Who Holds the Future? Value Enactment through Futures Framing by Upper Secondary School Teachers

This chapter discusses how upper secondary school teachers in Sweden became concerned with futures of education in the aftermath of the recently launched ChatGPT. To address uncertainties of tomorrow’s education, the school initiated a Futures Day project, engaging both teachers and students in producing futures imaginaries. The study offers insights into value enactments in the teachers’ practical preparatory work with the Futures Day and contributes knowledge about the benefits and challenges of introducing futures in K-12 education, by asking the following key questions: How did teachers frame futures through actions leading up to the Futures Day event? Which values did teachers enact in planning and carrying out their framings of futures? The analysis of data collected draws on Wenger-Trayner and Wenger-Trayner’s value creation framework to understand how teachers’ actions during the preparatory process enacted values in different ways, that contributed to the final delivery of the Futures Day. Our findings point to that the challenges in engagements with futures emerged as threefold, underscoring (1) temporalities that are not common to acknowledge in a school context, (2) a research area to explore from different disciplinary perspectives, and (3) the importance of an awareness of how specific actions and practices frame futures.