Category: UNESCO

Negotiating the Future of Education: The UNESCO’s Futures of Education-initiative and the OECD’s Future of Education and Skills 2030-initiative, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany.

Researchers at Humboldt University (Germany) are studying the entire process of the UNESCO Futures of Education initiative, and they contacted CID to learn more about our involvement in that project. They were interested in our participation for 2 reasons: our focus group was uncommonly diverse, and we proposed a 10th point of action, rather than just discussing the 9 points that the draft proposal outlined. We suggested that

Learning to live together requires intercultural dialogue

and produced a poster showing the relationship between their 9 ideas and our 10th.

Here are further details about the research project:

“In the project “Negotiating the Futures of Education”, we want to analyse how visions of the future of education are negotiated and contested, looking at how narratives about the future of education are constructed by UNESCO and OECD in two currently running projects, Futures of education (UNESCO) and Future of education and skills 2030 (OECD). Our main focus is on understanding the micropolitical “backstage” processes involved in constructing these narratives. We are particularly interested in whether and how formerly marginalized voices and groups are integrated in the process and whether and in which ways these challenge reigning “orthodoxies” in the liberal education script. The project employs a qualitative approach, relying particularly on ethnographic methods, narrative and discourse analysis.”

When the report appears, this post will be updated to include a link.

NOTE: The Center for Intercultural Dialogue held three focus groups as part of the information gathering stage of the Futures of Education project, preparing what we learned as a report for UNESCO, in 2021. A few months later they requested concrete examples from around the world, and we prepared an addendum.

Sobe, Noah W. (2022). The future and the past are unevenly distributed: COVID’s educational disruptions and UNESCO’s global reports on education. Paedagogica Historica, DOI: 10.1080/00309230.2022.2112244

“the future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed”

Willian Gibson

“For half a century the UN’s principal agency on education, UNESCO, has sought to shape the world’s educational landscape through a once-every-generation global report (e.g. the Faure report of 1972 and the Delors report of 1996). The latest of these reports – the Sahle-Work Commission’s “Reimagining our futures together: A new social contract for education” – was developed and released amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. This article considers the ways the pandemic entered into the production of educational futures – and pasts – in this tradition of UNESCO global reports. It argues that the uneven distribution of pasts and futures is one of the key, already- existing systems of difference that set the stage for a disruptive event like the COVID-19 pandemic.” (Sobe, 2022, p. 1)

“The core of the proposed transformation agenda is the call for building “a new social contract for education” that consists of agreed-upon core principles, a redesign of education on multiple dimensions, and a rethinking of the actions and actors that implement and manage educational institutions, programmes and processes.” (Sobe, 2022, p. 8)

As more than one of the Sahle-Work Commission members has noted, the word “together” is the most important word in the report’s title. (Some, 2022, p. 10)

NOTE: The Center for Intercultural Dialogue held focus groups as part of the information gathering stage of the Futures of Education project, preparing what we learned as a report for UNESCO, in 2021.