Conference Agenda

Temporality and its conceptions are fundamental to educational discourse, policy, and practices. More specifically, education is often and ubiquitously put about a specific kind of temporality, i.e., the future and ideas about possible and/or (un)desirable futures (e.g., Arendt, 1954). While (the concept of) future is often put in relation to education in rhetorical, tokenistic, or even instrumental ways, there are indeed different aspects of this bond that have been recognized and analyzed from diverse ontological and epistemological perspectives. For instance, we may think about how education will look like in the future, how it concurs in building the future or how it prepares students for the future, on the other hand, we may invert the relationship and ask ourselves how ideas and attitudes towards the future affect educational thinking, practices, and policies today. Here, for instance, ideas about technology and their role in future societal settings – so-called sociotechnical imageries (Jasanoff and Kim, 2013) – inform and define present discourses, practices and policies pertaining to education. This often happens in normative, preparative, or even speculative ways. In fact, as Facer (2021) summarizes, in the educational sector ‘the future’ can be subject to many diverse activities following heterogeneous aims: prediction, imagination, speculation, (adaptive or agentic) preparation, critique, emancipation, suspension, reflection and even repair. These activities, and the effects they induce upon present and future schooling, also depend upon which actors (students, teachers, policymakers, tech companies, financial speculators), interests (pedagogical, economic, political, … ), and generations participate in the construction of specific ideas, attitudes and conceptions of the future, but also upon how near or far the imagined future may be conceived.

In this paper, we are interested in discussing and confronting educational futures (and of futures in education) of small and rural schools. Education and educational practices are always embedded within broader territorial systems that define geographically specific needs, desires, constraints and grammar of school. Subsequently, educational conceptions of the future – and their influences and effects on the present – may also vary depending on territorial differences and specificities (Boix et al., 2015). Small and rural schools have specific features, needs, and grammar of school when compared with bigger schools in urban areas, for instance, regarding student numerosity and heterogeneity, classroom organisation or integration with other territorial actors and institutions. In this regard, one of the many questions arising is where, for which areas, and with which consequences educational futures are imagined, perceived, produced, built, or speculated upon.

By drawing on the current interest in the future in sociology (see the special issue in Sociological Review, 2016; New Media and Society, 2021; Qualitative Inquiry, 2022; Levitas, 2013; Urry, 2016) and on the ongoing investigation in small schools in Italy resulting from a collaboration between CNR-IRPPS and INDIRE, we will present social imageries of small schools emerging from participatory research with three schools aiming at stimulate bottom-up projects that makes operational the idea of the school as a learning hub. Our idea is to propose to work with the concept of ‘school as learning hub’ as a possible future scenario of the future grammar of the school in well-known OCDE scenarios of schooling to understand: a) how the idea of ‘school as learning hub’ may give a name to their schooling practices, and act as concrete (what could or ought to be), an abstract (core principles to engage critically with the present), or latent future (future in the making, but yet to materialise) (Halford & Southerton, 2023) for the three cases; c) to what extent this exercise of the future may help small schools stimulate their singularity and creativity in a bottom-up way.

Schools in the UK are currently at a disjuncture with regards to LGBT inclusion. In England, ‘LGBT content’ has been added to the curriculum for Relationships and Sex Education (RSE). Within this, government advice is tenuous, with notions of age appropriateness and parental consultations dominating guidance. These polices are also framed within a neoliberal climate, where structural inequalities are masked, and individualised solutions are favoured (Woolley, 2017). The resulting implementation of LGBT practices, and policies has been variable, both within and between schools (Llewellyn & Reynolds 2021). This picture sits alongside a rise in opposition to LGBT inclusion in schools (Nash & Brown, 2021).

In light of these contending notions, it is important to be sceptical of universal and linear narratives of progress which permeate modernity (Brown, 2001), education and research (Facer, 2023). However, linear narratives are only one of several possible “temporal framings” (Lazar, 2019) that are experienced. Indeed, education itself is often caught between competing conceptions of progress and conservatism. Both advocate a desired future, but each has a different relationship to the past, the former to discard and the second to preserve (Decuypere & Maarten, 2020). These ideas are adjoined to discourses of the desired child through a projected future (Lesko & Talburt, 2012). Arguably, nowhere are the lines between progress and conservativism more keenly drawn than with regards to LGBT inclusion in schools. Within this, conceptions of the desired child are used to advocate for, and notably against, LGBT inclusion. The moral rhetoric of “let kids be kids” (Bialystok & Wright, 2019) regularly appears in campaigns against LGBT inclusion, which can be seen more globally.

One group of people who are at the centre of these contestations are LGBT teachers, who are, to some extent, living their identities, and responding to the presence (or absence) of LGBT within their workplace. Identity formation in general has a relationship to time (du Gay, 2007). For teachers, they operate with the present, yet their work is centred around educational narratives of progress, and of their children’s future. However, teachers have a relationship to schooling through their own experiences, thus there is a recollected past that may impact their practices, perceptions, and identity formation. More broadly, for any individual, a “perception of their past, present and especially their future(s), is inextricably connected to psychological well-being” (Clancy, 2014, p. 36).

For LGBT teachers temporalities have even more significance, as often their own schooling has been harmful. UK schools have historically operated a homophobic relationship to LGBT content and people, with particular significance placed upon the legacy of Section 28 - this stated local authorities shall not “intentionally promote homosexuality” (DES, 1988). The impact of Section 28 has arguably led to decades of silence around sexuality in UK schools. Whilst present day schools may be less overtly homophobic, the inclusion of LGBT content, and treatment of LGBT people is variable, with emphasis often placed upon antibullying strategies, which construct a limiting victim narrative (Monk, 2011). Within this, schools are places that overwhelmingly reproduce heteronormativity; therefore, it is possible, LGBT inclusion is largely present through a “discourse of accommodation” (Omercajic and Martino, 2020). Alongside this, ‘LGBT people’ are also bounded by narratives of inevitable progress. This is demonstrated through public discourses such as the “it gets better” campaign, launched in 2010 in the US, and popularised through celebrities and online video content (West et al. 2013). Whilst these videos offer examples of hope and resistance, it is also possible that that they create a singular hero narrative, that streamlines an acceptable LGBT experience. Again, there is a separation into hero and victim.