Curriculum reform-necessity for emerging VUCA worlds to enhance pre-service teachers’ pedagogy

The economic meltdowns across countries are exacerbated by COVID-19 and its aftermath, which bear the brunt of perennial devastations characterised by abject poverty. Although somewhat peculiar, higher institutions of education (HIE) have modified learning and teaching strategies to accommodate the deleterious effects of COVID-19. Conversely, while adapting, the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) necessitates that HIE reprioritises a plethora of factors, including pedagogies. This approach catalyses the comprehension of volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) environments in economic sectors. Hence, this paper aims to evaluate the use of pre-service teachers’ AI skills and digital pedagogy at universities to determine the need to reform the curriculum for the purposes of navigating the VUCA world. Likewise, critical theory is utilised to understand the necessity of digital skills for pre-service teachers to enable HIE’s adaptation to VUCA environments. This mixed-method study involves purposively sampling 12 participants for interviews and randomly sampling 78 participants for surveys. Using critical discourse analysis, the data is analysed to postulate nuances of perspectives. The findings depict that, despite universities adapting to innovative methods, particularly AI, there is a paucity of AI content and infrastructural development that enables pre-service teachers to acquire the digital competencies and skills needed to teach robotics, coding, and maritime studies. Overall, digital skills are below average; hence, the paper recommends that universities reform their curricula to stimulate digital skills that reflect the requisite capabilities of digitalisation and AI to withstand the VUCA world.