Promising Futures: An Integral Exploration of the Futures Thinking of High School Teachers in a Technology-Rich Learning Environment

Date
2017
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Abstract
Teachers spend their working days preparing young people for the times to come. Teachers also imagine a wide variety of ideas about possible, probable and preferable futures. The purpose of this study is to discover how teachers feel and think about the potential futures for themselves and their students, and to explore how teacher perceptions of futures inform and are enacted in their teaching practices. Learning more about how often, how deeply and how optimistically teachers envision possible futures matters because teachers are educating the people who will become adults in all versions of the near futures. The conceptual framework sets integral theory as the basis for the methodological pluralism and analytical blending which are sustained throughout this trans-disciplinary study as a whole. The participants in this study were all high school teachers in one school in Winnipeg, Manitoba during the 2015-16 school year. Participants completed a survey, followed by eight focus group sessions, and finally twelve were individually interviewed. The research design employed integral methodological pluralism as an organizing methodological structure to draw together multiple research methods in a coherent fashion. The findings show that high school teachers deliberately think about their own futures and those of their students, that they are most likely to trust shorter term empiric predictions about futures, and that while they value long term thinking they rarely think about futures more than a few years away. Conclusions and recommendations point out the need for developing teacher capacity via training in long term futures thinking which allows teachers to consider much larger problems and challenges confronting cultures, over longer time spans. Thinking about the long term and choosing hopeful stances will ultimately strengthen teachers, and potentially lead cultures and civilizations to the more preferable futures that they envision.
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Keywords
Education--Secondary, Education--Sociology of, Education--Teacher Training, Philosophy, Individual and Family Studies, Industrial and Labor Relations, Sociology--Organizational, Sociology--Theory and Methods, Psychology--Behavioral, Psychology--Personality, Psychology--Social
Citation
Norris, R. (2017). Promising Futures: An Integral Exploration of the Futures Thinking of High School Teachers in a Technology-Rich Learning Environment (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/27456