This week, Keri Facer and Arathi Sriprakash spent a couple of days visiting partners and long term collaborators at UNESCO as members of a group discussing plans to set up a Futures of Education Observatory. The following are Keri’s informal and non-exhaustive reflections on the meeting and the interesting questions that it raised about how to sustain pluriversal educational futures-making, in particular in an environment in which edtech dominates discussions.
The group comprised highly diverse perspectives including:
- Members of UNESCO’s futures of learning team
- Former and current Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development leads on trends and scenarios work
- Advocates for children, teachers and adult learning (UNICEF, International Association of Law Librarians, Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers)
- Advocates for futures literacy from within UNESCO, as well as outside
- Academics working on edtech and decolonisation
- Leading futurists from Tunisia and Philippines.
The conversation was wide-ranging. Critical questions revolved around how to create a platform for the highly diverse practices and modes of futures-oriented research, policy and practice around the world. We explored a range of further issues including:
How to balance the emergency/crisis challenges of the present with the need for long term thinking in education
How to give reality to the UN’s commitment to ‘transform education’ as part of its Pact for the Future, and what does transformation mean beyond/instead of simply ‘acceleration’ of business as usual.
What might a global community of educational futurists look like and how could this be supported?
How can educational futures as a field attend to and respect diversity – in particular when different languages and epistemologies don’t work with linear conceptions of time or, indeed, resonate with the concept of the future.
How to balance different relations with the future – defending what needs to be defended and preserved in the present, imagining what the alternatives might be, experimenting and actively creating new approaches, recovering the lost experiments of the past.
How to both recognise and resist the dominance of technologically determinist accounts of the future, while working with the possibilities emerging tech offers for new ways of working.
How might an organisation like UNESCO, or academic organisations, offer ‘temporal arbitrage’ between pasts, presents and futures; between rushed emergency thinking and slower more considered longer-term thinking; between the shifting baselines of different experiences of education in different generations.
How might the past futures of education teach us something about our current moment(?) and making futures in the present?
The CenSoF team is looking forward to working with UNESCO at upcoming events including Digital Learning Week (2-5 September) and World Futures Day (2 December), and supporting UNESCO’s Futures of Education Observatory.