Empowering future educators: integrating artificial intelligence, sustainability, and ethics into teacher preparation programs

Abstract

Teacher preparation programs have quickly adopted artificial intelligence tools, but the ethical, social, and environmental dimensions of that adoption receive comparatively little attention in how future educators are trained. This conceptual analysis addresses that gap by asking how AI competence, sustainability education, and ethical technology use can be integrated into teacher preparation as a single coherent framework rather than three parallel add-ons. Drawing on critical digital pedagogy, domain-specific cognition theory, and Mezirow's transformative learning theory, we synthesize policy documents and peer-reviewed literature on AI in education, sustainability education, and teacher preparation to develop the SAGE Model (Sustainability and AI for Global Educators). SAGE organizes teacher preparation around three interconnected pillars: Critical Integration, which addresses how AI systems reflect the assumptions and biases of their design; Applied Problem-Solving, which situates AI and sustainability literacy in authentic classroom and systems-level challenges; and Reflexive Praxis, which asks candidates to examine their own judgment and positionality when using AI tools. The model treats AI as an instrument that can extend, not replace, educator judgment in addressing complex sustainability and equity problems in practice. This is a conceptual contribution: SAGE has not yet been implemented or empirically validated in a teacher preparation program, and the paper closes by outlining what that validation would require. The paper examines ethical considerations and challenges of AI in education, presents the SAGE Model and its theoretical grounding with illustrative applications across K–12 and higher education, and discusses implications for practice, policy, and future research.