Anticipating the transformation of education

As part of their reflection on anticipation capacities, a research team developed a "futures education" program which was tested between December 2023 and March 2024, with adolescents aged between 12 to 14 in schools in the Melbourne metropolitan area.

"This emphasis on anticipation raises a host of questions -- ranging from how education provision might be best reimagined considering changing economic and/or geopolitical conditions, through to the possible implications of climate disruptions or global health crises"

Students are indeed the most relevant people to involve in a consultation process about the future of learning, being at the center of the studied setting. A scenario-building exercise revealed itself to be a great way to work with them. The research team advocates for a better inclusion of young people in foresight reflections of such domains.

"Schools is a good [futures] topic - everyone knows what school experience is because we're in school. So, if you were doing the future city, flying cars and everything, it would be hard to describe. But we're already experts in school, right?"

[Female student, School B, Interview group#1]

Involving young people in a futuring process

The program was designed to introduce the students to a range of futures thinking skills.

During the 3 days-session, the students assisted to 4 different modules:

• Thematic discussions to approach different domains (emerging technologies, AI, energy, climate futures and future literacies) ;
• Scenario-building workshops to imagine in groups the future schools in the years 2050-2070 ;
• Creative representation to create presentation supports ;
• Group presentations to discuss the emerging issues.

For the third phase, the students used a wide range of digital tools, including AI softwares. According to the facilitators, it impacted quite negatively the creative process and limited the youngsters' imagination.

"Despite the options to draw, sketch, write music or stories, all groups were keen to source existing online visualisations, stock photographs or use generative AI tools such as Dall:E. While these uses of digital imagery resulted in a set of highly competent presentations, the final visualisations showed a pronounced flattening-out of students' initial 'future school' ideas and arguments from during earlier brain-storming sessions."

Insights from the students' works

Ten different scenarios and future schools were built by the adolescents. The research team selected 3 of them to be professionally illustrated.

The three main issues studied during the program (emerging technologies, energy and climate change) are well represented in the stories. But new technologies are particularly at the center of the narratives, showcasing a wide range of possibilities, from robots to holograms, surveillance systems and personalized recommendations.

The research team also reported interesting conversations with students, discussing ways to protect their school from frequent climate events.

"[A] Global warming? We'll use a bubble that protects the students from natural disasters.

[B] It depends on the extent of the disasters. We'll just keep this scenario as a 'possible'. It won't be that bad. Right?

[A] Well, we're technically building this school in the middle of the desert. Right? I mean, it's gonna be that bad. It's in the middle of a desert.

[B] What are we talking about? Surely, it might be semi-arid soon?

[A] Yeah. It is worth thinking about because the desert is rarely used, right?

[C] So, you know, we can do something like on Mars that protects people from the environment.

[B] So this school looks like an entire society in a bubble.

[Q] And the students will come all the way from Sydney?

[A]That's the point. It's a boarding school.

[Q] So, it's just basically a school?

[A] Definitely"

[Interview group #4]

Nonetheless, the students' narratives did not differ a lot from what school is nowadays in terms of structure, organisation and principles. "Students tend to anticipate the continued core structures of schooling, albeit shaped by values of care and relationality." Moreover, they were greatly influenced by already existing "futuristic" innovations. For example, the building of "New Horizons 2070" is directly issued from the Neom development in Saudi Arabia. It shows a tendency to replicate and take cues in the present, probably to ensure a sense of credibility.

This criticism led to a highly enriching discussion on the limits of the foresight framework:

"If we wanted to support radical reimaginings of how young people might engage with learning then we should not have used the word 'school'. Indeed our effort to support the speculative redesign of 'future school' highlighted the fact that school is one of the most obdurate 'legacy infrastructures' in young people' lives that impact any decisions that one might make about future possibilities. As Macgilchrist et al. (2024, p.19) put it:

"These legacy infrastructures are never ...'neutral': they afford and disafford certain ways of designing for post-digital futures as we experience path dependencies emerging from decisions made in the past about the sociotechnical worlds in which we live and the futures we hope to attain"."