Interview with theme convenors of one of seven UKFIET 2025 conference themes, ‘Skills and knowledge for sustainable futures’: Amy Parker, Right to Play, and Karem Roitman, The Open University. The Call for Abstracts is open until 21 March 2025.
What excites you about your theme?
This theme tackles some of the BIG questions in education, from ancient debates to modern challenges. We want to explore what skills and knowledge are essential for a just, sustainable future. This requires us to question what is the goal of education. Should education focus on current success or on reshaping the world? What knowledge fosters human flourishing and supports cross-cultural and cross-generational understanding?
More broadly, this topic confronts us with the larger question of what is human nature: what skills do humans have and what skills can we develop? For example, we could ask: is empathy an innate human skill that education can strengthen or is this something that must be taught? An understanding of human nature – which expands from the neurological to the societal – also looks at how we learn. Exploring the most effective ways to learn and teach is as exciting as considering what we need to learn.
We also need to consider what skills and knowledge, and what ways of learning, separate us from AI and can prepare us for an AI-rich world. When considering ways of learning and bodies of knowledge, it is important to avoid historical prejudices that blind us to knowledge and pedagogy from the global south.
How does your theme connect to the overall conference and today’s global landscape?
Education – what and how we learn – is intricately woven into our global, national, societal, and personal value systems. ‘What good looks like’ in education has largely been defined and controlled by those who have succeeded in the system and risen to its leadership. Our theme, therefore, allows us to question the structures of power that have created existing educational landscapes and to consider how education can be a force for change in an era of global instability and global challenges.
Our global landscape demands educational approaches that transcend traditional boundaries. As we confront unprecedented environmental challenges, technological disruptions through social media and AI, and complex cross-cultural dynamics, education must equip learners with both practical skills and critical knowledge that enables collective action.
Education that does not critically assess the skills and knowledge we need for the future will undermine sustainability and sabotage our wellbeing. We believe that our future requires partnership to support the development of knowledge and skills that can address global challenges. Education must find ways to overcome barriers in practice as well as between bodies of knowledge. While each educational situation is unique, and each learner is an individual, we need to constantly learn from best practices and support each other to shape the future of education. We want to consider whether we can move from industrial models of education into post-industrial, sustainability-focused models.
What kinds of papers/sessions would you like to see submitted under your theme?
We would like to see papers/sessions from practitioners, academics, and policymakers that help us critically assess what has been done in knowledge and skills development in education, and creatively imagine what could be done.
We are looking for discussions of pilot programmes and their insights, evaluations of established schools or curricula, and theoretical discussion of pedagogies and practices that provide insights that are valuable to share.
We are interested in exploring pedagogies that respect human nature and acknowledge the weight of history on education. Thus, we are particularly interested in pedagogies that highlight marginalised voices and ways of learning and knowing. Along with this we are interested in questioning the knowledge (and power) base that is needed to address our present and build our future.
We want to consider how knowledge is built, whose knowledge is prioritised, how knowledge is structured in curricula and what impact this has in our learning and visions of the future. Similarly, we want to consider what skills have been prioritised in education, and what skills require greater emphasis, considering how socio-economic contexts have affected our choices.
AI is a key variable to address. As we enter the AI era, we need to consider how AI can be harnessed to enhance education process and outcomes, in what ways AI might support or undermine educational objectives and sustainability goals.
We are looking for thoughtful, informed conversations on the knowledge and skills we need to build human connections and planetary sustainability in an era of political instability, technological change, inequality, and violence.
