By Jennifer Cummins
The views expressed here are the author’s and do not reflect the views of BC TEAL.
Recently, while reading a document from the OECD (2021), I came across an acronym that aptly captures our current local, national, and global context: VUCA—Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous. We inhabit a world characterized by rapid change and instability. In a recent BC TEAL talk for EAL Week, Carol Suhr (2025) described this reality through her metaphor of “shifting ground,” drawing on her journey from international student to TESOL educator. Her experience illustrates how many learners and teachers navigate the “cracks” caused by constantly shifting landscapes of personal and systemic uncertainty.
The question for educators, then, is how we can best equip students for this VUCA world. As someone preparing to become a teacher educator, I find myself questioning my own beliefs and classroom practices. What kinds of futures am I preparing students for? And perhaps more importantly, who is determining those futures? As Escobar (2023) asks, “One of the most important questions we can ask today as critical intellectuals and activists is: Who gets to imagine the future?” (p. 26). Reflecting on Escobar’s writings, if we as educators narrow the view of possible futures in the classroom, we contribute to narrowing possible realities for students. Our role as educators, then, is to open possibilities rather than limit them. In my studies, I have found that futures literacy—training students to use-the-future—may create a practice which helps students develop agency over their own futures, diversifies what “futures” in Canada can look like, and values both the lived and yet-to-be-lived experiences of those I teach and those I train to teach.
The Hidden Aims of Education
Educational philosophers such as Diana Osberg (2008) and Henry Giroux (1985) argue that education, even when framed as progressive, often remains a process of enculturation, assimilation, and control. Giroux (1984) describes schools as “a complex web of relations of culture and power…socially constructed sites of contestation actively involved in the production of lived experiences” (p. 23). Student performance, he notes, becomes “something to be measured, administered, registered, and controlled” (p. 26), perpetuating an asymmetry of power between teachers and students.
Similarly, Osberg (2008) states that a fundamental problem with education—including critical education—is its tendency toward normalization and enculturation. Even when enculturation serves as “just cause” through the process of integration, it can still legitimize hegemony and patriarchy within the classroom. Systems of control and enculturation run counter to preparing students for a VUCA world, where uncertainty and ambiguity define daily life.
This is not to say that integration is unimportant. Integration is a survival strategy for newcomers and is frequently taught by instructors. It supports social and economic mobility and can help students navigate existing systems. However, these systems can also be discriminatory, oppressive, and racist. Integration, then, is not inherently liberatory; without reflection, it can replicate the very enculturation and normalization that Osberg critiques.
As teachers, we can examine the extent to which we reproduce these systems and the extent to which we resist them. Equally important is recognizing the desires of our students: How much do they want to participate in these systems, and how much do they want to transform them? Our task is not to limit but welcome new and alternative visions of the future—to help students see the future not as predetermined and constrained by existing systems, but as Osberg (2008) calls for, open up the future as a space of possibilities. This can be done through a practice of critical futures literacies, which I explain below.
Taking Time to Reimagine the Future
Just as students hold diverse views of what futures are, so do academics. Futures literacy is most commonly defined as the capacity to "use-the-future" to understand present action and work towards desirable futures (Miller, 2018). There is a global network of Futures Literacies Labs advanced by UNESCO, helping people across the world navigate complexity, imagine alternatives, and respond to uncertainty (UNESCO, n.d.). However, UNESCO’s futures literacy is only one framework to work from. For example, Terry et al. (2024) believe futures literacy is not only about understanding the present, but also about tracing the historical ways in which we found ourselves in the present, honouring multiple representations of the past, present, and future. From an equity stance on futures thinking, authors like Appadurai (2013), Poli (2021,) and others point out that “the ability to aspire is unevenly distributed among different classes and social strata” (Poli, 2021, p. 4). Therefore, any futures framework that is adopted with language learners needs careful evaluation of how lived experience and different realities are valued and included.
A critical practice of future-making with language learners, then, should recognize the importance of diverse imaginaries and value multiple perspectives in future-thinking. To widen possibilities, a classroom practice of future-making should be creative with some degree of chaos. Values and beliefs about the future should be emergent and co-created, unpredictable and sometimes impractical. Futures lessons should work to connect past, present, and future in messy and interesting ways, and our lessons should reflect this way of thinking.
Practically, learning and reading about critical perspectives on futures thinking has changed how I approach lessons about futures with students. For example:
My previous futures lesson plan
- Teach goal-setting focused on practical, realistic outcomes
- Introduce the SMART framework (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Timely)
- Have students write SMART goals based on realism and pragmatism
- Provide feedback based on compliance with SMART criteria
- Gather together art supplies, digital resources, and other creative outlets for students to use
- Plan for emergence and chaos
- Elicit what dreams the students have, how they would like to change the world, and what difference they would like to make
- Encourage students to write, draw, or create visions of alternative futures
- Share and reflect on the multiple futures students imagine
- Co-construct lessons that build on students’ visions and deepen reflection on alternative possibilities
By expanding our pedagogical repertoire to include future imaginings, we help students develop agency over their own futures and better equip them for what Carol Suhr (2025) describes as the “shifting ground” they walk on.
References
Appadurai, A. (2013). The future as cultural fact. Verso.
Escobar, A. (2023). Welcome to possibility studies. Possibility Studies & Society (Online), 1(1–2), 56–59. https://doi.org/10.1177/27538699231171450
Giroux, H. A. (1985). Critical pedagogy, cultural politics, and the discourse of experience. Journal of Education, 167(2), 22-41.
Miller, R. (2018). Transforming the Future. (First edition.). Abingdon Routledge.
OECD (2021). Embedding Values and Attitudes in Curriculum: Shaping a Better Future. OECD Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1787/aee2adcd-en.
Osberg, D. (2008). The logic of emergence: An alternative conceptual space for theorizing critical education. Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies, 6(1), 133-161. https://doi.org/10.25071/1916-4467.17928
Poli, R. (2021). The challenges of futures literacy. Futures : The Journal of Policy, Planning and Futures Studies, 132, 102800. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2021.102800
Surh, C. (2025, Nov. 23). Teaching on Shifting Ground: Reflections from an Internationally Trained Educator. [Presentation]. BC TEAL EAL Week, Burnaby, Canada.
Terry, N., Castro, A., Chibwe, B., Karuri-Sebina, G., Savu, C., & Pereira, L. (2024). Inviting a decolonial praxis for future imaginaries of nature: Introducing the Entangled Time Tree. Environmental Science & Policy, 151, 103615. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2023.103615
UNESCO (n.d.). Global futures literacy network. https://www.unesco.org/en/futures-literacy/network
Jennifer Cummins, BC TEAL President (24–26), has been a professional in the field of English language instruction since 2007. She has worked in a variety of capacities, including private, non-profit, and post-secondary institutions. She has many years of leadership experience in a variety of roles, and is a full-time faculty member at Vancouver Community College. Jennifer holds a Masters of Education and is a PhD student at Simon Fraser University in Faculty of Education. In her free time, Jennifer likes to hike, cycle, do yoga, cook, read, and spend time with her family.