Educational Reform: Conceptualizing the uses and abuses of the future

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Tuesday VI)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: (En)countering the pre-owned future of public education

Proposal

This paper reframes contestation over current global education reforms and challenges using the discipline of ‘futures thinking’. Considering the ways the future is mobilized in public policy debates takes up the work of Riel Miller (2018), who currently champions UNESCO’s Futures Literacy initiative. Miller (2018) joins Reyes (2018) in calling for a broader public dialogue informed by disciplined research about the future as an object of deliberative democratic engagement rather than surrendering to its appropriation and foreclosure by a select few thought leaders, including a growing number of edu-preneurs.

Taking up the challenge to engage ‘futures thinking’, the paper reviews a series of encounters among an international research network that is seeing the future as an object being constructed and mobilized as a policy lever to advance competing interests. Most recently in an international summit, this research network opened important new conceptual space in educational policy-making by positing the question, “What might be public about public education in 2030? (Alberta Teachers’ Association 2018). Opening this most recent summit and subsequent publication, was the compelling reminder, “Whoever gets to name the future, owns the future” (Niedzviecki, 2015).

Be it a perceived mathematics and/or literacy ‘crisis’, the mobilization of ambiguous ‘21st century competencies’, the commercialization of public education, to name a few - current global education reform policy debates have coalesced around memes that attempt to pre-empt and pre-determine particular conceptions of the future. For example, in the Alberta case, student wellness and well-being are being subsumed under the aegis of the OECD (Couture, 2018), expanding the policy reach of the OECD’s global future imaginary evinced by efforts to measure the cognitive, psychological, social, physical and material well-being of students (Borgonovi and Pál 2016, p. 22; Rizvi & Lingard, 2013; Fischman, Topper and Silova. 2017).

The paper will illustrate how the discipline of ‘futures thinking’ might be extended by faculties of education, teacher organizations and professional educators whose social contract is to help build a “public”. These efforts might help us reconsider sustainability and human development through a creative openness and agency that can be inspired by a “speculative sensibility” (Michael, 2017) that distinguishes between “Big and Little Futures” while engaging an “ecology of practices” offered by Isabelle Stengers (2005 & 2010).

The implications are to take up the invitation to rekindle our imagination as a public continually becoming and resist “the TINA creed: ‘there is no alternative,’ a perception that we live within arrangements that are self-evident and inevitable” (Yosef-Hassidim, 2018, p. 55). Given the precariousness of public education globally in the context of immanent ecological collapse, this work includes a willingness to take up some of the most provocative possibilities, including the “after” to the future of education (jagodzinski 2017).

Author

• J-C Couture, J-C Couture Manchester Metropolitan University/University of Alberta