In this episode - Sean and Punya are joined by guest co-host Iveta Silova to talk with prominent futures scholar Keri Facer to discuss Futures education, futures literacy vs futures literacies, futures thinking, and cultivating a 'temporal imagination'. 

In our conversation we learn about Keri's own academic and professional journey, and how studying the learning space of children became synonymous with studying the future. We discuss a recent publication from Arathi Sriprakash and Keri Facer on the pedagogic imperative to 'teach the future' in modern schools and the opportunities and challenges exist, and explore the importance of the differences between futures literacy and futures literacies.

Guest Information: 

Keri Facer – Professor of Educational and Social Futures at the University of Bristol, Visiting Professor in Education for Sustainable Development at the University of Gothenburg and August T Larsson Guest Professor at SLU, Sweden. Her work focuses specifically on cultivating the ‘temporal imagination’ – the capacity to work critically with ideas of time, rhythm, pasts and futures to open up possibilities for individual and collective agency - in conditions of environmental and technological change.

Iveta Silova – Professor and Associate Dean of Global Engagement at Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State University. She teaches graduate courses in comparative and international education, education policy and evaluation, research design, and post/decolonial approaches to education research. 

Links & Resources: 

• Learning Futures Collaborative: Education, sustainability, and global futures
• Futurelab, former UK educational research organization
• Futures journal [publisher link]
• Jungk and Muellert’s future workshops [actioncatologue.eu link]
• Futures Literacy [UNESCO link]
• Coldwarchildhoods.org, Iveta’s work on childhood memories
• Chen, K (2010). Asia As Method:Toward Deimperialization. Duke University Press. [publisher link]
• Teach the Future
• World Futures Study Federation
• Sardar, Z. & Sweeney, J. (2015). The Three Tomorrows of Postnormal Times. Futures 75 (2016) 1–13. [article link]
• Turn It Around!, socially engaged art
• Ana Dinerstein’s ‘The Art of Organizing Hope’ [video link]
• Tsing, A., Bubandt, N., Gan, E., & Swanson, H. (2017). Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. U of Minnesota Press. [publisher link]
• The Ecoversities Network
• Facer, K & Sriprakash, A. (2021). Provincialising Futures Literacy: A caution against codification. Futures, Volume 133, October 2021. [pdf link]
• Punya and Iveta’s past work together: https://punyamishra.com/2022/11/17/speculative-fiction-and-the-future-of-learning/
• Keri Facer (2011) Learning Futures: Education, Technology and Social Change, London: Routledge
• Facer, K (2022) The University and the Social Imagination, CGHE Working Paper
  • In this background paper for the UNESCO Futures of Education Commission,  I talk about five different ways of doing ‘futures’ in education – and the ethical choices these raise: https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000375792.locale=en
• Black Mountains College - https://blackmountainscollege.uk/
• The Ecoversities Network - https://ecoversities.org/
• Book Recommendations:
  • Hospicing Modernity https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/675703/hospicing-modernity-by-vanessa-machado-de-oliveira/
  • At Work in the Ruins https://www.amazon.com/At-Work-Ruins-Pandemics-Emergencies/dp/164502184X
  • Bruce Sterling – (2002). Tomorrow Now, Envisioning the Next Fifty Years. Random House. [Google Books link]
• Keri and Arathi’s article: Provincialising Futures Literacy: A caution against codification
• How Are the Children? - Wake Up Arcade Fire Cover
• Southeast Asia collection of the Turn it Around! Youth Visions of Climate Futures