There are compelling arguments that the opportunities and challenges of the 21st century – social, environmental, economic, and political – are so different from those of the past that they require us to seriously rethink the way we support young people to meet them. In the shift from a world once perceived in terms of stability, uniformity, and homogeneity, to one which is increasingly viewed in terms of instability, multiplicity and diversity (Kress, 2008), giving rise to an unknowable future (Brady 2008),  what are the shortcomings in existing 20th-century approaches to curriculum and teaching , and what might need to change?

Many educationalists have proposed visions about what kinds of shifts need to happen in order for education to be relevant for the 21st century world (Gilbert, 2005). For example:

• students generating new knowledge by carrying out authentic tasks in real-world contexts, including drawing on, reprocessing, and recombining existing “old” knowledge (Gilbert, 2005; Brady, 2008)
• Foregrounding the agency, responsibility, and transformative role of the learner, and
• providing opportunities to help students to see relationships between ideas – in other words, the ability to synthesise and see the “big picture”.

The presence of the future focussed issues revised New Zealand Curriculum presents one compelling avenue for school education to develop students’ understanding of, and ability to engage with (and transform) some of the key ideas that are driving economic, social, cultural, and environmental shifts in the 21st century world.

This project aims to examine opportunities and dilemmas associated with future focussed issues in New Zealand education, building on a body of work that NZCER has already undertaken in areas relevant to the “future focus” principle in the New Zealand Curriculum. While the future focussed issues are still largely a conceptual “blind spot” for many people in schools, pockets of innovative thinking and development are occurring on the margins of the formal education sector, and in the spaces where education intersects with other sectors.  In this research project, we aim to explore these pockets of thinking and innovation in order to bring new insights to audiences within the education sector.

Our initial aims are to explore:

• Peoples’ understandings of the future focussed issues in Aotearoa, with particular emphasis on relationships and tensions across the four areas, and their implications as both design principles and suggested learning contexts for NZ school curricula.
• How knowledge networks form around the future focussed issues (together or separately) in both formal and non-formal education, with particular emphasis on how new knowledge (including ontological) is generated in these networks, and in connection with learning beyond school (i.e. with business, communities, youth groups, web-based social networks, etc).

Organising for Emergence

The first written output from the future focussed issues project is a case study of a youth-led sustainability network (ReGeneration) which brought together young adults and secondary-school-aged youth with an interest and involvement in sustainability and environmental issues within their schools, workplaces and communities.

Taking a future focus - what does it mean?

The second written output is a working paper which examines different ways of thinking about what it means to take a "future focus" in education. It introduces the notion of “wicked problems”—challenges characteristic of the 21st century that intertwine future-focused issues—and what these may mean for society and education. Finally, it outlines what we have learned in our studies of education in relation to the FFIs.

Citizenship working paper

A third written output is in progress. This working paper discusses views from the literature about citizenship education for the 21st century, and uses findings from various New Zealand research to speculate on some of the messages that our schools may send about what kind(s) of citizens we want our young people to be and become, and how these align (or do not alight) with 21st century thinking about citizenship