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Presenter

Keri Facer

Keri Facer is Professor of Education at the Education and Social Research Institute, Manchester Metropolitan University. She leads the Create Research Group in digital cultures, informal learning and educational change. From 2007-2009, Keri directed the Beyond Current Horizons Programme, a 2 year futures research programme funded by DCSF and tasked with developing long term scenarios for the future of education in the context of social and technological change. Keri was Research Director at Futurelab from 2002-2008, has directed over £6m of research projects related to innovation in education across formal and informal learning settings funded from Research Councils, commercial partners, government and NDPBs, trusts and foundations. She has acted as advisor to organisations as diverse as the Teacher Development Agency, Becta, The National Centre for STEM Education, The World Wide Fund for Nature, The Inclusion Trust, Partnerships for Schools. Her first book was ‘ScreenPlay: Children and Computers in the Home’, in 2011 she will publish two books on socio-technical change, education and social justice.

 

Abstract

We are living in interesting times. Times when students, parents and taxpayers are asking questions about education’s contribution to young people’s futures. Times when education’s ability to prepare us for changing social and economic futures are being called into question by industrialists and politicians alike.

But how often do we examine the assumptions about the future that underpin these calls for educational change? Whose ideas of the future are we working with? Too often discussions about education’s relationship with the future are dominated by a story in which technological change leads inexorably towards global competition and to the battle for individual and national economic survival. In this session, Keri will ask whether this vision of the future is sufficiently robust to act as a basis for redesigning education systems today, or whether alternative futures might also emerge from the convergence of social, economic and technological developments already in train. In so doing, she unsettlesdominant assumptions about education’s role in preparing young people for inevitable futures and restates the role of educational institutions in equipping young people to imagine and create their own futures.

The session will draw on a 2 year strategic futures project (Beyond Current Horizons, 2007-2009) that examined a wide range of future scenarios for socio-technical change. The programme addressed questions of demographic and environmental change, new debates in intelligence and identity, and divergent possibilities for democratic and economic future scenarios. The session will also draw on Keri’s new book ‘Learning Futures: Education, Technology and Social Change’ (2011) in which she talks about the increasingly urgent need for educational institutions to act as democratic and experimental public spaces in which questions about possible futures are debated and in which educators, students and communities can design, test and build equitable alternatives.   

 

Facilitator

Helen Beetham

 Helen is a Consultant to JISC, in  which role she supports JISC work on learning literacies for a digital age, curriculum design and Open Educational Resources, as well as other aspects of e-Learning  development and strategy. She is widely published and a regular  speaker at conferences in the UK and abroad. Rethinking Learning  for the Digital Age (Routledge 2010) and Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age Routledge 2007), co-edited with Dr Rhona Sharpe, are rapidly becoming benchmark texts in the field of e-Learning.