Conference Agenda

This Panel engages the question:

How can schooling, teacher agency and inclusion be reimagined and operationalised as hopeful practices for plural, sustainable and participatory futures?

Within the field of education, there is growing interest in futures discourses. Issues including the future of the planet, the opportunities and fears presented by technological developments in AI, and rising nationalisms have resulted in speculation on the future of education and its role in global society. A recent example is UNESCO’s “Reimagining our futures together: a new social contract for education” report (2021). While education does aim to offer responses to societal crises, as a field it is arguably ‘subsumed under a market logic that prioritizes the development of human capital and economic growth’ (Van dermijnsbrugge & Chatelier, 2022, p.3). As such, its orientation towards the future is too often considered to be a ‘known territory to be mapped and conquered and fought over’ (Facer, 2016, p. 70) resulting in little more than perpetuating a crisis-ridden status quo.

Through this panel, we wish to (re)orient ourselves, together with others, in relation to the field of education and to society more broadly by offering ways of being, thinking and doing that ‘not only help reveal structures and systems of violence, exploitation and domination’ (Haiven & Khasnabish, 2014, p. 85), but also by supporting ‘people’s capacity to imagine and forge paths beyond them’ (Haiven & Khasnabish, 2014, p. 85). To this end, we reimagine the concepts of schooling, teacher agency and inclusion, and the practices that underpin them. Through perspectives centered around plurality, participation and sustainability we wish to create ‘a space where an awareness of difference can lead to new ideas, alliances, solidarities and possibilities’ (Haiven & Khasnabish, 2014, p. 244).

The first project presents a reimagined perspective on schooling via a research study conducted in 2024 with a group of about 40 educators in various roles, with different levels of experience and located in diverse contexts across the globe. They applied utopia as method, a speculative and imaginative practice that goes beyond critical scholarship and requires ontological inquiry and direct action (see Van dermijnsbrugge & Chatelier, 2022), in order to generate a shared imagination of a genuinely alternative future for schooling that is better equipped to respond to society’s most pressing challenges.

The second project focuses on reimagining teacher agency. A recent research project, rooted in Actor-Network-Theory (Latour, 2005), shows how teacher agency is entangled with and often restricted by the agency of things (Oosterhoff et al, 2023). Human agency, decision making and taking action, ‘cannot be realized without an in-depth understanding of education “in its becoming”, as it unfolds and emerges’ as complex more-than-human practices (Gourlay, 2021, p. 165). This study supports educational professionals in gaining insight into the influence of objects in action that shape their profession. Through this insight, they develop a wider sense of response-ability that helps them to critically navigate increasingly complex educational practices.

The third project focuses on inclusive educational practices that are driven by a pedagogy of hope, or, in the words of Webb (2019): pedagogical tact for alternative futures. Ten teacher trainers with leadership roles and expertise in pedagogy participated in a phenomenological study (Middendorp, 2015; Van Manen, 2014) wherein they used the mirror letter as a phenomenological method (Middendorp 2015, 2023) to investigate their experiences with and perspectives on hope in inclusive practices. The mirror letter creates awareness of one's (inclusive) actions and helps to make explicit values of individuals and communities.

This Panel offers opportunities to discuss educational practices, and propose ways of thinking and doing that help offset dominant powers, whilst embracing complexity and uncertainty.