by Joedel Peñaranda
Curriculum design often presents itself as a technical exercise. Teachers identify standards, sequence content, select assessments, and document alignment. Yet beneath these familiar tasks sits a deeper question that is rarely asked with enough seriousness: what future is this lesson for? Terms such as readiness, innovation, relevance, and quality appear constantly in educational planning, but they often function as shorthand for preferred futures that remain insufficiently examined. Understanding by Design, or UbD, deserves renewed attention in this context. It is usually discussed as a framework for curriculum coherence. Read through a futures lens, however, UbD can also be understood as a practical tool for making the future assumptions of education more explicit.
UbD is organized around backward design. Rather than beginning with activities or textbook coverage, educators first identify desired results, then determine acceptable evidence, and only then plan learning experiences and instruction (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005). In ordinary curriculum language, this is a method for improving alignment. In futures language, it is a routine anticipatory practice. It starts from an imagined later condition and works backward to present action. That simple shift matters because futures studies has long argued that the future is active in the present. People and institutions do not merely react to what lies ahead. They act through assumptions, stories, expectations, and images of the future that shape choices now (Miller, 2018).
This wider reading of UbD is especially useful for education. Milojević (2005) argues that educational visions are always linked to underlying images of the future. Facer (2021) similarly shows that educational practice is unavoidably future-laden, because decisions about learning are also decisions about human purpose, social order, and desirable forms of life. If that is correct, then curriculum design is never neutral. It always contains judgments about what kinds of learners, communities, and societies education should help to bring into being. UbD offers a familiar structure through which those judgments can be surfaced, tested, and improved.
Understanding by Design as everyday anticipation
Seen this way, UbD is not just a planning template but a form of anticipatory practice embedded in the everyday work of teachers, program chairs, and curriculum committees. When educators identify enduring understandings, frame essential questions, and define transfer goals, they are not simply selecting content. They are deciding what should matter beyond the unit, in what sort of world, and for what kind of learner. Table 1 translates the three stages of UbD into corresponding futures questions, while Figure 1 summarizes the same movement visually as a cycle linking preferred futures, evidence of readiness, and present learning choices.
Table 1. Reading the three stages of Understanding by Design through a futures lens
| UbD stage | Conventional planning question | Futures-oriented question |
| Identify desired results | What should students understand and be able to transfer? | What kind of learner, citizen, and world is this unit presuming or inviting? |
| Determine acceptable evidence | What will count as credible evidence of learning? | What capacities, values, and forms of knowing are being privileged as signs of readiness? |
| Plan learning experiences and instruction | What experiences will move learners toward the desired results? | What present practices help students question assumptions, imagine alternatives, and act responsibly amid uncertainty? |
Figure 1. Backward design as a futures-thinking cycle
Stage 1, identifying desired results, is where the futures dimension is most visible. In many institutions, this stage is narrowed too quickly to standards statements, topic coverage, or performance indicators. These remain important, but they do not exhaust the question of ends. Desired results also express a preferred future. They indicate what forms of understanding, judgment, and action should endure after formal instruction ends. When these results privilege speed, compliance, and efficient reproduction of accepted knowledge, the implied future is narrow. When they include ethical reasoning, interpretive judgment, care across difference, and the capacity to imagine alternatives, the implied future becomes broader and more democratic (Vidergor, 2023; UNESCO, 2021).
Stage 2, determining acceptable evidence, is equally revealing. Assessment is never only technical. It signals what an institution counts as credible evidence that a learner is ready for the future being imagined. A curriculum that relies almost entirely on recall tests privileges a future in which success means efficient reproduction of established knowledge. A curriculum that also uses performance tasks, collaborative inquiry, design challenges, reflective writing, or community-engaged work privileges a different set of capacities, including transfer, interpretation, reflexivity, and responsibility. In this sense, acceptable evidence is not merely proof of attainment. It is also a declaration of value.
Stage 3, planning learning experiences and instruction, returns those commitments to the present. This stage asks what kinds of experiences make the desired future more plausible. Here, backward design becomes highly relevant to futures thinking because the everyday lesson is one of the main places where future assumptions are normalized. Students learn not only content but also how uncertainty is framed, whose knowledge counts, what forms of authority may be questioned, and whether alternatives can be imagined. Facer (2016) argues that education should create room for openness, hope, and novelty. A futures-oriented use of UbD supports that goal when it designs learning experiences that do more than prepare students to fit an anticipated future. It can also prepare them to interpret, contest, and help shape it.
This interpretation is consistent with empirical work on futures-oriented education. Chen and Hsu (2020) found that futures courses were associated with stronger performance in transdisciplinary thinking and openness to alternatives, suggesting that future-oriented pedagogy can shape how students approach complexity and possibility. Recent work on general education has similarly argued that strategic foresight can broaden undergraduate learning by helping students connect disciplinary study to longer-term societal change (Mayer, 2024). Across these discussions, the common point is clear: futures thinking becomes educationally significant when it is translated into curricular form.
What futures thinking adds to backward design
Treating UbD as a futures-thinking tool does not mean assuming that backward design is automatically emancipatory. It can also be used in narrow and technocratic ways. When desired results are treated as fixed, apolitical, and exhausted by accountability metrics, backward design risks becoming backward compliance, a risk consistent with critiques of restrictive anticipatory regimes in education (Amsler & Facer, 2017). The curriculum may appear coherent while simply reproducing dominant images of work, achievement, technology, and citizenship. Inayatullah (2008) describes such inherited and unexamined narratives as used futures. Milojević (2003) makes a related point in her critique of hegemonic educational utopias that present themselves as realism while marginalizing alternative visions of knowledge, history, and ideal education. A futures lens deepens UbD precisely because it refuses to let curricular ends pass as self-evident.
This is where recent futures education scholarship is especially helpful. New contributions in this journal show a widening conversation about how educational design embeds politics, power, and possibility. Mayer (2024) argues for strategic foresight in general education. Fu et al. (2025) call for a more systematic place for futures studies within design education. Barendregt et al. (2025) push further by linking futures education to critical pedagogy and to attentiveness to power. Maingon (2026), writing about Metafutureschool, shows that futures education can also flourish beyond traditional institutional formats when it preserves rigor while opening new pathways for transformative learning. Read together, these studies suggest that the key issue is not only whether futures content appears in a curriculum. It is whether educational design allows learners to examine dominant futures and participate in shaping alternatives.
UbD becomes more powerful when these concerns are brought directly into its three stages. Stage 1 can ask not only what students should understand, but which futures are being privileged in that understanding. Stage 2 can ask not only what evidence is acceptable, but what kinds of knowing and becoming are being rewarded. Stage 3 can ask not only which activities will deliver results, but whether the learning environment leaves room for questioning assumptions, engaging plurality, and responding ethically to uncertainty. These additions do not replace UbD. They make its anticipatory structure more visible and more responsible.
This argument is shaped by the author’s work across secondary and tertiary teaching, curriculum design, institutional planning, and futures facilitation. Over more than a decade in these roles, curriculum and planning conversations have often begun with coverage requirements, accountability documents, and compliance concerns. They have tended to become more useful when the focus moves to the learner several years beyond the course, program, or institutional plan. The language then shifts from topics to transfer, from completion to judgment, and from efficiency to responsibility. This is the professional context from which UbD is read here: as a familiar design structure that can help educators ask what forms of agency, care, competence, and public responsibility their planning choices are trying to cultivate.
That shift is especially important in higher education, where institutions increasingly face competing expectations to demonstrate economic value, human development, and broader societal contribution (Király & Géring, 2021). Under such pressure, curricular design can easily become reactive, managerial, and rhetorically future-facing without actually examining the futures it is serving. Milojević (2021) warns against common fallacies in futures thinking that narrow imagination and weaken agency. UbD can help interrupt this tendency when it is used not simply to align means to pre-given ends, but to open the ends themselves to ethical and anticipatory scrutiny.
From alignment to anticipatory design
A futures-oriented use of UbD, therefore, adds a small but consequential set of questions to ordinary curriculum work. What preferred future is implied by the desired results? What counts as evidence of readiness for that future, and why? Which alternatives are absent from the design? How much room remains for students to interpret, challenge, or co-create the ends of learning? These questions do not make curriculum design less rigorous. They enlarge rigor beyond technical alignment alone.
This approach also helps clarify what UbD cannot do on its own. It is not a substitute for the broader repertoire of futures methods, such as causal layered analysis, scenario development, or futures literacy laboratories (Milojević, 2008). Nor can it by itself resolve deep inequalities or democratize educational institutions. Its value lies elsewhere. Because UbD is already widely used, it offers a realistic bridge between mainstream curriculum practice and the deeper concerns of futures studies. It carries futures questions into the ordinary sites where educational futures are actually made: unit plans, assessment systems, program outcomes, and institutional review processes.
That bridge matters because not all educators will adopt a separate futures curriculum, and not all institutions will create dedicated foresight programs. Yet most educators do design learning. If futures thinking is to become part of everyday educational practice rather than remain a specialist activity, it needs entry points within routine professional work. UbD provides one such entry point. It invites educators to begin with the end in mind. Futures thinking then asks the more demanding follow-up question: whose end, under what assumptions, and toward what kind of world?
Conclusion
Understanding by Design remains one of the most influential curriculum frameworks in contemporary education because it helps educators move from activity-driven teaching toward intentional design. Its relevance, however, extends further than curriculum coherence. Read through futures studies, UbD becomes a practical method for surfacing the preferred futures embedded in educational planning. Desired results can be read as preferred futures, acceptable evidence as value-laden signals of readiness, and learning experiences as present interventions shaped by anticipatory assumptions.
This interpretation does not romanticize backward design. UbD can still be used narrowly, and educational planning will always be shaped by institutional pressures. But a futures lens allows the framework to do more than align instruction and assessment. It turns curriculum design into an occasion for examining power, plurality, responsibility, and the purposes of education itself. That is a modest claim, but an important one. In a period when schools and universities are repeatedly told to prepare learners for rapid change, the most useful question may also be the simplest: what future is this lesson for?
References
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