Abstract
Recognising the way visions of the future can shape our expectations of, and aspirations for education, this chapter tells the story of a series of inter-related attempts to diversify the groups usually involved in envisioning future education environments. It describes the experiences and lessons learned in seeking to mobilise digital technologies to assist in widening participation in educational futures research; highlights the tensions that accrue to such an endeavour around questions of expertise, insight and warrants to speak; identifies the many barriers to diversifying participation in these discussions; but highlights, as well, the value of ensuring that multiple and diverse voices are included in discussions about education: now and for the future.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
See, for example, the discussions on the importance of extending debate about educational futures to a wider public in Marie Brennan’s (2001) keynote Debates on schooling: The futures we have to have or the futures we might stand up for?; see also Classroom of the future: Orchestrating collaborative spaces (Mäkitalo-Siegl et al. 2009).
- 3.
The programme was run by a team at Futurelab led by Keri Facer in collaboration with the Department for Children Schools and Families. Mary Ulicsak, Jessica Pykett and Dan Sutch led the work on public engagement. Clara Lemon led the design of the engagement tools and Richard Sandford and Stephen Sayers led the academic and policy engagement.
- 4.
- 5.
- 6.
A full account of the project is available in Facer and Sandford (2010).
- 7.
See www.millionfutures.org.uk – this tool is still live, and contributions can still be made to the resource and other people’s contributions explored. The results are not, at the present time, being analysed.
- 8.
wefeelfine.org was created by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar in 2005.
- 9.
For example, Elise Boulding wrote about these issues in 1977 (Boulding 1977).
- 10.
See www.powerleague.org.uk – although the leagues used for BCH are no longer accessible the full list of results can be found at http://www.beyondcurrenthorizons.org.uk/evidence/public-engagement/power-league/
- 11.
This longlist of 11 areas is outlined at http://www.beyondcurrenthorizons.org.uk/background/research-challenges/long-list-of-challenges/
- 12.
For a longer discussion on differences between “future-proofing” and “future-building” schools see Facer (2011).
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to Clara Lemon for her role as producer of the Power League and Million Futures projects, to Dan Sutch for his work on public and stakeholder engagement in the second year of the study and to all those who participated in the workshops and the online activities in the programme.
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Ulicsak, M., Facer, K. (2012). Whose Educational Futures? Widening the Debates. In: Rowan, L., Bigum, C. (eds) Transformative Approaches to New Technologies and Student Diversity in Futures Oriented Classrooms. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2642-0_11
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