Designing futures through student engagement: A policy futures perspective
Date
2023-06-12Author
Hall, Tony
Millar, Michelle
O’Regan, Connie
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Hall, Tony, Millar, Michelle, & O’Regan, Connie. Designing futures through student engagement: A policy futures perspective. Policy Futures in Education, doi: 10.1177/14782103231181617
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Abstract
Futures research is gaining increased prominence in educational research
and development (Tesar, 2021), and particularly now as we emerge from
the global COVID-19 pandemic, which has provided a lever for change
and an opportunity for innovation in learning, teaching and assessment
(Hall et al., 2022; Jandri¿ et al., 2022). Designing Futures (DF) is an
initiative that aims to transform the student learning experience at
university, including through promoting student entrepreneurship and
enhanced interaction with enterprise, industry and the innovation sector,
supported by a national employability policy agenda, and concomitant,
significant government funding. Ireland¿s Higher Education Authority has
invested ¿7.57m in the DF programme at University of Galway for a
period of five years, 2020-2025. However, introducing such a
programme as DF within higher education raises problematic tensions
around the purpose of higher education today, as set amidst the current
policy futures perspective. Specifically, how do we balance policy
imperatives to work more closely with enterprise and industry, while at
the same time protecting the essential role of higher education, which
must be to provide a formative context for all students to reach their
fullest potential as active citizens? This paper helps to position the
concept of student engagement, taking DF as an exemplar initiative, and
examining the concept as it is construed and deployed in an innovative,
futures-oriented educational programme. This review is critical for DF, to
ensure we remain fundamentally focused on education, and not just for
the world of work, which is of course important, but beyond enterprise
and industry: to ensure students¿ readiness for the complex and
challenging world of today, and tomorrow. Furthermore, this constitutes
an important contribution to the literature, at a time when the identity of
the university and purpose of higher education are the focus of an
educationally problematic neo-liberal agenda (Mintz, 2021).