As millions of students around the world return to school, education is on everyone’s minds. Students of all ages will find their classrooms and learning systems significantly altered as a result of the ongoing pandemic. Their needs would be well-served by a thorough reimagining of how education can shape their experiences—and such an exercise could benefit the future of humanity and our planet at the same time.
Fortunately, in 2019, UNESCO launched the Futures of Education initiative, an ambitious undertaking that now seems startlingly prescient: it’s a project that aims to generate an agenda for global debate and action on the futures of education, learning and knowledge in a world that is increasingly complex, uncertain and precarious.
An independent UNESCO International Commission – made up of thought leaders from politics, academia, the arts, science, business and education – is overseeing the initiative. Canada is represented by Karen Mundy, a professor with the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education and former chief technical officer at the Global Partnership for Education. The commission will publish the results in an upcoming report.
Ideas from Canadian UNESCO Chairs
The commission asked the UNESCO Chairs Network for ideas and collected them in a report entitled Humanistic futures of learning: Perspectives from UNESCO Chairs and UNITWIN Networks. Published in January 2020, the report is the first-ever collection of essays on the futures of education globally and contains 48 papers selected from 178 submissions. We’re pleased to report that contributions from six Canadian UNESCO Chairs were included.
The Canadian submissions offer insightful perspectives on what the future of education could look like:
- UNESCO Chair in Community-Based Research and Social Responsibility in Higher Education (University of Victoria)
- In “Knowledge democracy: Opening our doors to all knowledge systems,” Budd Hall and Rajesh Tandon argue that acknowledging the diversity of knowledge customs and cultures is a matter of planetary survival.
- UNESCO Chair in Urban Landscape (University of Montreal)
- In “Reinventing the world through landscape reading,” Philippe Poullaouec-Gonidec says teaching learners to develop a sense of affinity with places and territories will translate into a sense of belonging, improving our ability to conserve cultural and environmental resources.
- UNESCO Chair in Community Sustainability: From Local to Global (Brock University)
- In “Strengthening our connection to nature and building citizens of the Earth,” Liette Vasseur and Christine Daigle elaborate on the dangers of rampant consumerism, and argue that education for sustainable development can help us become more effective environmental stewards.
- UNESCO Chair in Reorienting Education towards Sustainability (York University)
- In “Sustainability as a purpose on the path of learning for the future,” Charles A. Hopkins et al. argue for a new vision of education that gears learning toward building an equitable and inclusive society with planetary stability and well-being as the main goals.
- UNESCO Chair in Arts and Learning (Queen’s University)
- In “Toward a vision for arts education,” Lawrence O’Farrell and Benjamin Bolden contend that arts education can make a substantial contribution to learners’ lives as a means of communicating, healing, constructing culture and building community.
- UNESCO Chair in Open Educational Resources (Athabasca University)
- In “Open educational resources and global online learning,” Rory McGreal highlights how open educational resources can help bridge the knowledge divide to achieve equity in education.
Interested in participating?
The Futures of Education initiative welcomes your ideas. You can submit them:
- Through a survey. Top 3 Challenges and Purposes of Education is collecting views on the top three development challenges ahead and how education can address them.
- Through artwork. Your Vision of Education in 2050 invites you to share your creative vision of what education might look like by 2050.
- In writing. Your View on the Futures of Education invites you to present your thoughts on what you see as the single biggest issue for the futures of education.
You can influence how we learn and teach for a better world. Please consider joining the conversation about what the future of education could look like!
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