education studies major: what are the core educational knowledges to be addressed in pre‐service teacher education?

Reviewing and rethinking the ‘knowledge base’ for teacher education has become a particularly critical issue in recent times, given profound social and cultural shifts and changes and the emergence of new epistemological, political and technological conditions and contexts. This paper takes up the question of what are the key conceptual and contextual knowledges that student teachers arguably need to encounter and engage in their initial professional education and training. It does so by firstly reviewing the changing kinds and orders of knowledge, education and society in and for the twenty‐first century, and then by outlining a specific initiative in this regard: a reworked, reconceptualized Education Studies Major in the pre‐service teacher education program at Deakin University. The challenge the paper takes up is how to help prospective teachers to think differently about knowledge, so that they can better use such understanding to sustain and develop themselves as active, informed, reflexive professional practitioners.