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Alternative Educational Futures:

Pedagogies for Emerging Worlds

Marcus Bussey, Sohail Inayatullah & Ivana Milojević (Editors)

Sense Publishers, Rotterdam, (2008)

Alternative Educational Futures brings together theoretical and practical work in a challenge to mainstream thinking on the practice and purpose of education. The book promotes multiple futures by presenting works that range from the child-centred, through those that promote a futures oriented critical pedagogy to open ended explorations of the implications of technology for education and the possibilities of rethinking and deepening human potential.

The editors – Bussey, Inayatullah and Milojević – are all educators and describe this book as another small step towards rethinking the present in the light of possible futures. They see that whatever steps we take as a species towards the future – be it a proto-global civilization, a fractal cosmopolitanism, a gaian-technolopoly, or a return to the past – education both as an institution and as a social process is key to how we get there, remembering that the future is created and changes with every step we take.

The book contains chapters on futures strategies, tools and techniques for a range of educational contexts, global education and neohumanism, the futures of universities, the changing shape of textual authority and learning in the face of the internet, access and equity, democracy and learning, Buddhist and Vedantic insights and offering on education, Steiner education, creative pedagogies and a number of case studies on the successes and failures of futures studies in a range of educational and institutional contexts.
 

Marcus Bussey is a long term alternative educator and futurist based at the University of the Sunshine Coast, his web site is www.futuresevocative.com. Sohail Inayatullah is Professor of Futures Studies with Tamkang University and Adjunct Professor with the University of the Sunshine Coast; his website is www.metafuture.org. Ivana Milojević lectures in Peace and Conflict studies at the University of the Sunshine Coast and is senior research with www.metafuture.org. Collectively they edited Neohumanist Educational Futures: Liberating the Pedagogical Intellect (2006) Tamkang University Press, Taiwan.

Along with chapters by the editors, there are contributions from Richard Slaughter, David Hicks, Jim Dator, Erica McWilliams and Shane Dawson, Patricia Kelly, Julie Matthews and Robert Hattam, Kathleen Kesson, Basil Savitsky, Jennifer Gidley and Garry Hampson, Martin Haigh and Billy Matheson.

All authors in this collection are committed to transformation of assumptions about education and its social function. These chapters bare witness to various manifestations of an emerging global mind set that is marked not by coherence and a single story but by multiple and layered possibility. The authors all see, from often quite different positions, that the future health of society lies in diversity and a social activism that is grounded in the local actions of individuals. Education will play a central role in empowering this activism and it is to this multiple future that this book turns its attention.

Comments on Alternative Educational Futures: Pedagogies
for Emergent Worlds

We desperately need the dynamic revolution in education that this
book offers us, reflecting the new ways of thinking and being on this
planet that will permit us to live in peace as a global family even
through massive climate changes. Read it and put these ideas into
practice as quickly as possible in any ways you can!
Elisabet Sahtouris,
Evolutionary biologist and futurist,
author of EarthDance: Living Systems in Evolution

We have more than enough books that under-estimate what is
called for where educational change is needed, that only rearrange
deck chairs on the deck of the Titanic. This edited book goes where
change must go and its case for alternative pedagogies is
exhilarating. Drawing on 18 wide-ranging new essays the editors
both challenge conventional educational analysis and forge beyond
it to explore a deeper transformative potential of self and culture.
The book promotes visions, rather than roadmaps, and pioneers
thereby a fresh agenda for a new type of lifelong schooling that
honours spirituality, sustainability, and empowerment. Bold,
eclectic, and original, it leaves a reader eager to get on with a
major overhaul of education, from birth throughout life, the better
to replace the dominant enervating education narrative with one
that soars. Distinctive and revealing, the book will reward a close
reading by all eager to help education finally achieve what has
always been possible, but needed the creative jumpstart this book
offers.
Arthur B. Shostak,
Emeritus Professor of Sociology,
Drexel University
Author: Anticipate the School You Want: Futurizing K-12 Education

This collection provides an insightful, panoramic view of this
precarious moment in the history of humankind. These uncommonly
perceptive essays consider the "range of alternative futures" before
us and describe how we might work and educate toward a future
that offers more humane, nourishing, and genuinely sustainable
ways of living. These are stirring, provocative, exciting writings that
explore the most vital questions of our time.
Dr. Ron Miller
Holistic education theorist
Editor of Education Revolution magazine.

Alternative Educational Futures is a daring attempt to break out of
the endless cycle of school/university reform. This volume offers a
rare combination of imagination and rigor, pointing towards the
possibility that what is happening in the world around us today is
the end of education and the rebirth of learning.
Dr. Riel Miller
XperidoX: Futures Consulting

Fasten your seatbelts before you enter this collection of
provocative, sometimes brilliant, essays, because it will take you at
warp speed on a journey to many places you have not conceived of
before, places where your past understandings and current beliefs
may be shaken up. Basing their work on theory, imaginative
thinking, empirical social research, or case studies, the authors
map, create, explore, and evaluate alternative futures for
education, from grade schools to universities and beyond. Every
educator—indeed every citizen—ought to read this book as an
inspiration and guide to making teaching and learning more
effective, appropriate, equitable, and flexible in a rapidly changing
world.
Wendell Bell, Yale University
Author of Foundations of Futures Studies Volumes 1 & 2

Alternative Educational Futures challenges mechanistic models
of curriculum and pedagogy predicated on linear thinking, control
and predictability. Both individually and collectively, the editors and
contributing authors generate multifaceted understandings of
futures in and for education that are open, recursive, organic and
emergent. This is a text that performs what it represents by
questioning its assumptions, permitting contradictions, tolerating
ambiguities, and resisting the pernicious and pervasive politics of
complexity reduction in education and society. These adventures in
thinking should be an invaluable resource – and source of
inspiration – for all who care about the quality of education for
immanent yet unpredictable futures.
Noel Gough
Professor of Outdoor and Environmental Education
Director, Centre for Excellence in Outdoor and Environmental
Education
President, Australian Association for Research in Education
Editor: Transnational Curriculum Inquiry

There may never have been a time like this: tomorrow's decision
makers need to be ready to rescue our futures. Long-term vision,
critical assessment and thoughtful knowledge and wisdom in action
have not been a strong-point of their parents who have passed on a
world in need of rescue. The contributors bring a range of
perspectives to the critical rethinking of education and learning.
Professor Tony Stevenson
Futurist

Copies will be available soon and can be ordered from www.sensepublishers.com