Traditional science education has deep connection with core assumptions of Western modernisation (Gilbert 2024). However, in recent decades science education has been imposed with new perspectives that question the traditional aims of scientific rationality and technological faith. New and traditional perspectives, global crisis, and uncertainties are all together creating diverse conditions for science educators to navigate their profession in today society.

At policy level the contemporary conditions are addressed, for example, with the European Commission framework of science education for responsible citizenship (European Commission 2015), with future-oriented science education (Laherto et al. 2023) and with alternative visions for science education (Sjöström 2024). In addition to field specific frameworks, the contemporary science education is also guided by transversal aims for education, such as European Commissions’ GreenComp reference framework (Bianchi et al. 2022) that aims to outline knowledge, skills and attitudes that should be supported in education to help learners to obtain hope and agency over sustainability challenges.

With variation of frameworks and perspectives a question arises on how teachers envision the education, their personal position and different educational aims. In order to address the question, this presentation examines what kind of future visions of science education do science teachers manifest in their narratives of a regular school day in the future. By doing this, the presentation intends to open a conversation about different perspectives and ambitions for today’s science education. At the same time, this presentation examines the possible use of Causal Layered Analysis (CLA) for analysing teachers' visions of education.
In modern discourse, education is seen as a means to socialize people into rationality, scientific discourse, and technological faith, to pass on progress and wealth to future generations (Aronowitz & Giroux 1991). The contemporary frameworks challenge these assumptions of modern pedagogy and its faith in a linear, progressive future. For example, the Sjöström’s (2024) vision III for science education display that the scientific literacy should aim to understand the interrelationship between the science, technology, society, and environment from the perspectives of complexity and critical inquiry.

There is a strong emphasis on futures thinking and future-education in contemporary frameworks for sustainability and science education, such as GreenComp and future-oriented science education. The ability to imagine alternative future scenarios and identify actions towards future visions is seen as an essential competence to maintain agency, creativity and adaptability (Bianchi et al. 2022; Laherto 2020). When talking about futures thinking and future competencies, science educators play an important role in education as science and technology are commonly seen as unchallenged elements of future (Gilbert 2024).

This presentation analyses the future visions of school-based subject teacher educators (SBTEs) using CLA as an analysis structure. It will propose perspectives and themes categorized to three different levels - litany, societal and worldview - to bring the future visions and the theoretical background to multileveled interaction with each other.
The presentation also includes a critical evaluation of the methodological use of CLA analysis as a tool to analyze educational future visions. There is a need to find tools that help navigate between the complex objectives of science education that could take account the developmental need to evaluate simultaneously the content, values and systemic perspectives influencing the educational imagination and ambitions of the science teachers.

In the core of this presentation is a thematic analysis that draws from Causal layered analysis (CLA). CLA is a commonly used critical analysis and workshop method applied in various fields of futures studies (Wahab 2024). The analysis is based on a structure that moves between four interconnected layers of narrating: litany, societal, worldview and metaphor (Inayatullah 1998). The aim of this approach is to evoke multifaceted conversation that considers the future visions from the perspectives of generally accepted narratives, cultural structures, underlying value constructions and deep beliefs stretching towards a more holistic conception of reality than surface-level analyses do (Inayatullah, 2004). This presentation will focus on three layers leaving aside the metaphorical exploration of the narratives. In the presentation the CLA method is used to analyse eleven written future visions of Finnish school-based teacher educators (SBTEs) . The participating SBTEs work in Finnish teacher training schools teaching science and mentoring pre-service teachers during their training periods. The task was to write two texts related to each other. The first task was to imagine a typical day as a science teacher in the year 2050. The second text was a back-casting exercise where respondents imagine the sequence of events that have led to the envisioned future from the present. With the use of CLA, the presentation explores what kind of narratives SBTEs construct about the future of the science teacher profession. The analysis aims to interpret how narratives describe the science teacher profession in the future and what are the preconditions shaping the possible future visions.

The preliminary results suggest that the SBTEs’ future visions may emphasize more traditional perspectives for science education than the contemporary frameworks of science education propose. It seems that in the SBTEs narratives scientific literacy materializes, for example, through real life examples, technology driven exercises and with instrumental value leaving open the questions about the origin, the power structures and the possibilities for alternative interpretations of scientific content. However, the investigated future visions encompass a diverse collection of ideas and anticipation concerned the surface level descriptions of possible realisations of science education. It is possible that the diversity of these narratives could contain layers of reasoning, political stances and beliefs that are not decipherable when interpreting future visions with high level of temporality. An interesting continuation could be to explore the possibilities of CLA as a workshop method to achieve a more holistic and nuanced conversation about the possibilities of science education in the contemporary world and in the future. Further developments of these methods may prove useful, as there is urgent need to understand how teachers navigate tensions and imagine futures for education in the era of multiple crises.

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