Projecting futures of education: Comparing the projective grammars of the Scottish Futures Forum and the US Center for Strategic Foresight

• In Event: Leadership, Governance and the Globalization of Education: Future Forming and Situated Analyses

Proposal

Our era is one of ‘hyperprojectivity’ (Mische, 2014), involving intense public debates over possible and better futures. The widespread sense of crisis and acknowledgement of the complexity and global character of the issues at stake have over recent decades given momentum to anticipatory practices and projections intended to help realise certain futures. Concerned with strategic anticipation and the futures of education, this paper draws on an ongoing and exploratory comparative study of two national foresight mechanisms in the US and Scotland. In line with the purpose of exploratory studies, this paper seeks to develop and apply theoretical and methodological ideas that can later be taken further in more extensive research projects (Swedberg, 2020).
In doing so, the paper combines insights from the comparative education, public policy, and sociology literatures about anticipation, planning and future foresight mechanisms. The study of strategic anticipation involves the analysis of how anticipatory strategies bring the future into the present by translating uncertainties into tangible risks and legitimising particular practices, as well as the wider ramifications of anticipatory strategies, including changing modes of governance and standards of expertise (Berten & Kranke, 2022; Nowotny, 2016; Tavory & Eliasoph, 2013). A consciously oriented activity, anticipation assumes an active and critically reflective interaction with futures that are unknowable (Amsler & Facer, 2017). While explicitly conjuring up scenarios, visions, or imaginaries, anticipatory strategies often build on models relying on more implicit assumptions about causal mechanisms driving societal changes (Berten & Kranke, 2022).
Given that organized learning is an intrinsically future-oriented activity and strategic anticipation often harnesses ideas about education as a driver for development, education policy constitutes a pertinent area for studies of anticipation (Facer, 2011; Robertson, 2022). Yet, scholarship about the implications of anticipatory strategies for education policy remains limited. Furthermore, the existing comparative education literature tends to emphasise the roles and highly profiled activities of the major global agencies of the OECD, UNESCO and the World Bank (e.g. Auld & Elfert, 2024; Elfert & Ydesen, 2024; Kim, 2024; Robertson, 2022; Robertson & Beech 2024; Sobe, 2023; Yliniva et al. 2024).
This is unfortunate considering that state authorities remain the primary decision-makers in education policy (Rizvi & Lingard, 2010) as well as in strategic anticipation (Nelson et al. 2008). Moreover, studying national units of foresight mechanisms allows for directly considering and comparing the features of legislature and executive branches of government, and associated issues of democratic representation and the short-term motivations and horizon of electoral cycles in anticipatory governance. Globally, most state-level foresight mechanisms operate under the executive, yet such institutions have since the 1990s emerged also in legislatures, hence potentially expanding anticipatory governance towards democratic publics (Koskimaa & Raunio, 2022). Importantly, the study of national foresight mechanisms should consider the transnational and global nature of many policy debates related to anticipation - including those concerning the futures of education - where especially the OECD stand out as one of the most authoritative and influential over recent decades (Berten & Kranke, 2022; Koskimaa & Raunio, 2022; Robertson, 2022).
Accordingly, this paper considers two pertinent sites of hyperprojectivity, associated with national legislatures and executive branches of government, respectively: i) The Futures Forum established in 2005 under the Scottish Parliament, the devolved legislature of Scotland; and ii) the US Center for Strategic Foresight, created in 2018 as part of the Government Accountability Office, forming part of the executive branch of the US federal government. The paper conceives these two organisational units as distinctive and salient ‘sites’ (Riofrancos, 2021) of strategic anticipation in the increasingly globalized field of governance. This implies the research objective to study broader processes - that might well be global in scope - in multi-scalar sites, and hence the co-constitution of specific places and macro structures and processes.
Drawing on an empirical material of key policy documents, reports issued by relevant actors, and event summaries, the paper adopts Mische’s (2014) framework for analyzing the ‘projective grammars’ of these two multi-scalar sites since their establishment in 2005 and 2018, with a particular focus on the futures of education, learning and teaching. The study considers the following dimensions of projectivity: i) temporal reach (extension into short, medium, and long term futures); ii) representations of contingency and causality; and iii) the mapping of networks and future actors. In doing so, the analysis concentrates on various grammatical elements: verb tense forms, temporal markers, subjects and objects of action, and future-characterizing nouns and verbs. Focusing on the projective grammars of the two sites, the comparative analysis and discussion in particular addresses whether these grammatical elements cluster in patterned ways, thereby composing recognizable genres of future projection underpinned, explicitly or implicitly, by certain assumptions of causality, political intervention and change.

Author

• Tore Bernt Sorensen, University of Glasgow