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Abstract

Anxieties about the future are on the rise, yet teachers rarely centre futures in their teaching. Moreover, research shows that teachers’ implicit hopes, dreams, and anxieties about the future influence their pedagogy and can have adverse impacts upon student outcomes. This dissertation investigates futures literacies as a proposed curricular intervention aimed at providing a pathway for teacher candidates to explore their thoughts and stories about the future, foregrounding possibility and openness, and creating a safe space for experimentation with participatory futures imagining. Employing a mixed methods approach, this digital arts-based research sought both to provoke and understand the futures literacies of a group of teacher candidates at a western Canadian University. I provided a creative futures literacies workshop for two sections of a secondary methods course for pre-service secondary English, Drama, and Social Studies students. A total of 43 students volunteered to participate in the study and 13 students volunteered to participate in additional focus group interviews after the workshop. Data for this study included creative writing and answers to a futures literacies questionnaire, along with participants’ critical and pedagogical reflections about the workshop experience. Drawing upon a Deleuzian assemblage framework and provocations from posthumanist theories, I used thematic and narrative analysis, diagrammatic thinking, data visualization, and creative writing to analyze my data. These methods are a praxis of arts-based data rendering, which seeks to engage with the aesthetic, relational, and entangled nature of futures imagining in educational spaces. The research suggested that critical and creative reflection about current feelings and representations of futures can enhance our ability to nurture the conditions for new ideas and narratives about the future to flourish. Results of this study carry broader implications for both teacher education and education more generally, highlighting an increasing need to prioritize creative engagement with a radical plurality of futures in education.