Futures education: Curriculum and educational practices in Australia, Spain, and Chile

 Jordi Castellví, La Rioja (Spain)

 Carmen Escribano, La Rioja (Spain)

 Rodrigo Santos, Vancouver (Canada)

 Jesús Marolla, Santiago de Chile (Chile)

https://doi.org/10.3916/C73-2022-04

Keywords

Acting socially, curriculum, primary education, secondary education, futures education, critical thinking

Abstract

The images of the future among young people have been conditioned by the stories present in the media, films, books, and also in school. Educational curriculums are made up of a selection of knowledge that privileges some ways of understanding the future over others. Young people often imagine a future that is in economic, social, and/or climate crisis. However, they also imagine a bright future for themselves, detached from the future they imagine for society. In this article, we present a qualitative analysis of the curriculums of Australia, Spain, and Chile, together with interviews with teachers from these countries. We investigate the presence and absence of futures education in these curriculums, their degree of development regarding futures education, and make a first analysis of the influence of futures education in schools. To do this we identify four dimensions: situate in time, anticipate, imagine alternative futures, and social action. The results show that, while the Australian curriculum explicitly includes education for the future, the Spanish and Chilean curriculum include it only tangentially. In addition, the socio-cultural context of schools and the will of the teaching staff are elements that determine the implementation of futures education in the school context.

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Fundref

RedUNIR project ‘El uso de las redes sociales genéricas en el ámbito docente: retos formativos para el contexto educativo actual’ from the International University of La Rioja (Spain); Department of History and Geography of the Metropolitan University of Educational Sciences (Chile).

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Technical information

Received: 02-02-2022

Revised: 07-03-2022

Accepted: 12-05-2022

OnlineFirst: 30-06-2022

Publication date: 01-10-2022

Article revision time: 33 days | Average time revision issue 73: 43 days

Article acceptance time: 98 days | Average time of acceptance issue 73: 88 days

Preprint editing time: 195 days | Average editing time preprint issue 73: 185 days

Article editing time: 240 days | Average editing time issue 73: 230 days

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