Future-Focused Education

IF 0.4 0 RELIGION Religion & Education Pub Date : 2020-10-28 DOI:10.1093/obo/9780199756810-0258
J. Gilbert
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Abstract

‘Future-focused education’ is not an easily definable or coherent body of knowledge. It is best described as an emerging cluster of ideas, beliefs, theories, and practices drawn from many sources, within and outside education, that are mobilized in different ways to support different purposes. The unifying idea, if there is one, is the contention that major change is needed in education if it is to meet future needs. However, there is little consensus on what these needs are or how they are best met. Educationists started to talk about future-focused education thirty or forty years ago, but although we use many new words, our education systems have not changed very much. In today’s context, future-focused education work has several very different strands. In one influential strand, education’s links to work and the economy are foregrounded. This work emphasizes the skills people need to participate—and drive economic growth—in today’s knowledge-based, networked economies, and argues that education’s purpose is to develop them. These skills are many and varied. In some work they are called the “4Cs”: creativity, critical thinking, collaboration and communication. But references to a range of other ‘soft’ skills— for example, innovation, agility, entrepreneurship, digital literacy, and design thinking—are common. Learning is also emphasized: Education’s primary purpose is to foster ‘learning skills’ and the ‘disposition’ for independent, lifelong learning. Other strands of future-focused education work are strongly critical of the focus on work skills and learning. For some educationists, this focus is linked with, and driven by, the demands of global capitalism, not by educational considerations. Others say that it is based on impoverished views of both education and the future. Educational futurists argue that major change is needed to build the higher-order, more ‘evolved’ forms of thinking everyone needs to function well in a world characterized by uncertainty and complexity. In other strands, educationists explore how changes in the meaning and use of knowledge, increased cultural diversity, and the sustainability movement strongly challenge prevailing notions of curriculum. Others have worked on reorienting traditional curriculum content to be not an end in itself but a context for building “learning power” and the “C-skills” of creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, innovation, and so on. In policy contexts, future-focused education is rhetorically linked to many other concepts, including personalization, inclusion, school-community partnerships, sustainability, citizenship, enterprise, digital literacies, computational thinking, innovative learning environments, and competencies. For space reasons, not all of these concepts are covered here.
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一般教育
“面向未来的教育”不是一个容易定义或连贯的知识体系。最恰当的描述是,它是一种新兴的思想、信仰、理论和实践的集合,这些思想、信仰、理论和实践来自教育内外的许多来源,它们以不同的方式被动员起来,以支持不同的目的。如果有一个统一的观点的话,那就是,如果要满足未来的需求,教育就需要进行重大变革。然而,对于这些需求是什么或如何最好地满足这些需求,几乎没有达成共识。教育学家早在三四十年前就开始谈论面向未来的教育,但是尽管我们使用了很多新词,我们的教育体系并没有太大的变化。在今天的背景下,面向未来的教育工作有几个非常不同的方面。在一个有影响力的方面,教育与工作和经济的联系得到了重视。这本书强调了在当今以知识为基础的网络化经济中,人们参与并推动经济增长所需的技能,并认为教育的目的是培养这些技能。这些技能是多种多样的。在一些工作中,它们被称为“4c”:创造力、批判性思维、协作和沟通。但是提到一系列其他“软”技能——例如,创新、敏捷、创业、数字素养和设计思维——是很常见的。学习也被强调:教育的主要目的是培养“学习技能”和“性格”的独立,终身学习。其他面向未来的教育工作对关注工作技能和学习非常关键。对一些教育家来说,这种关注与全球资本主义的需求有关,并受到其驱动,而不是出于教育方面的考虑。另一些人说,这是基于对教育和未来的贫乏看法。教育未来学家认为,需要进行重大变革,以建立更高层次、更“进化”的思维形式,每个人都需要在一个以不确定性和复杂性为特征的世界中发挥作用。在其他方面,教育学家探讨了知识的意义和使用的变化、文化多样性的增加和可持续性运动如何强烈地挑战了课程的主流观念。另一些人则致力于重新定位传统课程内容,使其本身不是目的,而是培养“学习能力”和创造力、批判性思维、协作、创新等“c技能”的环境。在政策背景下,面向未来的教育在修辞上与许多其他概念联系在一起,包括个性化、包容性、学校-社区伙伴关系、可持续性、公民身份、企业、数字素养、计算思维、创新学习环境和能力。由于篇幅的原因,这里没有涵盖所有这些概念。
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来源期刊
CiteScore
1.30
自引率
0.00%
发文量
16
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