Designing futures through student engagement: A policy futures perspective

Futures research is gaining increased prominence in educational research and development ( Tesar, 2021 ), and particularly now as we emerge from the global COVID-19 pandemic, which has provided a lever for change and an opportunity for innovation in learning, teaching and assessment ( Hall et al., 2020 ; Jandrić et al., 2022 ; Tesar, 2020 ). Designing Futures (DF) is an initiative that aims to transform the student learning experience at university, including through promoting student entrepreneurship and enhanced interaction with enterprise, industry and the innovation sector, supported by a national employability policy agenda, and concomitant, significant government funding. Ireland’s Higher Education Authority has invested €7.57 m in the DF programme at University of Galway for a period of 5 years, 2020–2025. However, introducing such a programme as DF within higher education raises problematic tensions around the purpose of higher education today, as set amidst the current policy futures perspective. Specifically, how do we balance policy imperatives to work more closely with enterprise and industry, while at the same time protecting the essential role of higher education, which must be to provide a formative context for all students to reach their fullest potential as active citizens? This paper helps to position the concept of student engagement, taking DF as an exemplar initiative, and examining the concept as it is construed and deployed in an innovative, futures-oriented educational programme. This review is critical for DF, to ensure we remain fundamentally focused on education, and not just for the world of work, which is of course important, but beyond enterprise and industry: to ensure students’ readiness for the complex and challenging world of today and tomorrow. Furthermore, this constitutes an important contribution to the literature, at a time when the identity of the university and purpose of higher education are the focus of an educationally problematic neoliberal agenda ( Mintz, 2021 ).