Working with the not-yet: speculative approaches to digital education futures

This event is part of the School of Education's Bristol Conversations in Education research seminar series. These seminars are free and open to the public.

Hosted by the Education Futures Network (EFN)

Speaker: Dr Jen Ross, University of Edinburgh

Education is overly constrained by technology-related predictions and promises about the future. Not only does the history of the digital education field show us that these rarely play out as imagined, they also close down alternatives in the present. The ‘not-yetness’ of digital education is one of its most intriguing properties for researchers and educators: it is “perpetually incomplete, always uncertain, not fully understood, but still expected” (Ross 2023). To work with such not-yetness, we need approaches to research and teaching that can engage creatively with complexity, emergence, and uncertainty. In this seminar, Jen Ross will discuss insights from her recent book on speculative approaches to digital learning futures, with a focus on these futures as troublesome objects-to-think-with. Sharing examples of speculative methods in practice, she will explore the balance of experimentation and responsibility towards the future that such methods require.

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