set 2014: no. 1

In this interview set asks Keri Facer, author of Learning Futures: Education, Technology, and Social Change (2011), about her ideas and what keeps her optimistic about the future. Her book makes a powerful case for reimagining the role of education in response to environmental, social and technological changes. She advocates for schools to be at the centre of “future-building” work in their communities.

Te reo and mātauranga Māori are linked to a distinctive Māori identity and ways of being in the world. With the majority of Māori students enrolled in English-medium schools, we face the national challenge of how to affirm and promote reo and mātauranga Māori as part of the “everyday” in educational and community life, now and in the future.
This article illustrates how educators in English-medium settings can deliberately affirm, support, and promote reo and… Read more

The most powerful thing about the literature on future-oriented education is what it tells us about our orientation to the present. This article explores some of the key ideas of future orientation that show the importance of both the present and, in particular, the presence of the teacher. The contributions of science fiction and of Albert Camus are explored to support this analysis and to generate some practical philosophical approaches to making sense of the… Read more

Future focus is one of the eight principles of the New Zealand curriculum. However, the term is sometimes conflated with the more-expansive term 21st-century learning, which, this article argues, accepts uncritically dominant assumptions that New Zealand’s future is as part of a hyper-globalised, fast-paced, capitalist world. This article insists on future focus as a means of developing the curriculum to support pupils as they learn to… Read more

Future-oriented pedagogies should focus on supporting students to be creative, innovative, and capable of creating knowledge, both individually and collaboratively, at the community level. This article discusses how a group of teachers have come to understand and use the knowledge-building model developed by Scardamalia and Bereiter (2006) to support secondary students to develop as knowledge creators of the 21st century. Findings from knowledge-building… Read more

Future-oriented theorists argue that if we want students to be future builders, we need to provide them with opportunities to do things with existing knowledge, rather than just reproduce it. In this article I consider the implications of this argument for English. I describe some theory-driven learning opportunities that may enable students to build knowledge, and I provide some research examples from classrooms of what each opportunity might look like… Read more

We can no longer predict knowledge needed for the future, which has significant implications for contemporary literacy programmes. In this article we argue that reconceptualising current literacy approaches will support teachers to develop future-focused literacy teaching. We suggest that a critical multiliteracies lens can provide rationale for a future-focused literacy programme (the “why”), and that the four resources model (Luke & Freebody, 1999) can… Read more

Professor James Dator has spent nearly five decades in the discipline of future studies. In this article, he suggests that all images of the future can be described within four categories that he calls continued growth, collapse, disciplined society, and transformational. He argues that four big variables—energy, the economy, the environment, and government—have shifted in ways that make them so obviously part of the future they must be incorporated into all of our… Read more

I’ve been teaching since 1973, some in area schools, some in intermediates, but mostly in secondary schools. Throughout my career I have enjoyed studying part-time, and in 2004 I was privileged to spend the year as an e-Fellow. I’m still studying, still reflecting on education in general and teaching in particular, and still very interested in what it means to be working in this space, what it means to be a teacher. In this piece I am therefore writing… Read more