Writing the futures imaginary : digital arts-based inquiry and the futures literacies of teacher candidates
Bibliographic record
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.013 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".