Shaping Desirable Futures: Participatory Tools for Inclusive Education Policy

Abstract

Participatory tools play a crucial role in scenario building by engaging stakeholders in envisioning plausible and desirable futures. In education, participatory futures methods have been increasingly utilised to reimagine systems, ranging from pedagogy to governance. This study explores the application of the Future Headlines method, a participatory foresight tool designed to stimulate creative thinking by encouraging different stakeholders to imagine future news headlines representing desired outcomes. By fostering collaborative engagement, this method aligns collective aspirations with actionable pathways towards sustainable and inclusive educational systems. Despite the increasing interest in such methods, their application to specific contexts such as education governance remains underexplored, particularly in complex policy environments involving diverse perspectives. This paper presents findings from two workshops employing the Future Headlines methodology, conducted with a total of 20 participants divided equally between sessions. Participants included teacher educators and policymakers, with workshops held at an educational conference and a policy initiative. The workshops generated rich insights into inclusive governance and sustainable education systems, illustrating the potential of participatory methods to address the complexities of governance in education. The results offer a four-layered answer to the research question: 'How can the Future Headlines method, as a participatory tool, contribute to inclusive and forward-looking governance in education?' The Future Headlines method provides this by 1) engaging with a diverse range of stakeholders, enhancing inclusive co-creative decision-making, 2) contributing to developing forward-looking governance by conceptualising desired and undesired future outcomes, 3) promoting sustainability and equity, and 4) bridging diverse perspectives from micro-, meso-and macro-level in order to create actionable solutions that enable policymakers to capture the complexities of inclusive governance.