Journal article

Review of Learning futures: Education, technology and social change, by Keri Facer
Routledge, 182 pp., March 2011, 978-0-415-58143-1

Now is an exciting time to be involved in educating our next generation. The way we think about education and our approach to teaching is continually evolving, and our libraries are also undertaking a parallel evolution. They are no longer dusty, silent spaces where the main function is to store and catalogue books. Today’s libraries are becoming vibrant spaces for information seeking, sharing, creating, and communicating new learning.

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 primarily with my colleagues in mind—I am writing for the classroom practitioners of today who are the teachers of the future.

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 future-thinking.

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.

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 for English.

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 think critically about globalisation, sustainability, enterprise, and citizenship.

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 present in an absurd world.