ABSTRACT
Paolo Landri
What theoretical frameworks inspire your work? Is there is any evolution in the theoretical background of your work?
Keri FacerI am pretty eclectic, and I don’t sit within one tradition in particular, although increasingly I’m inclined to restate my allegiance to cultural studies as a field. I started off in Literature and media/cultural studies, and my phd was in sociology of education – so I was drawn to Gramsci, for his deep attention to how language discloses and constructs our ideas of what is possible and for his analysis of how consent is produced for ways of being that are clearly harmful to so many. I’ve always sat at the intersection of social sciences and the humanities, in the same way as people like Maxine Greene who have given themselves permission to look at the interaction of educational, political and artistic practices, particularly in relation to the imagination.
Over the years, I’ve spent a lot of my time in educational studies looking at how the idea of the future acts as an organizing heuristic to shape social action and to determine what we should do in education – and to challenging that assumption when it is dominated by techno-utopian fantasies and neo-liberal imaginaries. This brought me into the orbit of Futures Studies and Anticipation Studies, who have thought long and hard about how to create critical and emancipatory relations to thinking with the not-yet. I suppose this is where I have spent a lot of time, looking at how social imaginaries in education are bringing particular realities into being, how these are (or should be) sites of contestation, and how we might pluralize and diversify the processes of making such social imaginaries in and for education. I draw, for example, on Ruth Levitas, working on critical and utopian traditions; Sheila Jasanoff, from science and technology studies; critical futurists like Sohail Inayatullah. As my interest in the ecological breakdown has grown, I’ve also turned to eco-psychology, socio-material and posthumanist thinking, because these helpfully disrupt the idea that futures are simply in the gift of social practice and structures.
Paolo LandriThe idea of democratizing future literacy came across in many of your works. What does it mean exactly?
Keri FacerI was struck years ago by a metaphor Manuel Castells offers – he described futures as the programs on which the system runs, this is why they matter – you can think of the idea of the future that prevails in a situation as one of the key factors that is pulling reality into being. The question then, is where do these ideas come from? What I am interested in is how we create, through education and through public pedagogy, ways of imagining the future that involves a much wider variety of different groups, that invites us to think critically about our assumptions – not just what we think will happen, but what our desires are. This obviously also means engaging with pasts and histories as well. Futures literacy as a term, however, is one I have an ambivalent relationship with – it risks turning futures thinking into an expert practice, whereas I am keen to keep us aware of the many different ways everyone, already, engages with futures – so, futures literacies if you like. This isn’t to say that there isn’t a bunch of people who have spent a lot of time asking questions about our ideas of the future – and this is worth respecting – but to risk formalizing this as a form of specialist expertise is
Paolo LandriCould we summarize by saying that your main research interest is understanding the relationship between time and education?
Keri FacerToday, that’s definitely one of my priorities – shifting away from a focus just on ‘the future’ to thinking about time more widely. There are so many ways in which time and education interact with each other. I am working on a project, the ‘Times of a Just Transition’ with the British Academy, where we are bringing people together from around the world to interrogate how time, timing, temporality and rhythms structure our imagination and our perception of justice, specifically in relation to decisions we are making about our response to climate change. My specific interest there is in temporal pedagogies – how we are using time and teaching with time, to structure our perceptions of the possible and of fairness. Just think about the language of urgency, for example, and what flows from that; or the assumption that climate change is a problem of the last 50 years rather than taking into account the deeper time frames of colonial extraction, or the rhythms that structure international consultations and who these support and exclude. These raise big questions for education and educators as well – how do we invite our students to think about, to reflect upon their own temporal assumptions? Time is taught in a fragmented way in schools – and indeed, these bigger reflexive invitations to think about how our temporal assumptions structure so many of our day to day and life assumptions, are simply not there. So, it’s no surprise really that we are struggling as societies to grapple with something like climate change that requires engagement with complex temporalities, inter-generational relations, deep time, tipping points, exponential growth, rhythms of ocean circulation, co-ordinating the timescales of methane molecules and political cycles – I could go on…
Paolo LandriTo what extent are Futures Studies a way to criticize the current way of considering the dominant way of making the future in education?
Keri FacerFutures Studies has a 60-year history that is pretty poorly understood outside the field and yes, it has a lot of relevance for education (in fact, there’s a pretty under-valued but important tradition of futures work in education, but that’s another story). I wrote a piece for UNESCO last year that draws on basic Futures Studies principles, to outline (at least) five different modes of thinking about the future that are at play in education and that it would be helpful for us to distinguish between. It’s about becoming aware of the different ways in which, to use Riel Miller’s term, we ‘use the future’ in education. We can’t help thinking with it and about it, but we have choices about how we do so. For example, that piece argued that on some occasions we are concerned with futures of education – i.e. coming up with images of the future way in which we might ‘do education’, this can be critical utopian work or it can be totalizing technofantasy. This is different from thinking about how education can shape futures, i.e. education for futures, where the focus is on how education can shape future worlds – again, this can be neoliberal visions or radical emancipatory visions – but this is where education is seen as an actor on the future. We’ve also got a whole group of people who are concerned to resist the future in education, to see schools as a space and a time outside the future, where something new can emerge – this is more of the critical humanist philosophical tradition, which sees schools as sites of suspension of time – Jan Masschelein, Gert Biesta, Sharon Todd, Deborah Osberg for example, all make related arguments here. Then again, we have the idea of education as a site of critique of and reflection upon ideas of the future – whether this is Giroux, critical democratic education or the tradition of futures in education. And finally, we have a growing field of reparative futures, where education is seen as a place of healing pasts, and Vanessa Andreotti or Arathi Sriprakash’s work might be central here.
A challenge for me is that we need to develop a language for these different relationships we are assuming between education and this thing we call ‘the future’, and become critically reflexive about when we mobilize these conceptions and to what end.
Paolo LandriIf I understand your reasoning well, you are very interested in leaving the question of the future open. If I am interpreting well, what you are saying, what is at stake in thinking about education policy, is that, in a way, current discourse suggests the future is already done; it is not something that we can discuss or shape. Is that correct?
Keri FacerMy position is a kind of situated critique of the relationship between education and the future – an attempt to keep us thinking, not allowing us to settle into an unexamined set of assumptions. For example, if I am in a policy situation, where somebody says, this is what the future is, you know, it’s known, and we’ve got to prepare people for it, then I will want to say: ‘What is your evidence for that? What are the different ways in which this ‘future’ might pan out?’ At the same time, if I am working with people who are in a situation where they are very uncertain about what the future might bring, where the situation is seen as so radically open that they don’t know how to act, at that point we might start by saying, where can we see continuities, where are the concrete milestones or events that we might be able to organize some thinking around? Alternatively, if you’ve got a situation, where some people are going to say, “This is the future I want” – that they’ve got this vision that they want to achieve, that they want to mobilize education to create that particular future – then I want to ask: who’s involved in shaping, in making this decision? Whose future is this? What might disrupt this assumption? But reciprocally, if people are in a situation where they know what they don’t want, they can be very clear about the future that they don’t want to see, but they have no positive program, they have no alternative, they have no imagination of what might be desirable, then at that point you want to say: “Well, look. How do you start generating a vision of the future that might be desirable?” The point here is that too often different groups get stuck in particular ways of thinking about futures in education and become less and less aware that there are alternative frames. Whereas, I want to say that the future is something we think with. So, we need to know how we are thinking with it, and we need to consider how we mobilise it. In many ways, I think my role when I work with people in this area, is often about generating a degree of what a few people have called, after Keats, negative capability. Roberto Unger uses this concept of negative capability to talk about becoming aware of the as-yet unrealised potential in any social situation. Margaret Archer uses a similar concept of spontaneous meta-reflexivity, which is a form of situated awareness of the ever-shifting nature of what is emerging while at the same time cultivating the seeds of what we think is good in this dynamic situation. This is for me what we are trying to do when we are thinking reflexively about how we use the future, open ourselves up to possibilities in the present without trying to colonise what comes next.
Paolo LandriOk, so, if I understand well, your position is completely different from the scenarios of OECD on schooling where you have on the table four different futures, like they were the only possibilities that we have. In your case, you try not to give four scenarios, but opening the floor to many, to multiple possibilities.
Keri FacerAbsolutely – although the process of making scenarios can be a useful activity, I’m less sure how helpful it always is to work with scenarios other people have developed other than as a starting point for a new conversation. In the end, my position is a commitment to the openness of the future as an ethical stance and to the necessity of a pluralistic conversation about what futures we want to bring into being. This isn’t just radical openness. If we want to try to keep the future open, then sometimes we have to make some normative decisions; we have to present and prevent certain things from happening because they will close futures forever.
Paolo LandriYou have also presented the idea of the pedagogy of the present. What exactly does this mean? Could you give some examples?
Keri FacerWell, this is something I am still working on. It starts from a resistance to seeing the present if you like, as a ‘thin’ moment that is impossible to grasp and where there’s nothing going on. It starts from a phrase that kept coming to my mind – ‘the richness of the meanwhile’ – which captured, for me a sense of the shift that happens when you work in groups, when people become aware of what is already happening, what is growing, what depths and complexity there is in the present, and the impossibility of seeing and knowing everything going on even at the moment. It is a way of thinking that draws, for example, on the idea of building common knowledge that Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons talk about – on the richness and complexity of conversation that happens when people bring different lives to the table. It draws on Deborah Osberg’s work on symbiotic anticipation – which in turn draws on a different way of thinking about evolution, inspired by Lyn Margulis – which is about the new emerging from encounters, from that sort of curiosity about the other that asks ‘what if we shimmied around like this’ and would something else come out of it. It also, I suppose, focuses on the generative nature of ignorance – if the ‘meanwhile’ is ‘rich’ – there is power in knowing that we don’t know it all, and in that not knowing, also lies possibility. As you know, most of my work hasn’t been in schools recently, so this sort of practice tends to be focused on what’s happening with social movement groups and in public settings – but it is something I’m starting again to work with teachers and my students on, particularly in relation to climate education.
Paolo LandriI found very interesting the notion of ‘pedagogy of present’. For example, when we deal with the idea of a sustainable future, we are overwhelmed by these ideas of apocalyptic thinking. I have seen you are also very much interested in programs for education for a sustainable future.
Keri FacerIt’s trying to find ways where our present isn’t colonized by a particular idea of the future that traps us so we stop seeing the possibilities. The ‘pedagogy of the present’ or the ‘richness of the meanwhile’ started from an idea of abundance, not scarcity. If you think about the present as having so much depth that we cannot see, there are and will be more possibilities than what seems available to us right now. This is not wishful thinking, that is an ontological statement. We are not masters of the present. We don’t know it. Our job is to kind of fish in it, if you imagine us fishing to see what might come out of it and different ontological frames and stories shape how we approach that fishing – which is why I’m so interested in stories and ideas of the future. This is a critical thing with this sustainability question: there is obviously this vision, and with reason, of a catastrophic future, I mean, it’s absolutely reasonable to look at that, and to think that seems overwhelming, but, at the same time, in the present, if you look around us and you can see all of the different actors, all around the world, that are experimenting, trying, creating different things. Our job is to network them together, to see how they might create a counter narrative, a different story that might open up futures we cannot imagine from our vantage point right now. It’s that Blochian idea of new possibilities becoming visible with each step, the landscape shifts as we act.
You have to start from a vision of abundance in the present. If you allow the vision of potential catastrophe to dominate your vision of the present, you get stuck in the impossible assumption that it’s all too difficult. But if you can say that there’s more going on now than we can see and you then start looking for it, you see the present as a place that you want to fish in, to find the things that might be resources and of all things. Hope is not an emotion. Hope is not wishful thinking. Hope is an intentional act. The construction of hope is precisely what we do with the pedagogy of the present. We are intentionally trying to find the resources that might allow us to bring a different sort of future into being.
Paolo LandriCould you give an example of where you have felt that this pedagogy of the present has been embodied in a particular project?
Keri FacerWe can see it in a whole load of places and in many people’s work. Jan Masschelein’s poor pedagogy does something similar. I’m also drawn to the work of the teams working in South Africa with Heila Lotz Sisitka, on transformative learning. And to Vanessa Andreotti’s work in Canada – particularly the brilliant project ‘Moving With Storms’ that they just completed this last year – that works in a powerful way with temporality, with pasts and futures, with nurturing possibility in the present. In my own work, this approach just permeates what I do, all conversations. But perhaps I can point to a project a couple of years ago, in Sweden, where we were doing work on the sustainable future for the city. We ran a very complicated but beautiful process of public pedagogy, where we decided to focus the conversation around the river in the city. So, most cities – many cities – have rivers, and these cities revolve around rivers. We brought together scientists, who could tell us the story of the river and of what was going on in it at the moment; we brought local politicians; we brought artists who could take us around the local area to see it in different ways; and we ran a process where we had probably about 50 or 60 people that came together in a castle next to the river, to talk together about what they were seeing. And then, a smaller group – about 40, took a walk along the river, to encounter it, and then to participate in what Joanna Macy calls “A council of all beings”, which is where people are invited to inhabit the identity of different actors in that river. And so, we had people thinking about what it might be like to be a reed in the river, or a duck, or somebody who’s running the boats along the river. You know, people that live next to it, all the trees… and we talked together about what was going on in that space, and what responsibilities might come from this for us in our different work responsibilities. And what came out of that practice was a much richer awareness of what was going on in a particular time, but also a sense of possibility of what we might do together that was different. So, it focused our attention in really different ways upon the city, upon the place and our possibility of working together. It allowed us to see the world differently, and also that allowed us to see our relationships between each other differently. That allowed us to generate some political projects, research projects and some further educational projects.
Paolo LandriHave you some examples where this pedagogy of the present is evident in your work, or that of other scholars, and where this idea of thinking about alternative futures of the platformization of education has occurred?
Keri FacerIn relation to the platformisation of education, I’m guessing you are interested in how these questions relate to the whole edtech field. This is something we’re working on at Bristol with the Centre for Sociodigital Futures. And yes, it’s in the area of educational technology that a lot of this more critical futures practice is needed – too often in edtech we are too enthralled with the visions of future technology that are coming from outside education, from the tech industries. Often, this is just a distraction – look at this shiny future over here, don’t deal with what is happening right now, don’t look for the simpler, easier, more humane responses to the problems in education. We need a lot more engagement with the alternative possibilities for education in the present. I’m mean, I’ve been saying this with Neil Selwyn for at least two decades now, we need critical futures in education technology and we need a lot more emphasis on reimagining and co-developing with educators, students, communities. To be honest, that is what we were doing in FutureLab, in the early 2000s. We spent eight years putting educators and technologists and others in the same space, to start trying to create new approaches to edtech together – in the end, we struggled to translate these emergent practices into widescale change, which taught me a lot about needing to work at multiple levels, not just prefigurative prototyping, but changing the conditions and assumptions that drive educational systems – which is back to narratives of the future again.
Paolo LandriIn my research, I found some examples where the future is completely colonized by the socio-technical imaginary, to use the concept that you mentioned before. It is very difficult for teachers to develop alternative thinking.
Keri FacerAbsolutely, and now we have the next wave of edtech hype and extraction, as Ben Williamson’s work shows, specifically focused around AI and platforms for learning; there are a whole range of futures being presented that we definitely don’t want to see arising. So – there’s some resistance work that is needed. We are also dealing with the fact that education is being seen in markets now as a site of investment and profit margins. It’s a bit wild west out there. One of the reasons I stepped away from the edtech field for a while was precisely because I think that this area has been so colonized that it can be hard to find room for manoeuvre, to find that balance for possibility within systems of extraction. I wrote a chapter a few years ago in which there was a bit of a mea culpa for my own involvement in that field for a long time – and the naivety I displayed then, thinking that we could relatively easily appropriate the introduction of edtech for humane purposes.
Paolo LandriYou are thinking that in ed-tech, there is the risk to be captured in their dominant mechanisms?
Keri FacerAbsolutely. We need non-naive approaches. Erica McWilliams used the phrase “non-stupid optimism”, which I like. It is about holding open both the possibility of what we might want to see happen and at the same time, the critical awareness of just what we are up against. In other words, you need an awareness of the context that you are going to try to grow emerging ideas in and of what might stifle them at birth. One useful practice to help with this, and that I have been using a lot recently for thinking about the future of universities is Bill Sharpe’s “three horizons approach” [Bill Sharpe, Three Horizons. The Patterning of Hope]. This invites three key questions: what is the critique of the world that we have now, what are its weaknesses, where is it failing. The second question is – what is the world that we want to see, where are all our dreams pulling us. The third question is – what is emerging in the present, just beginning to act on the world, and how can that be pulled towards the futures we desire rather than be co-opted to prop up the harms of the world as we see it now. This last question is where the richness of the meanwhile comes in – it invites us to get out, to look around us, to ask what is coming up and to weave that into our critiques of what has been and what is. What I like about this practice, is that it invites us to live with dynamism: the future is constantly being made. I am trying to resist the idea that the future is out there, away from you. What we have is this constant ongoing dynamic process, where we are always trying to tip the balance of everything that is emerging in the present towards the future that we want. It is not falling into the trap of trying to make some blueprint that says: ‘This is where we are going’ because that becomes totalizing, or of simply giving up. It suggests that we are implicated, connected both to these emerging technologies and to the ecological and historical conditions that we are part of. We are thick in the middle of it all.
Paolo LandriIt seems to me that it is the idea of the future as an emerging process and reminds of the article you have published with Arathi Sriprakash named ‘Provincializing the future.’
Keri FacerYes, we have to recognize that the temporality that we have inherited is fairly specific to a particular worldview and in a particular culture. There are different ways of thinking about time and our position in it. Specifically, we are seeing a huge resurgence of interest in Indigenous conceptions of time – from the relational temporality of land, to new metaphors that position us as walking backwards into the future, or the idea of thinking with seven generations (to name a few examples). We are also seeing a growth in Buddhist thinking about time, questioning attention to time’s arrow, and inviting an attention to the ongoing present. It’s a very exciting moment, when our temporal frames are shifting and opening up – because when they do, that invites us to think differently about so many things. It invites us to think beyond planning and forecasting, to engage with time as situated, as relational. For education in particular, this is potentially transformative and inevitably disruptive. What would educational governance look like if it relaxed its obsession on futures-planning?
Paolo LandriI think that this relates to what we are inheriting about modern education. Are you proposing to counter modernity?
Keri FacerIf we are thinking about modernity as a world concept of individuals isolated from each other, this separation of humans from each other and from the other beings on this planet, this modernist, techno-centric worldview, then yes, I am against that. For the practical reason that is makes no empirical sense at all – as the ecological crisis is making clear. But I also think exploring conceptions of reality beyond modernity opens up a whole set of possibilities. If we conceive of ourselves as ongoing processes, rather than as atomistic individuals, then that may create a lot more possibilities for action, it invites attention to creative unintended consequences. If we think of ourselves as processes, as entangled with each other, as waves, as relational, it is a very different worldview from if we think of ourselves as isolated individuals whose actions are constrained. This sort of understanding of reality, that post-quantum idea of ourselves as waves rather than particles, to me, opens spaces of radical imagination that we struggle to see in a modern worldview. It prevents foreclosure of possibility, it opens up the potential for disruption, it demands modesty in the claims we are making – good and bad – about what might happen.
And yes, I am interested in spaces of radical imagination in the sense of going deep, of exploring roots, of thinking of pasts as beneath us rather than behind us, as part of the material we are inevitably working with, and futures as, if you like, what we are growing towards – I sometimes think it makes sense to work with the tree as temporal metaphor rather than the arrow.
I’ve just spent this afternoon working with a whole load of people from different disciplines, trying to support a critical conversation about the futures we might want as well as the difficulties we face. And it’s clear we have had so little training in reflecting on how we think about time and futures, and we have just a few, quite worn, tools – some more or less useful. And particularly in sociology, we can often be encouraged to critique rather than imagine and make futures – and so, as a result, its left to the engineers and the economists, who, in turn don’t always want to believe that things might not turn out as modelled. And then we are surprised that we’ve ended with the world we’ve got? I mean – it’s not that surprising. The good news is, I guess, that it’ll be interesting to see what happens when we do manage to open up our repertoire for thinking with time – it’s may offer a whole world of possibility.
