Future Studies: Reimagining our Educational Futures in the Post-Covid-19 world

What Has Happened to Educational Futures in 2020?

Educational futures have perhaps never been more debated than during the Covid-19 pandemic. Educators, policy makers, teachers, parents, students and children have found themselves in 2020 in what we would call an unimaginable position of being, teaching, learning and decision-making. The whole world, regardless of geographical location, has been facing unprecedented – the adjective that has been used so much in 2020 – turmoil, where forced entry into becoming a virtual classroom – an online space and virtual presence – started within a week, without much research, understanding, or particular thinking process. Such a rapid change for many of us created a rapid tension, insecurity, as well as predictions and ideas – looking back, analysing current conditions or contemplating the future. Indeed, a number of research papers have collaboratively examined possibilities, creating an interesting environment within which we can learn something about our own ontologies and potential for future learning (see for instance Peters et al., 2020; Jackson et al., 2020; Jandric et al., 2020; Kalantzis and Cope, 2020; Littlejohn, 2020). The year 2020 has been different from any predictions and thinking, and it has changed our attention to the world and our educational futures. It has challenged our core values and understanding of educational policies; we have learnt that even the most conservative institutions were flexible to adjust their operations and outlook.

Policy Futures in Education has always been vested in the ideas of the future, education, policy, and how to look towards the future with possibilities and potentialities, considering ourselves as active agents in the process (Tesar, 2016). However, it is not unusual for other journals to make such a statement (see, e.g., Hood, 2020). In particular, the analysis of historical and current conditions and how they address, through theoretical and empirical evidence, the future direction of education, has been at the forefront of many research projects and essays. In this paper, we will consider possibilities that may influence our thinking about the future; and how we perceive the education moving forward. ¹

Future Studies

What are future studies, and why are they important? There is a lot of scholarship that addresses this research area – theories and ideas that have been around for some time (Bell, 2003; Ramos, 2006). This includes the potential to think about and consider what relates and constitutes the idea of future in education. Grounded in our histories, and accelerated through our current experiences in 2020, the potential for possible, probable and preferred futures has been highlighted, as would be discussed in the future studies scholarship. Future studies are focused on the idea of uncertainty, and given our educational experiences in 2020, it seems pertinent to consider how we can address and think with such a condition. Future studies build such a notion and make it work within our educational practices. Future studies are also utilized in other organizations, businesses, NGOs and others, but overall are very relevant to the idea of education. There are many myths and diverse world views that underlie such action towards utilizing future studies in scholarship, and in using them to think about our policies.

For education, this means thinking about how can we transform the future of education, of childhoods, and how can we seek to use future thinking to enhance our progress and our pedagogies (Madjar, 2020). The future will occur – we just need to wait for it – and it is important to consider how it could be imagined, how it could be thought about and how it could be considered in order to alter or change the present. Education does have the capacity to start thinking about its own futures when education processes and established ways of doing things are disrupted. When Covid-19 occurred in 2020, it seems that just reacting, rather than acting upon it in a sustainable way, is a missed opportunity. Future studies have been for some time thinking how to use foresight, how to chart our futures, so further disruption in the future can be thought of, be imagined and prepared for. Not acting upon our potential future could be something that may be irresponsible, if not dangerous. The foresight is for education to think about the future before the disruption starts, to be proactive rather than reactive. The move to online (Tesar, 2020b) has been such a reactive experience; educational settings, leaders and teachers did not know what they did not know, and it has created so many challenges that we now have the possibility to learn from.

Asking what can we learn is to start considering the emerging issues from 2020 that will allow us to anticipate what could happen for many educational organizations and institutions in the future. We’ve learnt this year that business as usual does not work. We have learnt that we do live in a world that is undergoing substantial ontological, epistemological and axiological change. Many educational institutions are currently thinking, what does 2020 mean for us? What does a lack of international students really tell us about ourselves, about our models of governance, finance models, ideas about the future, care for indigenous and minority students and staff, for our long-term strategic plans, and our commitment to the human rights, to the marginalized and to indigenous people and people of colour?

What is somewhat important is that rather than anticipating that the educational world is constantly changing and transforming, we need to think about how to create alternative futures and alternative scenarios to learn about the future of education and schooling. We have confirmed and accepted this year that education is not just about the physical place and space, but that there is a virtual space of education that is equally important to consider. However, that does not negate the physical place and space; it enhances the possibilities of place and space that we are used to inhabiting and utilizing in our curriculum and pedagogical practices. We have also reconfirmed our commitment to sustainability and the importance of future studies scenarios of how education can contribute, discursively but also in real terms, to the future of the planet. For that, future studies can help us to think about how to make from the aspirational also associated changes, such as redesigning the way we create curricula, perform our pedagogies, manage our leadership and create opportunities for holistic thinking about the world around us. We need to carefully think about what assumptions we have about the future, what ideas we should use, and what thinking should be implemented. The overall concern is, are we currently asking the right questions, are we looking and considering the right directions, are our educational policies serving the present, or are we aiming at imagining the possible and potential futures (Kupferman, 2020)?

Future studies are keen to look at and consider the collective, the ideas around how our idiosyncratic experiences could become more focused on our collective futures. The intellectual engagement with our current situation is the critical condition which we will need to undertake to chart our education futures. That would move us away from our position that we have been trained for – to be reactive rather than proactive – towards issues, concerns and things that are happening around us. We need to create these alternative scenarios about our ontology of ourselves, and to allow ourselves to be more productive and rethink our possibilities for the future. There must be a different way to learn (Gehlbach and Chuter, 2020).

For that we need to understand our purpose, our values and our story. When we say ‘our’, we are referring to the sum total of all engaged in education – not just management and leaders, nor just teachers. We need to listen to all administrators and support service organizations, but perhaps most importantly to families and children themselves. This of course has been a long-term issue because our current statement of our current condition under which we operate tells us that we should not really be consulting with children and their ideas. However, what our experiences this year argue is that our traditional thinking around including children in decision-making, planning and thinking about the future must be changed.

For this to take place we need different governance models. The governance models that we need to implement in education are very different from those models traditionally associated with education and educational policy. Educational futures and their traditional modus operandi have been engaged with just one leader, with their leadership and management teams, and then with the team of teachers and the students or children. However, we need to rethink our current commitment to everybody involved in education, and pursue a willingness to think about the current potential of Covid-19 learning. The outlook that has been provided to us, the ideas that shape our educational futures, need to really carefully consider the thinking around the ontology of our being. We need to think about the episteme that forms our knowledge about ourselves. And for this we need to understand our educational identities and our long-term engagement within our communities. This is not to say that the current system does not have application. However, what it does say is that the current system cannot help us to shape our educational futures and future outlook of the educational policies that govern us.

The policies of today are not aligned or suited for the world of tomorrow. If there is something that we've learned in 2020, it is that educational futures could happen outside of traditional forms of development. Covid-19 has been one of the accelerators that has potentially brought us the future sooner. However, that should not stop us thinking with future studies methods to imagine the possible and potential future. The ideas that will create new ad hoc policies can potentially create more danger than good; there are plenty to be developed and implemented based upon individual experiences and anecdotal evidence. As such, what we propose is to carefully consider the future studies to engage with all stakeholders to carefully study identities, knowledges and ecologies of our engagement with ourselves and with the world around us. ² And, it will enable us to fully recognize and consider the global outlook in order to fully comprehend the underlying conditions and the potential future scenarios that will help us to chart our educational futures.

Future Methodologies

From the argument above it is evident that we need alternative methodologies in order to make our educational futures viable and relevant to the current times. The methodologies that we aim to employ must be different from the methodologies of today. Future methodologies must be inclusive of everybody involved in our education sector. That means being inclusive of not only internal and external stakeholders, but also of everybody who has a stake in education and is a beneficiary of the positive future educational outcomes. The point of such methodological reconceptualization is to engage with all, but most importantly, and especially, with children. It is children who need to be able to imagine, to create and to play out the scenarios in order to produce those future thinking ideas that can then create possible, potential, imagined, probable and real scenarios. Only then will we be able to put adequate, responsible and responsive resources towards the future. Such future methods would also enable and enhance the creativity of children, because children need to have a stake in their own educational futures.

We need to find new stories, new narratives, new ideas for how to move forward in education. The story that we need to find needs to be a different story from the one we are telling ourselves today. The narrative of today is fully reactive to the ideas of the past, reactive to the ontologies of ourselves. The story of today is passive in the way it is positioned in the middle of world events, of megatrends of ideas – that really does not allow us to have any control of our futures. And if adults can’t have it, neither can children – that’s the concern of those who do not wish to change the methodological approach. And that is the argument we need to change, as it is children’s imaginations of the future that will allow identified future scenarios to occur. The pandemic seems to be a perfect storm that has allowed us to rethink and carefully look at future methodologies, and to rethink our possibilities, what our educational systems and educational policies could look like in the post-COVID-19 world.

There is something fundamentally seductive about the idea of educational futures that are imagined – futures that do not exist yet. The future is something that is waiting for us, and in a certain sense we do not need to do anything in order to reach the future. However, we can do something about it. We can engage and employ future studies thinking in our curriculum and in our pedagogies and in our overall education outlook. We can employ different methodologies focused on children. This would allow us to rethink policy futures in education, and our key learnings from 2020 as we are all turning with hope towards 2021. We all know that the educational future must be better than it was in 2020; however, how we are going to reach it, and what we are going to do, is really dependent on our engagement with our society, with our educational system, with our educational leaders and with our children and families. We need to look towards 2021 with cautious optimism, as there is a lot that we have control of and a lot that we can do.