Unit information: Educational Futures in 2023/24

Unit name	Educational Futures
Unit code	EDUCM0089
Credit points	20
Level of study	M/7
Teaching block(s)	Teaching Block 2 (weeks 13 - 24)
Unit director	Professor. Keri Facer
Open unit status	Not open
Units you must take before you take this one (pre-requisite units)	None
Units you must take alongside this one (co-requisite units)	None
Units you may not take alongside this one	None
School/department	School of Education
Faculty	Faculty of Social Sciences and Law

Unit Information

The overarching aim of the course is

• to equip educators and education leaders with the theoretical and practical tools needed to understand and work with long-term and disruptive change in education– such as technological transformation, demographic changes, changes in work and employment, and climate change.

In particular, it aims to:

• Develop students’ critical understanding of the tools offered by futures studies for understanding and working with long-term change in education.
• Support students in identifying, challenging and reframing common assumptions about the relationship between education and the future
• Introduce contemporary environmental, technological, scientific and political trends – such as Smart Cities, Climate Change and Demographic Aging - and consider their implications for education
• Provide opportunities for students to reflect on their own orientations to, aspirations for and fears about the future.

The course will explore topics including Popular Futures for Education, Future Trends, Education’s relationship with futures, International futures work in education, Learning from the pandemic about theories of change, Decolonial Futures, Afrofuturism.

It will focus in particular on the UNESCO Futures of Education Commission, its debates, tensions and implications for global change.

It will support students to become reflexive about their own ideas - students will be invited to consider the emotional challenges of working rigorously with futures in education, discuss questions of hope and desire, fear and anxiety, explore the existing literature on embodied and affective futures and have an opportunity to reflect on their own affective engagement with the future.

Finally, the course will introduce the concept of futures literacies and the application and development of futures methods and approaches in formal educational settings in universities and schools.

Your learning on this unit

On completion of this unit, students will be able to:

1. Identify, challenge and reframe common assumptions about the relationship between education and the future
2. Analyse contemporary environmental, technological, scientific, and political trends and consider their implications for education
3. Demonstrate an in-depth understanding of the methods and theory of futures studies and the practical tools that this offers for thinking about long-term change in education.
4. Critically reflect on their own orientations to the future and consider how they impact their assumptions of agency and change in education.
5. Apply futures-oriented methods to their own area of professional practice or interest.

How you will learn

Futures thinking requires reflection on the ontological and epistemological assumptions we have about the future, and the questioning of the frames we use to tell stories and produce models of what may come next. This unit will involve you reading, engaging in seminar discussions and developing personal reflective activities as a basis for enabling you to become aware of your own cognitive frames as you think about futures and engage with those of other people.

How you will be assessed

Formative assessment will include peer and tutor feedback on student work throughout the term, including a short critique of one image of a future of education – this might be a policy document, commercial document or piece of popular media.

The assessment will be an individual essay applying futures methods to the challenge of long-term futures thinking in an educational domain as negotiated with the tutor (4000 words, 100% ILOs 1,2,3,4,5

When assessment does not go to plan

Re-assessment arrangements for students who have not been able to take or pass a summative assessment will involve a second attempt at the assignment tasks in their original form. Assessments for this unit are individual and do not involve group work

Resources

If this unit has a Resource List, you will normally find a link to it in the Blackboard area for the unit. Sometimes there will be a separate link for each weekly topic.

If you are unable to access a list through Blackboard, you can also find it via the Resource Lists homepage. Search for the list by the unit name or code (e.g. EDUCM0089).

How much time the unit requires
Each credit equates to 10 hours of total student input. For example a 20 credit unit will take you 200 hours of study to complete. Your total learning time is made up of contact time, directed learning tasks, independent learning and assessment activity.

See the University Workload statement relating to this unit for more information.

Assessment
The Board of Examiners will consider all cases where students have failed or not completed the assessments required for credit. The Board considers each student's outcomes across all the units which contribute to each year's programme of study. For appropriate assessments, if you have self-certificated your absence, you will normally be required to complete it the next time it runs (for assessments at the end of TB1 and TB2 this is usually in the next re-assessment period).
The Board of Examiners will take into account any exceptional circumstances and operates within the Regulations and Code of Practice for Taught Programmes.