As part of a collaboration around education futures, a group of colleagues led by George Veletsianos are co-editing a special collection for the fully open access  International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education. The theme of the collection is “Higher Education Futures at the intersection of justice, hope, and educational technology”. The journal works with a rolling submission framework, so papers are reviewed and (potentially) published as they come in rather than all at once. This is interesting from an editorial point of view!

The final deadline for submissions for this collection is 31 October 2023, but please submit any time before then.

The collection invites prospective authors to turn towards reimagining the futures of education, and to contribute scholarship that speculates what higher education at the intersection of justice, hope, and educational technology could look like. Read all the details of the call on George’s blog.

For me, this way of tackling digital education futures – connecting justice and hope – is potentially really rich, because it suggests the complexity of exploring the idea of ‘responsibility to the future’ (Adam and Groves, 2007, Facer 2021). My recent work around speculative methods has shown me how tricky this is – I’ve tended to think about this in terms of the balance of play and responsbility, for example:

Insisting on responsibility is not to overstate our ability to predict, but instead to recognise that what we do and say about the future matters. Regardless of the complexity involved, teachers and researchers, students and participants can be part of producing new things in the world, including beliefs, practices and technologies (Urry, 2016). In addition, it has implications for how we understand caring… [reframing] care of the future to take account of open-endedness. (Ross 2023, p.50)

I’m really looking forward to seeing the range of different approaches and responses to this call.

Editors for the special collection:

George Veletsianos: Royal Roads University, Canada
Shandell Houlden: Royal Roads University, Canada
Jen Ross: University of Edinburgh, UK
Sakinah Alhadad: Griffith University, Australia
Camille Dickson-Deane: University of Technology Sydney, Australia

References:

Adam, B. and Groves, C. (2007) Future Matters: Action, Knowledge, Ethics. Boston, the Netherlands: Brill.

Facer, K. (2021) Futures in education: Towards an ethical practice. UNESCO. Available at: https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000375792 .

Ross, J. (2023) Digital Futures for Learning: Speculative Methods and Pedagogies. Routledge.

Urry, J. (2016) What is the Future? John Wiley & Sons.