In a conference organized by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the Hungarian National Commission for UNESCO in 2018, educational experts convened to discuss sustainability in higher education. They also touched upon the role of teacher education in promoting sustainability and they agreed that it is of utmost importance to change teacher education in the following four aspects: (1) By greening the content of higher education in every subject, the view that it is everyone’s task to educate the younger generation about environmental and global matters could become more prevalent. Those topics that permit teachers to expand their subjects and link them to sustainability should be compiled into a list, and teacher trainees should learn how to bring the global and sustainable dimension into their classes. They also underline that these topics should be introduced through current local issues so that students see the relevance of talking about sustainability. (2) Training should be adjusted to the changing pedagogical functions of schools, and in future, the main emphasis should be placed on competence development instead of knowledge transfer. Teacher trainees should be prepared to be flexible, adaptive to changing circumstances and help diverse learning groups as facilitators. Moreover, they should be prepared to deal with interdisciplinary topics and involve their students in problem-based learning. (3) New teacher roles should be taken into account when reforming teacher education. Teacher knowledge in the 21st century is different from traditional teacher knowledge, and their role is also different in their students’ learning. The teacher should not be the only source of knowledge, they should rather act as facilitators and help their students construct their own knowledge. Moreover, their content knowledge about sustainability-related issues should be developed, supplemented by knowledge (pedagogical content knowledge) about how to develop sustainability-related skills in their students. (4) Finally, teacher trainees’ ability to relate to students’ changing attitudes should be addressed in teacher education programmes. They should be prepared to hold interesting, interactive lessons which require students’ active participation to engage their students. Teacher trainers should also prepare to teach trainees about different pedagogies and methodologies than before (Lányi & Kajner, 2018).

As argued in 2.3.1, it seems that the incorporation of the global perspective is yet to deliver successful results in secondary education, so it may be valuable to gain insight into what has already happened in tertiary education, most specifically in teacher training when it comes to integrating global issues. In 2012, Hain and Nguyen Luu set out to examine the presence of the global education approach in teacher training in Hungary. They interviewed university tutors teaching at Hungarian teacher training centres and also conducted a questionnaire study with 205 university students in these programs. Although most of the university students said that global education is present in their teacher training, only some of them claimed that they had dealt with current public affairs in their classes. They felt they were the most informed about the following topics: gender equality, climate change, environmental awareness, conscious consumption and changing perspectives. By contrast, one of the university tutors stated that the global perspective is completely missing from the training and outcome requirements (Képzési és Kimeneti Követelmények – KKK in Hungarian) of teacher trainees and if something is not there, they do not attach any importance to it in the teacher training programme. Another tutor claimed that “global education is not part of mainstream pedagogical thinking” (p. 21), which manifested in the fact that university students did not even know what they were talking about when they were asked about it.

Examining the training and outcome requirements of teacher training programmes may yield some interesting insights into what is supposed to happen in the programmes (even though some empirical studies would complement the picture about what is happening in reality). Looking at the training and outcome requirements of English as a foreign language teacher training, there are few references to trainees being required to have the capacity to nurture global citizens. Nevertheless, the intercultural aspect of teaching English is present in the requirements, as future English teachers need to “know English-speaking cultures, their similarities and differences, they are able to mediate between cultures and they can develop students’ intercultural competence” (EMMI, 2013, Angol nyelv és kultúra tanára section, para 5). English language teachers should also become critical thinkers, who can “critically review and interpret contemporary literary texts, and other forms of the target culture” (EMMI, 2013, Angol nyelv és kultúra tanára section, para 5). The requirements also contain a passage about trainees having to be “prepared for bringing issues from current public affairs, examples from the society they live in and from the students’ everyday life” into the teaching-learning process and “reflecting on them using the target language” (EMMI, 2013, Angol nyelv és kultúra tanára section, para 10). Consequently, some aspects of global competence development are already present in the training and outcome requirements, however, it would be worth having more explicit mentions of the importance of incorporating global responsibility and sustainability into the requirements, so that training programmes feel the need to adapt their courses to them.

In the English as a foreign language training context, research about the incorporation of the global perspective is scarce. Holló (2016) and Lázár (2013) carried out research about the incorporation of intercultural competence development into English teacher training programmes. Holló (2016) attempted to explore good practices, and tutors’ views about the intercultural component in an English teacher training programme at a university in Budapest, Hungary. The tutors in her study stressed the importance and relevance of the integrated teaching of interculturality in the programme, and they do deal with intercultural issues in their courses, but in most cases, not consciously and not in a planned manner. She concluded that there should be more effort put into integrating different aspects of interculturality into various courses, in an explicit, conscious manner. In a document analysis of the course content of teacher training programmes in Hungary, Lázár (2013) found that before 2006, 70% of all pre-service English teachers could graduate without learning anything about the role of interculturality in ELT, as it was hardly present in the courses they needed to take. However, she added that it was a welcome change that intercultural competence was added into many courses, constituting an essential part of compulsory lectures and final examinations by the 2012/13 academic year. In a similar vein, it would be beneficial to examine the available course catalogue to find out whether pre-service English teachers need to learn about issues of global and local importance and whether they learn how to bring such issues into the classroom and develop their students’ global competence.