Integral Futures for Education
Dr. Richard A. Slaughter

This presentation briefly considers the development of the futures field, especially through the development of an evolving knowledge base. It then reviews several aspects of futures in education. It introduces aspects of integral theory and shows how they’ve been applied to issues such as global warming, the ‘state of play’ in the futures field and the outlook for humankind. Emerging strategies of relevance to education are outlined along with an integral view human and social development. It is suggested that the latter can help us to conceptualise viable futures beyond the current ‘overshoot and collapse’ trajectory.

Designing Educational Futures with the Future Technology Workshop method
Dr. Giasemi Vavoula

Future educational scenarios invariably contain references to some form of advanced, desirable and, often, as yet nonexistent technology. This seminar will present the Future Technology Workshop (FTW), a structured, collaborative method for envisioning future technology-enabled experiences that are relevant, innovative and practicable. The FTW has developed over a series of research projects, design exercises and teaching sessions, serving a variety of purposes and objectives. Through a series of seven sessions, participants are guided from ‘blue sky’ thinking to specifying requirements for new technology-enhanced learning experiences. The session will include a presentation of the method and examples of its application. Further development of the method will be discussed, with input from the audience.

A survey of methods for educational futures research
Richard Sandford

For those encountering the domain of futures work for the first time, the range and variety of methods, approaches, tools and techniques can seem overwhelming, and the processes in which these various methods are employed opaque. This session will begin with an overview of those techniques and approaches commonly employed in futures work, and of the sorts of organisations who most often engage in this work: a basic framework for grouping and understanding these approaches will be proposed in order to support their critique and analysis from the perspective of education research, and finally an exploration offered of some possible criteria for assessing the relevance of particular approaches in supporting the construction of educational futures. Participants will be invited to consider other domains which might usefully contribute methods and perspectives to such exercises.

Perspectives on methods for futures research in education
Professor Tom Schuller

I shall draw on three rather different sources of personal experience:

• a general interest in time as a social phenomenon
• international policy analysis at OECD
• the Inquiry into the Future for Lifelong Learning

I shall use these to offer some perspectives on the claims and utility of futures thinking. A particularly hard question which follows from this is how we distinguish ‘good’ or ‘successful’ futures thinking from their obverse.

Research and the Future of Education; higher education’s contribution
Professor John Furlong

This paper will explore some of the challenges facing those in higher education – and particularly university schools and departments of education – if they are to make a serious contribution to theorising and thinking about the future of education. It will address, in different degrees, three questions: what is current contribution of universities to such debates; why is that current contribution so restricted; what sorts of contributions can and should universities make in the future and how can that be achieved?