Edited by Benjamin A Kehrwald

Published: Aug 2006
ISBN: 978-1-921729-81-2
Pages: 80 (PDF version)

Overview

Education is a forward looking enterprise. It is concerned with ongoing gain and future benefit. It seeks to provide advantage to learners long after the educative activity has ceased.

The difficulty with such futures-oriented activity is that it must try to predict the future and the future needs of its participants in order to retain its currency.

If education is to remain beneficial to learners, it must prepare them for the world not only of today but also of tomorrow. However, this problem is not straightforward. Now, more than ever before, rapid and continuous change has made the future difficult to predict. The stability of lifelong employment, career, family and other social institutions continues to erode. Professional activity demands continual upskilling to remain abreast of changes. These changes have highlighted the need for a shift away from 'education for life' towards ongoing learning throughout and across the lifespan.

This special theme issue of the International Journal of Pedagogies and Learning seeks to engage with the challenge of futures-oriented education in the context of lifelong learning. The issue includes six articles which examine and respond to key questions posed by that challenge.

Kehrwald focuses on creating opportunities for professional development for educators with the problem of the design, development and implementation of a postgraduate course in education on the topic of Learning Futures.

MacLean examines the process of identifying and evaluating active citizenship within the curriculum and pedagogy at a one-teacher school in Queensland, Australia.

Bethel highlights the success of the Remote Area Teacher Education Program (RATEP) in North Queensland as a potential exemplar for re-imagining inclusive higher education.

Garvis argues that the current state of gifted education in Queensland is inappropriate for Aboriginal students and outlines criteria for identifying appropriately inclusive gifted education programs.

Baitz examines the nature of a discipline-based undergraduate program which relies heavily on professional experience as a teaching tool and highlights recommendations for inclusive practices in such programs for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) students.

Ibbotson argues for the employment of situated approaches to professional development for health care professionals to learn within the context where new knowledge might be applied.

Zukas highlights the interconnected nature of context and practice to outline a case for the continual learning of educators though ongoing practices which promote learning.

This collection seeks to engage with the challenge of futures-oriented education in the context of lifelong learning and as such is important reading for today's educators.

Table of Contents

Editorial: Educating for tomorrow: Considering theories for learning futures
- Benjamin A Kehrwald

Considering learning futures: Educating educators for tomorrow
- Benjamin A Kehrwald

Active citizenship at old Yarranlea state school
- Andrew MacLean

Critical approaches to inclusion in Indigenous teacher education in Queensland: The case of RATEP
- Bronwyn Bethel

Optimising the learning of gifted Aboriginal students
- Susanne Garvis

Strategies for inclusion of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender learners in discipline-based programs
- Ian Baitz

Situated approaches to information literacy for nurses: The view from a Canadian nurse
- Yvonne Ibbotson

Pedagogic learning in the pedagogic workplace: Educators' lifelong learning and Learning Futures
- Miriam Zukas