Educational Futures Seminar Series

Seminar 1: Theorising Change: Traditions and Perspectives

Tuesday December 15th 2009
Room 0.0 Behrens Building, Didsbury
Please inform Barbara Ashcroft b.ashcroft@mmu.ac.uk if you are planning to attend.

Programme:

  • 10.00 Arrival and coffee
  • 10.30 Welcome & Rationale for the Educational Futures Seminar Series - Keri Facer, Manchester Metropolitan University
  • 10.40 Perspectives on methods and approaches for thinking about the future in education - Professor Tom Schuller, Director of the Inquiry into the Future of Lifelong Learning
  • 11.20 Foregrounding diverse assumptions and ideas about change and futures - An exploratory discussion with Mike Sharples, Anna Craft and Simon Mauger
  • 11.40 Group Discussions: what are our frames for thinking about the future?
      Orienting questions:
    • what do each of us see as the relationship between past, present and future?
    • How does this differ across disciplines or sectors?
    • How do we bring to look for different trajectories or influences?
    • What do we pay attention to/ what do we ignore?
    • Where would each of us start in thinking about the future?
    • How do we represent our ideas of the future, what language, images, other representations do we use?
    • What counts as 'evidence' about the future for each of us?
  • 12.45 Lunch
  • 13.30 Group Discussions: why do we think about the future in education?
    • On whose behalf do we think about the future in education?
    • What do we see our role as in thinking about the future?
    • What assumptions about the relationship between present and future, and about agency and change underpin these reasons for thinking about the future?
  • 14.30 Research and the Future of Education; higher education's contribution - Professor John Furlong, Director of the Department of Education, Oxford University
  • 15.15 Coffee break
  • 15.30 Plenary discussion and first steps towards a manifesto for educational futures research
  • 16.15 Close

Invited Speaker Biographies and Outlines

Professor Tom Schuller
Tom Schuller is director of an independent Inquiry into the Future for Lifelong Learning in the UK, sponsored by the National Institute of Adult and Continuing Education. It’s main report, Learning Through Life, was published in September 2009.From 2003-2008 Tom was Head of the Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI), OECD, Paris. Formerly Dean of the Faculty of Continuing Education and Professor of Lifelong Learning at Birkbeck, University of London from 1999 to 2003, he was also co-director of the Centre for Research on the Wider Benefits of Learning. Previous positions were at the Universities of Edinburgh, Glasgow and Warwick, at the Institute for Community Studies in London, and for four years at OECD in the 1970s. Tom’s research history covers many areas of lifelong learning, but also fields such as employee participation, social capital and the social study of time. His most recent books are Understanding the Social Outcomes of Learning (with Richard Desjardins, OECD 2007), Evidence in Education: Linking Research and Policy (edited, with Tracey Burns, OECD 2007), and The Benefits of Learning: The Impact of Education on Health, Family Life and Social Capital (with John Preston et al, RoutledgeFalmer 2004). He chairs the Governing Board of the Working Men’s College, is a member of the Academy of Social Sciences, and plays in the Alexandra Palace Band.

Abstract: Perspectives on methods and approaches for thinking about the future in education.
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.

Professor John Furlong
John Furlong undertook his PhD while a teacher in a London comprehensive school. On completion of his thesis he began a six year full time career as a research fellow, working first at Manchester University and then at Brunel University. In 1981 he moved to Cambridge University where he was a lecturer in the sociology of education for 11 years. In 1992 John moved to Swansea University to take up his first Chair; he became head of department in 1993. In 1995 he moved to Bristol University, again serving as head of department, and then joined the School of Social Sciences at Cardiff University in January 2000. He took up his current post as Director of the Oxford University Department of Education in 2003. As a highly experienced researcher, John Furlong has researched and published on a wide range of aspects of educational policy and practice including: teacher education and professional development; the role of universities in the field of education; the nature of ‘quality’ in applied and practice based research; and young people’s use of new technologies at home. John is an active member of the British Educational Research Association and served as President during the academic years 2003-5. He was elected an Academician of the Academy of Social Sciences in 2003 and was a member of the 2008 RAE Education Sub-Panel.

Research and the Future of Education; higher education’s contribution
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: