Seminar 3: speaker abstracts

11 June 2010, by Richard

The next seminar is in a few weeks’ time and will focus on methods and approaches to futures work that might have particular relevance from an educational perspective. Below are outlines of the three presentations supporting the day’s discussions.

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.

abstracts, events

Seminar 3: Methods and tools for educational futures

10 June 2010, by Richard

The third seminar in the series will be held on July 5th 2010 at
the Learning Sciences Research Institute, Jubilee Campus, Wollaton Road, Nottingham, NG8 1BB, UK (directions).

This seminar will examine the tools, methods and techniques commonly used to address the future, and explore the ways in which these might specifically support futures inquiry within education. How might education researchers best respond to the social and theoretical perspectives that underpin these techniques? To what extent is it possible to develop and extend these tools to generate informed analysis of possible and alternative socio-technical and educational futures? What other domains and perspectives might be usefully drawn upon in looking for ways to recognise and manage the personal, psychological and emotional challenges that accompany radical social and individual change?

To register for this seminar please contact Barbara Ashcroft. The programme for the day is as follows:

The ESRC funded ‘Educational Futures Seminar Series’ is run jointly by the Education and Social Research Institute, MMU; Graduate School of Education, Exeter University; London Knowledge Lab; LSRI, Nottingham University; NIACE; Futurelab.

events

Notes from the Second ESRC Seminar at Exeter, 11/03/2010

30 March 2010, by Rupert

Linked are notes from the speakers and from the discussion sessions.

Education Futures Seminar notes

events

Pictures from Seminar 2

30 March 2010, by Rupert

Uncategorized

Seminar 2: From Theory Into Practice

7 January 2010, by Richard

This is a revised programme for the second seminar – start/finish times and location remain unchanged

The second seminar in the series will be held on March 11th, 2010, at the University of Exeter Graduate School of Education, St Luke’s Campus, Heavitree Road, Exeter, EX1 2LU

This second event in the series will work with significant themes discussed in seminar 1, exploring how these play out in practice through an overview of the field of educational futures and through a set of distinctive examples. It offers opportunities for mapping out motivations, assumptions and theoretical positions inherent in a sample of educational futures work, and for considering how the field of futures orientated education might develop both theory and practice. We hope to begin to develop the basis of a manifesto, through critical engagement with:

• Overview of current futures-oriented research in education
• Where this work has come from, and the institutional and cultural contexts and values frames through which such work is being developed
• Models of the future inherent in such work

In this way we intend therefore to expose the assumptions, the values, the economics, resources and gaps in research in educational futures in order to develop strategies for “getting better at futures thinking in education”.

To register for this seminar please contact Barbara Ashcroft. The programme for the day is below:

events

Seminar 1: comments and responses

16 December 2009, by Richard

Thank you to everyone who attended yesterday’s initial seminar in Manchester: it was a fascinating and challenging day. Particular thanks to Tom Schuller and John Furlong for taking the time to share their perspectives on educational change and the contexts in which the educational research community is situated.

In the afternoon session, our core questions were how do we help the education system get better at thinking about the future? and what is the role of the education research community in achieving that? These were the central issues of the day: our final session, though, asked a few more practical questions:

• What is clearer for you after today?
• What might help us to draw upon disciplinary expertise and insight more effectively in the seminar series?
• Who else ought to have been there?

Of course, comprehensive answers to all these questions aren’t going to be forthcoming immediately. But, in the meantime, if anyone has any immediate responses to these questions, or any comments on the general themes that emerged from the day, it would be wonderful to capture them here, using the comment form below. We’ll use these to sustain our conversation between now and the next event in the series.

Looking forward very much to hearing your thoughts: thanks again for your time and contributions yesterday. See you in March!

events

Seminar 1: speaker abstracts

8 December 2009, by Richard

We’re looking forward to the first seminar in the series next week. Below are outlines of the two papers being presented during the day.

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?

abstracts, events

Seminar 1: programme

11 November 2009, by Richard

The first seminar in the series will be held on
on December 15th 2009

at

Didsbury Campus, Manchester Metropolitan University, 799 Wilmslow Road, Manchester, M20 2RR

Location and directions can be found here: http://www.mmu.ac.uk/travel/didsbury/. The programme for the day is as follows:

Looking forward to a stimulating and interesting day.

events

Seminar 1: Theorising change — traditions and perspectives

27 October 2009, by admin

The first seminar in this series on Educational Futures will be held at the Education and Social Research Institute, Manchester Metropolitan University on December 15th, 2009.

At a time when billions of pounds are being spent on ‘building schools for the future’, in which our ideas of economic and environmental futures are subject to weekly change; when it is suggested that new bio-technologies will offer radically new human/technical futures, and when the consequences of our actions may be ever longer lived, strategies are needed for critical reflection and research into our ideas about and understandings of the future.

The overarching aim of this seminar is to gain a deeper understanding of diverse strategies for theorising change and the implications of these strategies for different groups’ approach to thinking about the future.

• To explore the different strategies that different disciplines and groups use for theorising change and so for thinking about the future
• To articulate the different motivations and reasons for which different disciplines and groups think about future
• To identify the areas of most useful intervention and discussion for the educational research field

This seminar series will bring together researchers from multiple disciplines to explore the intellectual tools and resources, the existing traditions and new departures that might be mobilised to help us contribute to thinking intelligently and critically about the future in order to help us make better decisions in education today.

Should you like to attend, please contact Barbara Ashcroft. Please note that places are limited to 35 people only and that there are no bursaries for travel. Lunch and refreshments will be provided on the day.

events