Global sustainability crises and accelerating societal and technological development are posing new demands for education at all levels. A lack of stable future horizons can lead young people to regard the future with hopelessness, to take directionless actions and to exhibit inabilities to project themselves into the future (Cook, 2016; Rosa, 2013; Rubin, 2013). Meanwhile, the United Nations’ Agenda 2030 program calls for societal transformations that cannot be achieved without transgenerational thinking, responsibility and transformative abilities of the young (Unesco, 2017).

These emerging goals of education connect to agency, the capacity for autonomous social action during which people intentionally transform their social and material worlds (Biesta & Tedder, 2007; Emirbayer & Mische, 1998; Lipponen & Kumpulainen, 2011). Policy documents worldwide promote agency as an educational objective in order to enhance responsible participation in the complex and uncertain world  (e.g. OECD, 2018).

This paper addresses one of the “leverage points” to fostering students’ agency: by analyzing and broadening the ways in which they think about the future. Indeed, agency is intertwined with futures thinking since “agency involves the idea of projection and implies anticipation” (Cuzzocrea & Mandich, 2016). Also according to the seminal work on agency by Emirbayer and Mische (1998), an individual’s capacity for action, imagination and making change in relation to structural contexts is profoundly dependent on how they perceive their own relationship to the past, future and present in different situations and moments of time.

Our take on the concepts of “future” and “futures thinking” draws on the research field futures studies (e.g. Bishop, Hines & Collins, 2007; Börjeson et al., 2006; Kousa, 2011). The basics of futures-thinking in that field involve, e.g., understanding the plurality of futures, disengaging from deterministic future views, identifying and questioning assumptions to develop alternative scenarios, and understanding that small changes can become major changes over time. Research in the field has shown that positive images of the future have positive effects on an individual’s life (Bell, 1997; Rubin, 2013). Focusing on threats as well as not questioning ’automatic’ future-thinking patterns narrow down thinking and thereby limit the possibilities (Hutchinson, 1996), while the perspective of hope encourages to see alternatives and opportunities (Lombardo & Cornish, 2010).

A typical approach to analyze futures thinking in the field of futures studies is that scenarios, or images of the future, can be created from various orientations (see e.g. Bishop et al., 2007; Börjeson et al., 2006; Hicks & Holden, 1995; Voros, 2003). The first type of orientation discusses what the future is likely to be (probable futures), while the two other types of futures thinking concern what the future could be (possible futures), and what it should be (preferable futures) (e.g. Börjeson et al., 2006). The study reported here employed these orientations to analyze students’ writings on the future and agency-related views in them.

The study examined the following three research questions: 

1. How do the different types of futures thinking manifest in students’ essays on the future?

2. What is the prevalence of different types of futures thinking in students’ essays on the future?

3. How do the types of futures thinking connect to the temporal dimensions of agency?

This paper summarises the results and outcomes of four part-studies analysing students’ writings on the future, and one part-study analysing upper secondary school science curricula from five European countries. The main corpus of the data on students’ perceptions consisted of 16-19 year old upper secondary school students’ essays on a desirable future, collected in Finland (n=58) and Italy (n=223). Additional data from the Netherlands was analysed to expand the research into younger, 8-14 years old children. Students’ narratives were analysed by qualitative content analysis and narrative inquiry, also used in earlier research on youth’s agency and views of the future (e.g. Angheloiu et al., 2020). For the curriculum analysis, a subset of European secondary-level science curricula (i.e. Dutch, English, Finnish, Italian and Lithuanian) was selected. The qualitative content analysis combined inductive and deductive coding, latter basing on the model of Futures Conciousness (Ahvenharju et al., 2018).

The analysis resulted in three categories of “future talk”, each representing a different type of futures thinking as manifested in the essays. We argue that the recognized types of future talk may offer interesting facets to understanding students’ agentic orientations. Type 1 (“Stability/extrapolation”) of futures talk demonstrates the capacities to selectively recognize, locate and implement schemas (experiences, trends, etc.) which are central to Emirbayer’s and Mische’s (1998) iterational dimension of agency. Both types 2 and 3 demonstrate a capacity for imaginative distancing (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998; Mead, 1932) – detaching oneself from constraining assumptions, schemas, habits and traditions – characteristic to the projective dimension of agency. The types of futures talk can thereby be connected, respectively, to the reproductive and transformative types of agency. Our results imply that students need practice to be able to imagine futures based on values, dreams and choices; this type of thinking (“preferable futures”) is needed to activate the projective dimension of agency. It is, however, not a single type of futures thinking but a combination of them which constitutes an effective agentic orientation -- cf. the “chordal triad” of the three temporal dimensions of agency (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998). Therefore, education developing students’ futures thinking should aim to find a balance between imaginative distancing (types 2 and 3 of futures talk) and selective recognition and implementation of schemas (type 1 of futures talk). We argue that this is crucial in order to foster students’ transformative agency in the age of sustainability crises and accelerating societal and technological development.

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