Temporality and its conceptions are fundamental to educational discourse, policy, and practices. More specifically, education is often and ubiquitously put about a specific kind of temporality, i.e., the future and ideas about possible and/or (un)desirable futures (e.g., Arendt, 1954). While (the concept of) future is often put in relation to education in rhetorical, tokenistic, or even instrumental ways, there are indeed different aspects of this bond that have been recognized and analyzed from diverse ontological and epistemological perspectives. For instance, we may think about how education will look like in the future, how it concurs in building the future or how it prepares students for the future, on the other hand, we may invert the relationship and ask ourselves how ideas and attitudes towards the future affect educational thinking, practices, and policies today. Here, for instance, ideas about technology and their role in future societal settings – so-called sociotechnical imageries (Jasanoff and Kim, 2013) – inform and define present discourses, practices and policies pertaining to education. This often happens in normative, preparative, or even speculative ways. In fact, as Facer (2021) summarizes, in the educational sector ‘the future’ can be subject to many diverse activities following heterogeneous aims: prediction, imagination, speculation, (adaptive or agentic) preparation, critique, emancipation, suspension, reflection and even repair. These activities, and the effects they induce upon present and future schooling, also depend upon which actors (students, teachers, policymakers, tech companies, financial speculators), interests (pedagogical, economic, political, … ), and generations participate in the construction of specific ideas, attitudes and conceptions of the future, but also upon how near or far the imagined future may be conceived.

In this paper, we are interested in discussing and confronting educational futures (and of futures in education) of small and rural schools. Education and educational practices are always embedded within broader territorial systems that define geographically specific needs, desires, constraints and grammar of school. Subsequently, educational conceptions of the future – and their influences and effects on the present – may also vary depending on territorial differences and specificities (Boix et al., 2015). Small and rural schools have specific features, needs, and grammar of school when compared with bigger schools in urban areas, for instance, regarding student numerosity and heterogeneity, classroom organisation or integration with other territorial actors and institutions. In this regard, one of the many questions arising is where, for which areas, and with which consequences educational futures are imagined, perceived, produced, built, or speculated upon.

By drawing on the current interest in the future in sociology (see the special issue in Sociological Review, 2016; New Media and Society, 2021; Qualitative Inquiry, 2022; Levitas, 2013; Urry, 2016) and on the ongoing investigation in small schools in Italy resulting from a collaboration between CNR-IRPPS and INDIRE, we will present social imageries of small schools emerging from participatory research with three schools aiming at stimulate bottom-up projects that makes operational the idea of the school as a learning hub. Our idea is to propose to work with the concept of ‘school as learning hub’ as a possible future scenario of the future grammar of the school in well-known OCDE scenarios of schooling to understand: a) how the idea of ‘school as learning hub’ may give a name to their schooling practices, and act as concrete (what could or ought to be), an abstract (core principles to engage critically with the present), or latent future (future in the making, but yet to materialise) (Halford & Southerton, 2023) for the three cases; c) to what extent this exercise of the future may help small schools stimulate their singularity and creativity in a bottom-up way.

Since the pandemic, CNR-IRPPS and INDIRE has started a joint program of research on the school of the future: a) the first investigation concerned the adaptation of Latour’s inventory and led to a report called ‘La scuola che verrà’ (School yet to come) (CNR-IRPPS & INDIRE 2021); b) the second investigation is regarding OCDE’s Scenario of the School Future (202x) in three pilot schools. This presentation focuses on the scenario of ‘School as a Learning Hub, proposed by the OECD, is defined as follows: '...Open school walls, connect schools to their communities, foster ever-changing forms of learning, civic engagement and social innovation'. In a perspective of collaboration with schools and with the actors of the educational community, a research protocol is framed in a participatory pilot research design, in which research activities alternate with educational activities that will involve managers, teachers, students and actors of the context in which the school operates. For this purpose, the small schools included in the path will be called to organise '7 days on the future of small schools'. In seven days, the schools involved will be invited to think, narrate, and rethink, using the idea of the school as a learning hub as a guideline. Leveraging the combination of inventive methods for social research and 'traditional' qualitative techniques (such as semi-structured interviews and focus groups), the seven days on the futures of small schools will create a path of reconnaissance-participatory research and co-codesign. The route includes a) the creation of a school-territory group (teachers, parents, students, outsiders, etc.); b) the involvement of the school and the territory through digital storytelling (or video-participatory); c) the development of projects to give shape to the school as a learning hub. Three cases in the country's North and South have been selected through an open call oriented to schools that could give information on some of the characteristics of the definition of ‘School as Learning Hub.’ The open call circulated in the ‘Movement of Small Schools’ list, a movement supported by INDIRE, including small and rural schools. ‘Small schools’ here regard schools in rural and suburban areas, often at risk of closure or aggregation to bigger schools. In Italy, school policy implicitly considers schools of big cities as the dominant model. Accordingly, small schools are seen as exceptional or peripheral. Nevertheless, there are not a few small schools numerically.

The research intends to map the practices, experiences and organisational processes that can be approached to the concept of ‘school as a learning hub’ and to intercept their local translations, possibly enriching the concept. Through a phase of creative-participatory research focused on developing video stories developed by the school-territory group, it is intended to encourage small schools to be involved in processes of self-narration and self-reflection oriented to a definition from below of the concept of School as a Learning Hub. Secondly, through the experiences narrated and the reflections, we intend to illustrate how schools live in multiple temporalities that escape the simple and dominant linear past-present-future logic. In that sense, we expect to describe multiple forms of futures at the stake. Finally, we want to illustrate how methods matter in studying educational futures. Deterministic and positivist orientations risk limiting the mapping of future-making activities. Engaging in new methods helps silent or marginal voices to be heard in the public debate. A participatory approach may permit the voices of small schools to be considered and not made peripheral in dominant discourses that reinforce the vision of the school’s future as taken for granted.

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