Multiple Futures - Anticipatory Competence and Critical Utopian Horizons.

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Abstract

Multiple Futures – Anticipatory Competency and Critical Utopian Horizons in Environmental and Sustainability Education

Nadia Raphael Rathje

In education in general, and education for sustainability specifically, the future is always embedded, as education continually has implicit ideas about which citizens are educated for which future society. Combined with the great need for change and transition that the sustainability challenges require, it may come as a surprise that anticipatory competence is not a major focus in both ESE research and educational practice. Everyone has been taught history, but few have been taught visions of the future, strategic foresight or critically utopian horizons (Bengston, 2016).

In my research on the development of sustainable primary schools in the welfare state of Denmark, I have asked school principals, teachers and students what kind of school they dream about and what the school of the future should look like in their opinion. It turns out that it is difficult to get answers that go beyond the everyday life and the understanding of the school that the participants already have; basically, the answers revolve around more time and more freedom. At the same time, and in contrast to this, these same people are concerned with sustainable development, experience a strong need for development, transformation and transition, and have high hopes for how education can help solve the enormous environmental crises (climate, pollution, biodiversity) and the social and economic challenges we and the planet face.
“The school is the materialisation of the decision of a society to offer a time and space for study, exercise and thinking in order to give the young generation the opportunity to renew society” (Masschelein & Simons, 2015, p. 88). Masschelein and Simons is one of many possible examples of viewing education as a particularly possible utopian place where the seeds for valuable change can be laid for the individual and for society. Again, the contrast between this and the contemporary challenges of creating a school that opens up the work of sustainable development is huge. One of many problem areas is how to become more skilled at imagining the future we want and increasingly need to be able to imagine. This is also connected to a need for new conceptions of the future; the current state of the world calls for a different understanding of time and future than the traditional narratives of modernity which use reason, technology, liberation and progressive thinking think of history and the future as linear. In this way of thinking, it is science that understands and develops the world towards progress, just as it is market forces that create growth and wealth. But the notion of mastery of nature, technological progress and future happiness and growth has had difficult conditions in the wake of environmental disasters.

A question that arises is whether it is becoming increasingly difficult for the people of today to imagine alternative futures? A possible framework for examining anticipatory competence and the people of today's ability to think critically utopian is with Oskar Negt's understanding of the modern human's loss of orientation ability (Negt 2019, Nielsen 1997). The immense complexity makes us dependent on experts, the crises are diffuse and intangible, and we cannot understand the world through our own bodily experience. In consequence, we have to rely on experts' statements in everything from sustainability crises to child-rearing. The Danish further development of Negt: Critical Utopian Action Research (CUAR) explains that by ‘critical utopian horizons’ is meant social imagination based on everyday experiences and utopian thinking without reducing the importance of a critical perspective (Egmose et al. 2020, Husted & Tofteng 2014, Nielsen 2016).

Another and more direct pedagogical/didactic education-oriented view of anticipatory imagination can be found in Keri Facer (Facer, 2018), who criticises future imagination in education for either thinking too rationally and without imagination, thereby embedding today's hopes and worries too concretely, or with too nearly-excessive hopes for education to solve all the problems of the future and thereby displace uncertainties. Facer argues that the understanding of future imagination in education must rest on a pedagogy of today, which understands itself as an ecotone, i.e., an ecologically fertile intermediate zone between past and future. Facer argues that school should not be a preparation for “known futures”, but a space of opportunity and a laboratory for new opportunities and new futures.

In an ESE perspective, the need for qualification of future imagination as a skill or competence is formulated in several places, not least in UNESCO's ten key competencies for sustainable development: “Anticipatory competence: the abilities to understand and evaluate multiple futures - possible, probable and desirable; to create one’s own visions for the future” (UNESCO 2017, p. 10). Thus, qualifying this is a didactic pedagogical task for the field of ESE.
The problem area of developing anticipatory competence and critical utopian horizons has many significant perspectives for both the research field ESE and for a more practice-oriented didactic, pedagogical approach. One of the areas that particularly concern me in the field of problems is the possible important bridges between research and practice, and whether the area has special opportunities to let theory and practice enter into a dialogue and gain from each other. Here are three perspectives for further discussion of this:

First, it is a well-known problem that critical perspectives on existing issues often leave an impression of too disconnected, vague and overarching solution proposals or ideas. A possible development of concepts and a pedagogy that qualifies perceptions of the future may help to provide a better common foundation for understanding and developing perceptions of the future.

In continuation of this, an understanding of anticipatory competence as an essential part of educational ideas about the individual student's democratic formation can contribute to the problem that it is primarily left to researchers and experts to think about future ideas and critically utopian horizons.

A third important perspective is that focusing on future ideas could help to qualify the field's work with emotions, both in the negative perspective of future anxiety, but also in relation to the notions of education's ability to work with (critical) hope (Ojala, 2016) . On the one hand, it could qualify that hope does not just become an empty signifier, a kind of “toxic positivity” that risks that education conceals the big difficult dilemmas in order to inspire hope and action. On the other hand, perhaps through qualification of the social utopian horizons, hope and more sinister feelings can be developed to a greater extent.
This work could transform the interrelationship betweeen hope and action and future imaginations to create an approach of courage for the future.

References
Bengston, D. N. (2016). Ten principles for thinking about the future: a primer for environmental professionals. https://dx.doi.org/10.2737/nrs-gtr-175
Bojesen, E., & Suissa, J. (2019). Minimal utopianism in the classroom. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 51(3), 286-297. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2018.1472576
Egmose, J., Gleerup, J., & Nielsen, B. S. (2020). Critical Utopian Action Research: Methodological Inspiration for Democratization? International Review of Qualitative Research, 13(2), 233-246. https://doi.org/10.1177/1940844720933236
Facer, K. (2018). Governing Education Through The Future. In (pp. 197-210). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97019-6_10
Hicks, D., & Holden, C. (1995). Exploring the Future: a missing dimension in environmental education. Environmental education research, 1(2), 185-193.
Husted, M., & Tofteng, D. M. B. (2014). Critical Utopian Action Research. I D. Coghlan, & M. Brydon-Miller (red.), The SAGE Encyclopedia of Action Research (1. udg., Bind 1, s. 230-232). SAGE Publications.
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Masschelein, J., & Simons, M. (2015). Education in times of fast learning: the future of the school. Ethics and education, 10(1), 84-95.
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Nielsen, B. S. N. K. A. (2016). Critical Utopian Action Research: The Potentials of Action Research in the Democratisation of Society. In Commons, Sustainability, Democratization (pp. 90-120). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315647951-13
Nielsen, K. A. (1997). Ekspertkultur og orienteringsusikkerhed [Expert culture and orientation uncertainty ]. In K. Weber, Nielsen, B.S., Olesen, H.S. (Ed.), Modet til fremtiden (The Courage to the Future) Roskilde Universitets Forlag
Ojala, M. (2016). Facing Anxiety in Climate Change Education: from Therapeutic Practice to Hopeful Transgressive Learning. Canadian journal of environmental education, 21, 41.
UNESCO. (2017). Education for Sustainable Development Goals - Learning Objectives. Paris, France, : Unesco Retrieved from https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000247444/PDF/247444eng.pdf.multi
Wals, A. E. J., & Benavot, A. (2017). Can we meet the sustainability challenges? The role of education and lifelong learning. European journal of education, 52(4), 404-413.


Original languageEnglish
Publication date14 Jun 2022
Publication statusPublished - 14 Jun 2022
EventInvitational Seminar on Environmental and Sustainability Education - Ghent University, Belgium
Duration: 12 Jun 202217 Jun 2022

Conference

ConferenceInvitational Seminar on Environmental and Sustainability Education
LocationGhent University
Country/TerritoryBelgium
Period12/06/2217/06/22

Keywords

  • learning, educational science and teaching

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