Futures Study in Teacher Education

Futures Study in Teacher Education

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NOEL GOUGH, Rusden College of Advanced Education

The future, as a subject of serious study, seems only recently to have become fashionable, and numerous conferences titled "something-or-other in the 80s" are evidence that futures study (also known as futurology or futurism) has been given a boost by the onset of a new decade. But if all that was meant by futures study was a study of the next ten years, arguments for incorporating futures study into teacher education would largely be superfluous, since a great deal of teacher education is focused on the near future. "What am I going to do on Monday?" is the sort of question that is often uppermost in trainee teachers' minds; trainee teachers also plan their courses of study for three or four years and worry about whether or not they will get a job when they graduate. Teacher educators ask themselves the same sort of question, and focusing on the future becomes increasingly important as decisions about the continued existence of certain courses — and, indeed, of some institutions — appear to be made on the basis of extrapolated statistics which estimate teacher supply and demand over the next decade. Since 1975 Rusden has offered an elective unit entitled "Educating for the Future" to fourth-year students in the Bachelor of Education programme. This report outlines the unit in its present form paying particular attention to two features of the unit which might be regarded as unusual: firstly, the unit focuses rather more on the medium and distant futures than on the near future and, secondly, the unit requires wide reading of science fiction and related non-fiction. It may seem odd to take speculations about futures which can barely be imagined, let alone predicted, as the substantive focus of activities in pre-service teacher education, but it will be shown that such speculations can be important resources for teachers and teacher educators. CONTEXT AND DESCRIPTION OF "EDUCATING FOR THE FUTURE" Students in Rusden's Bachelor of Education course undertake an Education programme concurrently with academic studies in third and fourth years. Students undertake a minimum of eighteen units (i.e. nine per year) during these years, at least six of which are in their area(s) of academic specialization. The Education programme is structured on a core and electives basis, each student undertaking six core units and at least three elective units, together with an integrated school experience programme. The elective units are chosen from a wide range offered. The electives available are subject to variation from year to year according to changing patterns of thought and practice in education, the areas of specialization of The South Pacific Journal of Teacher Education, Vol. 9 No. 2, November 1981


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staff involved in the course, and the interests of the students. Each elective occupies one term of ten weeks duration, and is time-tabled to allow for up to four hours class time. It is expected that students will spend an additional four hours outside class time on work associated with the unit. In certain electives class contact time is varied, but in all cases students are expected to devote a minimum of eight hours per week to each elective. The stated aims of "Educating for the Future'' are: (a) to examine our social and technological futures; this might be termed an inquiry into the limits of the possible. (b) to examine the role of formal (i.e. institutional) education in preparing man for the future; this will include consideration of futures study as a dimension of existing school subjects. (c) to enhance participants' abilities to: — develop curriculum units (including learning resources and criteria for teaching), suitable for use in schools, in which the major emphasis of each unit is an exploration of some aspect(s) of social and/or technological futures; — describe and defend alternatives in social and technological futures; — critically evaluate literature relating to social and technological futures. During the unit, the following topics are explored by means of lectures, films, workshops, directed readings, class discussions, independent reading and student-led seminars. Organizing concepts in future studies: extrapolation, invention, imagination, social factors, science and technology, Utopian and dystopian perspectives; Present determinants of the future: human factors (distribution age, race and gender in the world population), environmental factors (including energy resources), technological factors (including artificial intelligence and the industrialization of space); The hazards of prophecy: failure of nerve, failure of imagination; Past and present images of the future: science fiction and other speculative literature (and equivalents in other media); The distant future, with particular reference to the impact of images of the distant future on perceptions of the near future; The future in education: developing resources for futures study. Student assessment is based on such tasks as: oral and written presentation of seminar papers; written presentation of brief book reviews of independent wide reading; and production of future-oriented curriculum materials for use in an existing school subject of the student's choice. UNDERLYING VALUES AND ASSUMPTIONS It has already been suggested that "Educating for the Future" may be unusual because of its emphasis on medium-term and distant futures, together


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with its emphasis on the use of science fiction as a major resource. These emphases are convenient foci for discussing the underlying values and assumptions which form part of the rationale for the .unit. 1. Going beyond the near future As noted above, the near future (by which is meant from tomorrow to ten years hence), and our speculations about it, are commonplace in teacher education. But speculations about the medium-term future (say, 10-50 years) and the distant future (say, 50-10,000 years) are far less common in teacher education, and tend to receive rather cursory attention in schools. Yet the medium-term future is clearly important to us: it is a period in which most of our current trainees (and, it is to be hoped, many of us) will be living and working, and it is certainly of great relevance to the pupils our current trainees will be teaching. The case for medium-term futures studies in schools has been well argued elsewhere. For example, Godfrey Gardner (1975) argues that including social futurology in social studies courses in schools enables children to prepare more adequately for their future roles in society. Gardner believes that the very least we can do is to innoculate pupils against "future shock" ^against the impact of an unforeseen and undiscussed future — by developing futures-oriented concepts and some elementary forecasting techniques. Gardner also draws attention to an essential act of faith which is part of any rationale for futures study: We must assume that it is possible for human beings to shape their own social destinies, if not entirely than at least to a degree which amakes the effort worthwhile. (Gardner, 1975,127) Thinking rationally beyond the near future may be inhibited not only by fatalism but also by pessimism. Much discussion of alternative futures (especially in the near term) seems to have been forced on us by pressures of dwindling resources, changing values and priorities, population problems, and other issues concerning energy, food and environment. We are being lectured or scolded about our excesses, so that the future is often portrayed pessimistically — as something to be feared rather than anticipated. Indeed, these sorts of issues are so familiar that they may be in danger of becoming boring. But population, energy, food and environment are legitimate concerns, and need not be trivialized by the superficial thinking which often characterizes their relentless over-exposure in the media and in classrooms^. In "Educating for the Future" it is assumed that fear of the future is not the only reason for attempting to study it and that neither pessimism nor naive optimism may be the most appropriate ways of approaching the future. Rather, intelligent thinking about the future is presented as one among many skills to be developed as part of our personal and professional education. It is further assumed that there are both intellectual and moral imperatives which compel us to study the future. On the one hand, the future can be seen.,as a kind of intellectual resource that we can use for our enlightenment, education and entertainment. On the other hand, because each generation is to some extent entrusted with the future, our thinking about the future must not only be rational but ethical.



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It is relatively easy to justify the study of short- and medium-term futures, but what of the distant future? It is tempting to regard the distant future as irrelevant; barring some unforeseen breakthrough in the bio-medical sciences, we (as individuals) will not be living in it. But one important reason for including the distant future in futures study is that speculating about the distant future is an important influence in shaping the medium-term and near future. How far we can look into the future depends very much on our particular concern: we can make credible and. intelligent speculations about the development of technologies in the next 10,000 years (with the greatest risk being that our speculations are likely to be extremely conservative), whereas the forecasting of electoral politics can seldom go beyond the next few weeks. However we are not only concerned with predicting the future but also with inventing it and, although we should not confuse our preferred futures with probable futures, nor should we confine our consideration of alternative futures only to those which now seem most probable. We need positive visions of desired futures as a guide to action (and, conversely, we need negative visions of undesirable futures as guides to . what we should avoid). It can be argued that our visions of the near future are governed to some extent by our visions of the medium and distant futures. One of the topics explored in "Educating for the Future" — namely, the colonization and industrialization of space — provides an illustration of this. An introductory activity has consistently shown that students are largely unaware of the present impact of aerospace technology on our day-to-day lives, yet there is hardly a facet of everyday life where space spinoffs have not penetrated: solar panels, electric light bulb filament protectors, voice- and eyeball-controlled wheel-chairs, electronic food warming, lightweight fabric roofing, fire detectors and monitors, protective fluids for LP records, hang gliders and pig pregnancy detectors are but a few that come to mind. These are just the beginnings of what could be an area of great technological expansion with the potential for enormous social and economic impact in the very near future. Over two years ago the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) offered its "Getaway Special" to the general public: for just $500 (and a balance of $2,500) one could reserve a one-and-a-half cubic foot package on a space shuttle flight in the early 1980s. By November 1978 more than 250 Getaway Specials had been reserved, some by schools, colleges, universities and private citizens and others, more intriguingly, by commercial enterprises: Johnson & Johnson, Dow Chemical and General Electric had at that stage booked several each. The purpose of the Getaway Specials, according to NASA, is to permit private organizations to carry out experiments in orbit, to have access to proprietary rights, and to encourage research in new materials and new processes that will lead to factories in space. Add to this the recent announcement that NASA is offering to sell its three space shuttles shortly (Boeing and McDonnell-Douglas are both potential buyers), because they expect space shuttle flights to become a routine commercial operation within the next few years, and one can see why an observer has commented: "If the trend develops to its fullest potential, you


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can forget about Luke Skywalker. The next Star Wars you see may be between IBM and ITT" (Zuckerman, 1978,30). The proposition explored in "Education for the Future" is that it may be easier to accept, and to be prepared for, highly probable aspects of the near future, such as space manufacturing, if one also has a vision of what is possible and probable in the more distant future. O'Neill (1978) has argued that, with existing technology, orbiting space manufacturing colonies of up to 10,000 people could be established within a decade, while commercial enterprise — particularly mining — on the Moon and asteroids could be a reality (again with existing technology) within 20 years. Sagan (1976) has suggested that it may be possible to terraform Venus or Mars so that they would be habitable to humans within one or two centuries, again with no new technology needed. Looking even further into the future, Berry (1974) has speculated that in the 23rd century we may even be contemplating dismantling Jupiter, which would provide sufficient mass in the required elemental forms to build approximately 38 new worlds with the mass of the Earth, or 3,000 worlds the mass of the Moon, or about 300,000 flying cities each with the mass of Ceres (the largest asteroid) or any desired combination of these. While this may seem like a fantastic speculation, it is a possibility which has received serious consideration over the last two decades. Indeed, Dyson (1966) showed that the dismantling of Jupiter could be accomplished with mid-sixties technology. The probability (or desirability) of such a venture is highly debatable, but the point to be made is that industries in space, farms on the asteroids, and hotels on the Moon, which are probably part of the moderately near future, may be more readily accepted when placed in the perspective of a longer term future which possibly may include such a mammoth undertaking as the dismantling of Jupiter. 2. Science fiction in futures study The place of science fiction (SF) in futures study can best be appreciated by considering the range of forecasting methods which can be used. Figure 1 provides a suggested scheme for classifying forecasting methods. In "Educating for the Future" it is emphasized that different forecasting methods may be more or less appropriate for various purposes. For example, many decision-makers in government and private enterprise display an almost obsessive preoccupation with extrapolating statistics into the future, often in circumstances where the appropriateness of quantified information is not questioned. Some future events are very predictable, especially where human voluntarism is not a factor (e.g. predicting the time of the next solar eclipse) or has minimal effects (e.g. predicting that a certain percentage of all children born in Australia in 1981 will be male). Population statistics are also relatively reliable, especially when they deal with the aging of an existing population. Thus, it is relatively safe to expect that the Australian population will continue to age, and that 51% will be over 30 years of age in 1986 — which, incidentally, will be the first time in two centuries of Caucasian history that the number of over-30s exceed the number of under-30s (IBIS, 1980. 25). But


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FIGURE 1 Classification of forecasting methods 1. Extrapolative:

methods of projecting present trends into the future.

2. Combinatory:

methods for relating various kinds of projected change to each other and identifying consequences. Examples are models (including computer models), simulations, cross-impact analysis, relevance trees, technology assessments.

3. Consensus:

methods for gathering opinions about the future. Examples are Delphi and genius forecasting.

4. Creative:

methods for speculating about futures that are not necessarily projectable from present trends. Examples are science fiction, scenario building, Utopias, . dystopias.

other social trends are less easy to predict, and such extrapolations as the following must be treated with caution: If we continue to dismember the American family at the present accelerating rate, we shall run out of families before we run out of oil . . . i.e. if the number of married couples decreases at the accelerating rate it has over the past few years, there will be no husband-wife families by the year 2008. (Etzioni, 1980, 28) Clearly, modelling the future on such extrapolations alone is inadequate. Much of the future resists prediction, and attempts to do so in any detail usually appear ludicrous within a very few years. It may be that the most we can hope to do is to map out some of the boundaries within which possible futures might lie, but to define these boundaries requires imagination and invention as well as extrapolation. The need for imagination in forecasting is illustrated in "Educating for the Future" by reference to the failures of past forecasts. Such examples as the following are considered in terms of why the erstwhile prophets were so wrong; The abolishment of pain in surgery is a chimera. Knife and pain are two words in surgery that must forever be associated. (Dr. Alfred Velpeau, 1839) The Americans have need of the telephone — but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys. (Sir William Preece, Chief Engineer of the British Post Office, 1876) The demonstration that no possible combination of known substances, known forms of machinery, and known forms of force can be united in a practical machine by which men shall fly long distances through the air seems to the writer as complete as it is possible for the demonstration of any physical fact to be. (Simon Newcomb, American astronomer, 1906)


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. . . too far fetched to be considered. (The editor of Scientific American writing to Robert Goddard in 1940 about Goddard's idea of a rocketaccelerated airplane bomb) The energy produced by the breaking down of the atom is a very poor kind of thing. Anyone who expects a source of power from the transformation of these atoms is talking moonshine. (Ernest Rutherford, 1933) Americans require a restful quiet in the moving-picture theatre, and for them talking . . . on the screen destroys the illusion. Devices for projecting the film actor's speech can be prefaced, but the idea is not practical. (Thomas Edison, 1926) All of the above items were reported in various editions of Omni, a magazine of speculative science and science fiction. The pronouncements of Newcomb, Rutherford and especially Edison remind us that, with monotonous regularity, apparently competent men have laid down the law about what is possible or impossible — and have been proved utterly wrong. Some of these errors are what Clarke (1973) calls "failures of nerve" which occur when even given all the relevant facts, the forecaster cannot see that they point to an inescapable conclusion. In the examples quoted above, both Newcomb and the editor of Scientific American are obviously guilty of failures of nerve. The other kind of forecasting error identified by Clarke is the "failure of imagination", which occurs when all the available facts are appreciated and marshalled correctly, but when all the really vital facts are still undiscovered and the possibility of their existence is not admitted. Rutherford, for example, did not imagine that a nuclear reaction might be discovered which liberated more energy than that taken to initiate it. We can help the teachers and pupils of tomorrow to avoid failures of nerve and imagination by affording opportunities to practice a wide range of thinking skills and by trying not to lock our students (and ourselves) into a single pattern of thinking, such as may be engendered by relying too heavily on extrapolation from existing situations. This point is illustrated by an incident in "Educating for the Future" in which a student suggested that a possible method of assessing future economic well-being might be to extrapolate Gross National Product (GNP) to the year 2000; this was challenged by another student who suggested that it might be more useful to consider the possible alternative ways in which economic well-being might be measured at that time. There may be many possible futures and one needs to stretch imagination to its limits to conceive an array of alternative futures. Fortunately, there is no need to rely on our unassisted imaginations. Speculating about the future is supported by a large array of readily available resources, among the most important of which are those bodies of literature known as science fiction (SF) and speculative non-fiction, together with their equivalents in other media. The relationship between futures studies and science fiction posited in "Educating for the Future" is similar to that outlined by Arthur C.Clarke:



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Over the last thirty years, tens of thousands of stories have explored all the conceivable, and most of the inconceivable, possibilities of the future; there are few things that can happen that have not been described somewhere, in books or magazines. A critical — the adjective is important — reading of science fiction is essential training for anyone wishing to look more than 10 years ahead. The facts of the future can hardly be imagined ab initio by those who are unfamiliar with the fantasies of the past. This claim may produce indignation, especially among those second-rate scientists who sometimes make fun of science fiction (I have never known a first-rate one to do so — and I know several who write it). But the simple fact is that anyone with sufficient imagination to assess the future realistically would, inevitably, be attracted to this form of literature. I do not for a moment suggest that more than one per cent of science fiction readers would be reliable prophets; but I do suggest that almost a hundred per cent of reliable prophets will be science fiction readers — or writers. (Clarke, 1973,14-15) The best SF writers deserve attention in futures studies because they rarely display failures of nerve and imagination. On the other hand, scientists themselves seem to have made rather poor prophets even when dealing with matters close to their own interests. For example, Lee De Forrest, inventor of the electron tube, declared in 1926 that: While theoretically and technically television may be feasible, yet commercially and financially I consider it an impossibility, a development of which we need waste little time in dreaming. However, De Forrest was guilty of an even greater failure of nerve in 1957: But to place a man in a multi-stage rocket and project him into the controlling gravitational field* of the moon, where the passenger can make scientific observations, perhaps land alive, and then return to earth —all that constitutes a wild dream worthy of Jules Verne. (De Forrest, in Reader's Digest, June 1957) De Forrest is fairly typical of those critics who accuse SF authors of being over-imaginative, but his specific reference to Jules Verne is singularly inappropriate. Like many SF writers, Verne was quite conservative in many of his prophesies; for example, he predicted that television would be invented in the 29th century. Nevertheless, Verne's prophecy is trivially inaccurate compared to De Forrest's failure of nerve in respect of a technology he helped to invent. It may be that too great a burden of knowledge can clog the wheels of imagination and, if so, science fiction might be a useful lubricant. Speculative non-fiction can also challenge our own and our students' thinking. For example, one student, reviewing Gerard K. O'Neill's The High Frontier (in which O'Neill details the technological possibilities of agricultural and industrial colonies in space), took issue with the following statement: In the energy-rich environment of a space community, it will normally be more efficient to recover and separate industrial waste products for their


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useful materials, but if any smoke or gases do escape from a factory they will be carried by the solar wind all the way out of our solar system, never to add pollution to the environment. (O'Neill, 1978) The student commented: Never to add pollution to whose environment? I would like to ask Mr. O'Neill to defend the ethics of merely removing pollutants from our solar system. If one is to be open-minded, might not this pollution affect the atmosphere of other alien colonies or planets? The student's comment is both provocative and perceptive: it raises the whole question of what moral duty (if any) humans have toward extra-terrestrial aliens (if any). Furthermore, the issue being considered is far from irrelevant to present-day concerns, as indicated by a recent news item headed "Space may get nuclear garbage". The item referred to a contract awarded by NASA to the Boeing company "to help find if potentially dangerous wastes can be fired into eternal orbit around the Sun, into another solar system or elsewhere in the universe" (The Age, 21 May 1980). STUDENT RESPONSE TO "EDUCATING FOR THE FUTURE" One of the most gratifying aspects of "Educating for the Future" has been the enthusiasm of students in tackling the problems and issues presented in the unit and the high quality of work they produce in response to the set tasks. Many students have reported that the unit has led them to see their teaching specializations in a new light (it should perhaps be noted in passing that the unit has drawn students from all of Rusden's academic areas: Drama, Environmental Studies, Home Economics, Language and Literature, Media Studies, Legal Studies and Commerce, Psychology, Physical Education and Social Studies). Student-led seminars on "inventing the future" produced diverse topics and views — often controversial and thought-provoking — which stimulated a great deal of discussion and debate. For example, in a recent series of seminars, the following topics were introduced by students majoring in home economics: the future of schooling in third world and industrialized countries; transportation; the future of entertainment; urban development and housing; and the possibilities of interspecies communication. Most of the students who have undertaken "Educating for the Future" have not been regular readers of science fiction or speculative non-fiction at the outset. However, nearly all of them have voluntarily read beyond the minimum requirements of the unit, and appear to have found the experience enjoyable. Some students in "Educating for the Future" have also voluntarily assisted in Project IF (Inventing the Future) which involves the production of flexible curriculum materials (chiefly in the form of pupil worksheets) for use in secondary classrooms. The worksheets are based on the belief that the best way to cope with the surprises of the future is to rehearse the experience of surprise (that is, we get ready for the future by trying to surprise ourselves and our pupils). A detailed description of Project IF is beyond the scope of this article, but it should be noted that the process of developing the worksheets is seen by participants to be both enjoyable and edifying: in developing resources



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for teaching about the future we are discovering more about what the future has to teach. CONCLUSION The ideas outlined above have been supported by necessarily brief evidence and/or arguments. The proposals appear to have validity in the Rusden situation and futures studies are seen to be a valuable component of Rusden's teacher education programme. There is a view of curriculum that suggests that such educational proposals should not be presented with a view that they be accepted but, rather, that they be regarded as tentative hypotheses to be tested by other workers in other situations. This article can be regarded as an invitation to other interested teacher educators to consider mounting futures studies programmes, or programme components, in their situations. REFERENCES BERRY, A. The next ten thousand years. London: Jonathon Cape, 1974. CLARKE, A. C. Profiles of thefuture. (2nd edn.). London: Pan, 1973. DYSON, F. J. The search for exterterrestrial technology. In: MARSHAK, R. G. (Ed.) Perspectives in modern physics. New York: Interscience, 1966. ETZIONI, A. The last american family. Next, 1, 2, 1980. GARDNER, G. The case for social futurology in schools. In: TONKIN, C. B. (Ed.) Innovation in social education. Carlton, Vic.: Pitman Pacific Books, 1975. O'NEILL, G. K. The high frontier: human colonies in space. London: Jonathon Cape, 1977. ZUCKERMAN, E. The search for profit on the last frontier, Rolling Stone, November 2, 1978. Noel Gough, Curriculum and Teaching Department, Rusden College of Advanced Education, 662 Blackburn Road, Clayton 3168, Australia.