The Hidden Curriculum of Futures Studies

Abstract

Communicating Futures Studies to graduates steeped in specialized disciplinary domains calls for a well-structured series of thought interventions. To achieve this considerable reflexivity is called for on the teacher’s part. This article looks at futures pedagogy and my personal “hidden curriculum.” These reflections hinge on the teaching of a course titled Business and Media Futures. The skeleton of the course is presented, and an outline of the deeper learning processes is offered as a Causal Layered Pedagogy that incorporates the notion of the five Futures Senses.

Keywords

futures senses futures pedagogy anticipatory imagination hidden curriculum teaching

Futures pedagogy is a hybrid of traditional and nontraditional approaches to learning. It embraces both informal and formal learning and is often most effectively communicated in nonformal settings such as workshops and workplaces where it becomes “real” to students. In this article, I am interested in exploring futures education in the light of the concept of the Futures Senses. I take it as a given that there is always a hidden curriculum at work in any educational setting. Such a curriculum is embedded in the taken-for-granted social processes of educational sites. It is, therefore, performative and informs the habitus of all involved in the school or university.

Given that all teachers and students are never free from the hidden curriculum, I have sought out ways to counter some of its effects by identifying my broader intentions, commitments, and values as a teacher and linking them to how my pedagogy unfolds. In short, I consciously seek to build a learning culture into my pedagogy that seeks to expose elements of the hidden curriculum. Intentionality is key to this work. It brings a reflexivity to teaching that challenges the coercive force of the hidden curriculum. As culture fosters a range of senses as sense-making tools, I have identified five Futures Senses—memory, foresight, voice, optimism, and yearning—as cultural resources operating in the background of my futures teaching. These Futures Senses help me at least manage (offset) the hidden curriculum at work in the broader learning experience. This article consequently unfolds via a series of reflections on the open and closed teaching at work in education to consider the case for Futures Senses, offers a thumbnail overview of a course I have just finished delivering, and finally turns to look at the entire process through the lens of causal layered analysis (CLA).

Open and Closed Teaching

Teaching is central to human activity. All human action is ultimately pedagogical—usually it is the teaching of habit, a way of reinforcing the status quo. Friendships do this, families do this as does much media—such social networks usually maintain the comfort zone of our identities and teach to reinforce our norms, values, and also present and future trajectories. Such teaching also reinforces the “learnings” from shared experiences, shaping and editing memory and identity. These personal, informal domains are intimate and rich and yet generally unreflexive. They represent closed teaching contexts that are insular though comforting, maintaining as they do current identities and shared assumptions.

Some 100 years ago, such informal teaching was challenged by formal education that promised a “modern,” “open” sensibility and the skills and literacies the modern identity was based on. Yet ultimately, it too has come to reinforce business as usual, closed identity formations. Much of the potential and power of formal education has been squandered as it ultimately became a tool of the status quo. Yet this tendency of education to limit rather than enhance, close down rather than open up human potential has been challenged over the years via a series of educational innovations. For example, we have a whole suite of critical pedagogies that focus on the political and intellectual liberatory power of education¹; the cognitive and moral psychological approaches of Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg; and the liberal education approaches of Richard S. Peters,² Martha Naussbaum,³ and Michael Oakshott⁴; then there is a range of “alternatives,” which by their very being challenge and innovate, for instance, there are Montessori and Steiner schools, also integral schools from Aurobindo and Krishnamurti and Neohumanist schools from P R Sarkar, so the list continues.

This restless dissatisfaction with dominant approaches to education seems perennial. And just as well, given that all disciplines have the capacity to either ossify or innovate. Yet most are so bound by the political economy that maintains current knowledge systems that innovation is sidelined in favor of stable regimes of practice and transmission. The present so often trumps the future when it comes to education! This should come as no surprise, given that the first casualty of our modern education system is imagination. With the death of imagination, curiosity also dies. So, all that is left is information management and recall.

Teaching Futures

The natural human disposition to learn, however, can be reclaimed when we start teaching Futures Studies. Because the future is yet to happen, it is freed of the burden of content knowledge. With no future “facts” to learn, no burden of “evidence” to weigh, and no future “information” to manage, we must turn to imagination and curiosity for help. This article is largely focused on how I understand my teaching as a futures capacity building process that resists the hidden curriculum imposed on us all by institutions and society. It offers a glimpse into how I approach the delivery of futures thinking tools in the course “Business and Media Futures” at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland Australia. It is, therefore, not focused on the course content itself but on my intentions and aspirations in its delivery. My approach is indebted to many of the innovations noted above. It is critical in that it seeks to challenge dominant rationalities, it is psychological in that it is sensitive to developmental and constructivist processes, it is liberal in that it values cultural literacies over technical flair, and it strives to be true to the futures mandate of seeking out and sowing alternatives to the future via experiential application and aspirational visioning.⁵

So teaching futures involves a cognitive-intuitive shift that allows openness, imagination, and curiosity.⁶ Such a shift, in turn, requires a pedagogy committed to what I have come to call the Futures Senses. I argue that such senses generate a living–learning ecology that nurtures the learning journeys I take with my students.⁷ Much of course depends on students’ willingness to let go and take risks.⁸ Imagination, it should be noted, invites story. The narrative drive to make meaning through ordered plot is compelling. This is why scenario work is so popular in the futures field.⁹

In the same way curiosity seeks a meaningful context to explore, it demands application, testing, and verification—feet on the ground and real world sites to engage with. Thus, teaching needs to draw the line of flight between concepts and their effects¹⁰ and also provide ample access to case studies.¹¹ This immediately leads to the call for thinking “tools” to enable us to open up and explore the world around us.¹² Paradoxically such tools generate new forms of data. Much of this data are recognizable to mainstream learning, but having been produced through this alternative epistemological route, their normative orientation is at odds with the dominant system. Futures data are alive and dynamic; Presentist data are static and reified.

Futures Senses

To educate for alternative futures requires quite a different approach to learning. As an experiential and embodied teacher and learner, I have always found that students, regardless of subject/discipline area, respond to their world through a range of cultural “senses.” In fact, much of my teaching is about helping students access and refine these senses in ways that enhance their potential for optimal futures in the increasingly open and volatile world that await them. When dealing with the future therefore, I have come to think of the following as Futures Senses:

Memory: This sense focuses attention on the biography of the student and how their ontological and epistemological orientation to the world is culturally defined. It sees heritage as a rich source of futures tools but acknowledges that much of the past conditions us to think within boxes not of our own making. Developing this sense involves pedagogy that is reflexive and critically alive to how we are complicit in the experience of “reality.” I have recently begun to explore the importance of this sense through the concept of Heritage Futures.¹³

Foresight: This sense harnesses intuition and anticipation to the service of providing engaging and expansive learning experiences. As the imagination is shaped by the sense of memory (i.e., we can only imagine within the context of our cultural toolboxes), it is important to deepen this sense to allow for an anticipatory imagination to blossom and take the student beyond default images and status quo rationality. I have been developing this concept recently in conjunction with intuition and rationality as they mutually reinforce one another. Richard Slaughter¹⁴ argued that foresight is a natural human “sense” two decades ago. His work is an excellent introduction to how we can understand the curricular possibilities of this sense.

Voice: This is the sense that lifts the individual out of culture.¹⁵ It acknowledges that each one of us has a quality of being that is unique. As I see it, the individual stands between culture and their world. We all experience the present from a singular perspective, or as Heidegger terms it, as dasein.¹⁶ From an intimate sensorial perspective, this is a biopolitical condition¹⁷ that brings up issues of agency and action within structures. The curricular implications of this sense are immense and largely unexplored. Inayatullah has pointed to it in his work on alignment.¹⁸ Being alive to this “being present” or dasein, yet not being co-opted by it, is the key to aligning the personal with the structures that shape identity and meaningful action. In this way, the sense of voice offers us critical perspectives on the past-present-futures continuum, bringing a critically spiritual consciousness to bear on the senses on memory and foresight.

Optimism: This sense empowers students to respond to the limits imposed by structure. Optimism helps roll back the stifling sense that it is all too BIG! As such, it is a powerful Futures Sense that builds on the sense of voice. This sense is pragmatic and realistic. It does not turn away from the realities that people struggle with, yet it also does not give in to them. Instead, it reframes them via a constructive hope. It is the Futures Sense that is the antidote to what Melissa Lane calls the Idea of Negligibility¹⁹: what we do as individuals makes little or no difference. The sense of optimism also deepens memory and foresight by bringing to curricula planning a futures trajectory that analyzes, identifies, and celebrates human possibilities. It finds pattern and patterning in chaos and is a key element in healthy, and healthful, futures pedagogy. It also informs the Neohumanist sensibility that underpins the fifth sense: yearning.

Yearning: This sense is what Clem Bezold called “aspirational.”²⁰ As a curricular tool, it is the compass that focuses energy and gives meaning to our futures engagements. It deepens the utilitarian yearnings for ever expanding possibilities and alerts the teacher to the deeper Neohumanist yearning for relationship that finds expression in dreams, visions, and a constant restlessness that both troubles and vivifies life. Through it, curriculum becomes restless and open. This sense is therefore much more than a simple pragmatic orientation to the future. It is what we can refer to as the source of a critical spirituality that pushes the limits.²¹ In fact, it refuses to give in to limits and constructs the futures enterprise as an amalgam of all five senses in that it frames meaning via all five senses in the service of future generations and the planet.

Teaching My Course

The five Futures Senses inform my approach to the teaching of Business and Media Futures. Using a once fashionable educational term, they constitute the “hidden curriculum” that shapes my choices and orients course delivery. The course itself is designed for graduate students who are seeking to upskill in areas such as policy delivery, health services, government services, and the not-for-profit sector. Class numbers are small, and students often live interstate (or overseas) and take the course entirely online.

This course is one of four offered over one year, the other courses being Applied Futures Studies, Futures Research Methods, and Strategic Foresight Leadership.²² Because students can enter at any point in the Graduate Certificate, delivery always has to account for folk totally new to Futures while extending and reinforcing futures thinking for those with more experience. Fortunately, the class size is always small, so we can cater easily to this range of understanding.

What students like about this course is the flow between concepts, case studies, and tools. Each week, we have three hours contact time. There is a two-hour futures workshop (students can skype in) in which a tool is introduced and students get to work with it on set tasks that all come together to inform assessment items. Learning by doing is key to this. Students work in groups to essentially analyze a business or media of their choice and present on this to the group. Later they develop a business or media proposal that demonstrates their ability to use futures concepts and tools to think out of the box. In this, they need to demonstrate proficiency with their chosen tools and the ability to think on their feet while applying them.

In doing so, they hone their Futures Senses by identifying

where the past and their own personal biases, based on memory, experience, and conditioning, were at work in their construction of the “problem,” and

how intuition and imagination were enabled or constrained, and particularly, how the application of anticipatory foresight to their task disrupted comfortable patterns and norms and opened up alternatives.

They also

explore how they themselves were futures lenses and how their interactions forced them to rethink voice as agency, as they struggled to understand alignment in the context of any set task;

develop strategies to foster constructive optimism and the ability to reframe and seek out and celebrate successful resistance to the often challenging (read depressing) centralist and monopolistic tendencies we encountered; and finally,

listen to one another and the yearnings that emerged in class around community, social and ecological justice, relationship, inclusion, and empowerment. Yearning feeds back into the learning a distinct sense of “can do”!

What tools were we applying in tutorials? Here is this year’s list:

Emergent issues analysis

Futures triangle

Shared histories and macrohistory

T cycle

Four quadrant model

Morphological analysis

CLA

Scenarios

Transcend

Visioning

Each tool came with a case study and was contextualized by the lectures. The lectures always followed the tutorials and were used as a tutorial debrief. They usually only lasted about forty-five to fifty minutes and focused on a concept or set of concepts linked to the tool covered that week, sought to remind students of past concepts so that they developed a sense of a working ecology of ideas, and usually ended with series of case studies.

Beyond the Litany

What I am describing here, however, is really only the structural level of my approach. The inclusion of the Futures Senses is simply illustrative of how I see them operating. None of the above nuts and bolts is rocket science, and any decent teacher would approach a subject like this in some similar manner according to temperament and experience. For me, the real learnings happened in and around this unfolding work. The learning process is deeply relational and even intimate. My task is to hold the space in which the five Futures Senses can begin to emerge. As I noted above, the work of the futurist is a creative mix of pragmatic need and vision. The balance is unique to each and every one of us, but I would argue that futures pedagogy is a grounded activity shaped by what we do, it is always a process of teaching, and it involves thinking through the logics of the Futures Senses and an openness to social creativity that one can only ever dance with. There is in all this the commitment of the futurist-as-educator to the potentiality of any given context: a harnessing of the Futures Senses to the deeper tasks of cultural work that lie at the heart of futures pedagogy and futures studies more broadly.

So my teaching trajectory is well expressed as a series of layered actions: Doing, Teaching, Thinking, Dancing! Doing refers to the day-to-day interaction of teacher–student and is about the ephemeral, spontaneous manifestation of the teaching in the class. Teaching is structural. It is about the order and coordination of meaningful learning processes across the course of study. Thinking is what is engaged in prior to the doing and teaching. It imbues both of these with coherence and direction. Essentially, it is the epistemological foundations of what teachers either consciously or unconsciously engage in when they prepare and apply the doing and teaching. Such thinking can be creative or didactic, open or closed and grows out of the dancing we engage in when we play with the transformative possibilities inherent to deep learning environments such as those called for in futures pedagogy.

This process, of course, is a kind of “CLA understanding”²³ of something we often take as a singular seamless expression: teaching. For me, as I outlined some years ago, it is best understood as a form of Causal Layered Pedagogy.²⁴ Since writing that article, I have come to understand litany as the doing, the visible practices of futuring. I see that teaching is the systematizing of the practices into an ordered, communicable, though permanently dynamic and complex, futures domain. The thinking wakes us up to the constructed nature and inventiveness of our worldviews and their effects on practice and system. Whereas the dancing is the metaphorical activity of responding to the “yearning” I describe above. This dance is ever intuitive and transformative in nature. It suggests a whole new ontological and epistemological world waiting to burst into and permanently disrupt accepted narratives and enactments of the Real.

This relationship—the Causal Layered Pedagogy of my approach—is captured in Table 1. As indicated, the development and engagement with the Futures Senses occurs across all layers being applied in class, communicated consistently across the course of study, foundational to the epistemic routes of my futures thinking, and woven into the transformative work of narrative engagement. They all fold together to inform the elements of a hidden curriculum. In addition, I connect the doing, teaching, thinking, and dancing with process. Process lies at the heart of futures pragmatics and links the praxis of futures work with culture and the openness of the eternal becoming at the heart of the human experience. As I have noted, the Futures Senses have a role to play across the CLA domain. My goal as a teacher of Futures Studies is to enable students to gain the skills they need, be able to communicate key futures principles to others, and be able to think on their feet and respond intuitively to the moment. Generally, these indicators are demonstrable and therefore assessable. What lies behind and throughout this entire relational net, my “hidden curriculum,” is the emergent futures sensitivities I am calling the Futures Senses.

Table 1.

Unpacking Course Delivery.

Litany	Doing	Apply	Class	Futures Senses
System	Teaching	Communicate	Course
Worldview	Thinking	Invent	Episteme
Myth/metaphor	Dancing	Intuit/transform	Narrative

Conclusion

My approach to teaching is cultural. I see structure as an epiphenomenon of culture, though, of course, once instituted, it reinforces existing forms. In my quest to teach Futures Studies effectively, I turn to culture and to the hidden curriculum. This orientation means that I look first to my cultural anchors and those of the students, seek to make explicit the cultural roots and orientations that shape meaning, and then ask the big questions: What futures do we want? How do we get there? I take such questions as critical tools to evoke in the students a willingness to consider broader, more inclusive approaches to the world and its possibilities. Problems there are in bucket loads, but when students (and teachers) get in touch with their Futures Senses, these are less daunting, acting as invitations to develop the richer futures we all desire.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author Biography

Marcus Bussey is senior lecturer in history and futures at the University of the Sunshine Coast. He also is program leader for the Graduate Certificate of Futures Studies. He specializes in futures as a vehicle for personal and social change—he is particularly interested in education as a tool for both oppression and liberation.