Whose Futures Are Being Taught? A Critical Systematic Review of Futures Thinking in Education

Article

Joedel O. Peñaranda^1*, Ralph Arvic T. Arcenal², Jenny A. Genoguin², Marianne Agnes T. Mendoza²

¹Faculty of Education, The University of Melbourne, Australia

²Biliran Province State University, Philippines

Abstract

Futures thinking has become prominent in education amid uncertainty, technological change, and sustainability crises. This critical systematic review analyzes 107 publications from 2000 through July 2026 and uses Causal Layered Analysis to ask whose futures educational scholarship makes visible, legitimate, and teachable. The findings show that institutionally authorized futures of adaptation predominate, especially techno-economic and skills-oriented imaginaries shaped by higher education and Global North publication circuits. Decolonial, Indigenous, community-grounded, and structurally transformative futures are present but less institutionally embedded. The article advances a plural futures pedagogy that positions education as collective world-making rather than preparation for externally prescribed futures.

Keywords

futures thinking; futures literacy; education; pedagogy; Causal Layered Analysis

Introduction

Futures thinking has become an increasingly visible strand of educational research and practice. Across higher education, school reform, teacher development, curriculum debates, community learning, design education, and adult education, scholars and practitioners have turned to futures literacy, foresight, scenario building, speculative design, anticipatory learning, and Causal Layered Analysis (CLA) to respond to uncertainty, technological acceleration, ecological disruption, and political volatility. The expansion is understandable. Education is routinely asked to prepare learners for worlds described as unstable, fast-changing, and difficult to predict. Under those conditions, pedagogies oriented toward possible, probable, and preferable futures appear both timely and necessary.

Yet the growth of futures discourse in education raises a prior question that the field must keep asking: whose futures are being made visible, legitimate, and teachable? Futures education has never been merely a technical exercise in preparedness. Foundational work framed it as a reflective, ethical, and cultural project concerned with agency, imagination, social foresight, and the democratization of future-making (Gidley & Hampson, 2005; Gidley & Inayatullah, 2002; Hicks, 2000, 2002; Inayatullah & Gidley, 2000; Milojević, 2005; Slaughter, 2008). In this tradition, futures thinking is not simply preparation for change. It is a way of questioning the assumptions, histories, and power relations through which some futures become plausible while others are excluded.

This longer lineage matters because contemporary educational futures work often uses the language of plurality while operating within institutional conditions that reward adaptability, innovation, competitiveness, and digital readiness. The field contains diverse pedagogical experiments, including futures games, school-based foresight, youth futures, biographies of the future, design futures, post-pandemic futures schools, adult futures literacy, and university transformation work (Beara & Dubovicki, 2023; Bishop & Strong, 2010; Chen & Hoffman, 2017; Dubovicki & Dilica, 2022; Fu et al., 2025; Hovenden, 2024; Lombardo, 2010; Maingon, 2026; Martin, 2025). The existence of such work does not settle the question of dominance. It makes the question more important: which futures become central in educational research, and which remain peripheral? Recent studies extend this repertoire through collaborative course design and cross-cultural workshops that connect futures methods with active participation, positive interdependence, culturally situated images of the future, and more inclusive futures literacy (Abdullah, 2023a; Abdullah et al., 2024).

This article starts from the proposition that futures thinking in education is never neutral. Education does not simply prepare learners for futures that already exist outside schooling. It actively constructs desirable futures, legitimizes particular forms of agency, and marginalizes others. In that sense, futures thinking is part of the politics of anticipation. It shapes what counts as a problem, what forms of readiness are valued, and who is imagined as capable of acting in and on the future. Research on policy futures and educational imaginaries shows that such anticipatory framings can reorganize present educational priorities long before any projected future arrives (Rahm, 2023; Robertson, 2022; Webb et al., 2020).

The purpose of this article is therefore not merely to map educational futures scholarship, but to interrogate it critically. Using a systematic review of publications from 2000 to 2026 and applying CLA to the corpus, the article asks: What futures dominate educational futures discourse, what deeper assumptions organize those futures, and what alternatives remain marginal? The argument developed here is that the field is broader in terminology than in worldview. While the reviewed literature presents itself as open, plural, and exploratory, the futures most commonly being taught remain concentrated around adaptation to techno-economic change. More decolonial, relational, and structurally transformative futures are present, but they remain secondary.

Futures thinking in education as a politics of anticipation

In this article, futures thinking is used as an umbrella term that includes futures studies, futures literacy, foresight, anticipatory learning, scenario work, speculative design, futures games, visioning, and related approaches that explicitly engage possible, probable, or preferable futures in educational settings. This broad framing is warranted because the educational literature rarely uses one stable label. Adjacent vocabularies circulate across disciplinary and institutional settings. What matters for the present analysis is not terminological purity, but the shared claim that engaging the future can transform how learning, teaching, and educational planning are undertaken.

The field has a substantive foundation in work that treats futures education as a democratic, reflective, and transformative practice. Hicks (2000, 2002, 2003) placed futures within reflective educational practice and argued that learners need opportunities to explore personal, social, ecological, and planetary futures. Slaughter (2008) framed futures education as a catalyst for social foresight and institutional renewal. Gidley and Hampson (2005) traced the evolution of futures in school education, while Gidley (2012) later interpreted educational futures as rich imaginaries rather than simple reform projections. Inayatullah’s work on CLA and layered change provided a method for treating educational futures as cultural and narrative formations rather than predictions (Inayatullah, 1998, 2008, 2020).

Early pedagogical work widened the repertoire. Contributions on teaching the future emphasized why futures should be taught, how it can be taught, and how learners across age groups can encounter the future through interdisciplinary, experiential, and reflective methods (Bishop & Strong, 2010; Dator, 2003; Dian, 2003; Goux-Baudiment, 2003; Jones, 2003; Kelly, 2003; Lombardo, 2010; Masini, 2011; May, 2003; Ono, 2003; Savitsky, 2003; Stein, 2010; Tiberius, 2010). Work on school-age and preschool futures similarly showed that futures learning is not confined to universities or expert foresight settings (Gustafson, 2011; Mack, 2011; Shostak, 2011; Strong & Bishop, 2011; Vidergor, 2023).

Recent scholarship extends this pedagogical repertoire across school, university, science, and design contexts. Participatory scenario work has foregrounded students’ capacity to construct, critique, and act on future-school imaginaries, while also exposing institutional and technological constraints on imagination (Kaviani et al., 2025; Selwyn et al., 2025, 2026). Other studies have developed futures consciousness, transdisciplinary future-making capabilities, narratives of change, challenge-based futures education, speculative education fiction, responsible co-speculation, and more-than-human design pedagogy (Gidiotis, 2026; Kligyte et al., 2025; Koch et al., 2025; Matos-Castaño et al., 2025; Monittola et al., 2026; Røkenes et al., 2025; Stead, 2026; Torri et al., 2025). Together with work on human-centred AI governance in higher education, these contributions show that contemporary futures education spans both adaptive institutional reform and more participatory, critical, and relational approaches (Kosbar, 2025).

A critical review is necessary because this educational turn to the future unfolds within wider regimes of anticipatory governance. International organizations, policy actors, and technology sectors increasingly frame education through future-oriented rationalities that link present reform to imagined social, economic, and technological trajectories (Robertson, 2022). The future is often narrated as an external force of disruption to which education must respond through flexibility, innovation, competence building, and resilience. In education policy and public discourse alike, this can produce a narrow sense of urgency in which institutions are encouraged to adapt quickly while deeper questions of educational purpose, political conflict, and unequal power recede from view (Rahm, 2023; Selwyn et al., 2020; Webb et al., 2020).

Causal Layered Analysis offers a useful framework for moving beyond surface description. Developed by Inayatullah (1998), CLA interprets a field across four layers: litany, systemic causes, worldview, and myth or metaphor. The litany layer captures recurrent headlines, problem statements, and visible trends. The systemic layer examines institutional arrangements and structural drivers. The worldview layer identifies assumptions about reality, agency, progress, and knowledge. The deepest layer concerns the myths and metaphors through which a field imagines itself. CLA is especially useful for futures education because it reveals how apparently practical debates about skills, scenarios, and readiness are underwritten by cultural narratives and contested images of the future (Inayatullah, 1998, 2008). Complementing CLA, the Futures Triangle can function as a cognitive map for interpreting the past, orienting the present, and charting plausible futures, while supporting the elicitation of future images, the integration of knowledge and values, and broader participation in imagining desired futures (Abdullah, 2023b).

Applied to educational futures, CLA enables us to ask not only what themes dominate the literature, but also what kinds of learners, temporalities, and social orders those themes presuppose. It also opens space for reconstruction. If the future is not singular but multiple, then futures-oriented pedagogy must attend to plural knowledges, unequal histories, and competing visions of the common good. This concern resonates with calls to broaden education beyond instrumental problem-solving and to cultivate ethical, democratic, and intergenerational orientations to change (Facer & Sriprakash, 2021; International Commission on the Futures of Education, 2021; Rasa, 2025).

Method

The study was designed as a critical systematic review. Systematic review procedures were used to identify, screen, and extract literature transparently, while the interpretive goal remained explanatory rather than merely aggregative. The review followed the general reporting logic of PRISMA 2020 (Page et al., 2021), but the analysis was oriented toward discourse, assumptions, and imaginaries rather than effect size estimation. This made it possible to combine review rigor with a futures-studies mode of interpretation.

The search covered publications from 2000 through 17 July 2026, including online-first and in-press records available by that date. Principal searches were conducted across Scopus, Web of Science Core Collection, ERIC, Google Scholar, futures journal archives, publisher pages, and citation trails from key educational futures works. Search strings combined education-related terms with futures-related terms, including education, pedagogy, teaching, curriculum, learning, school, higher education, teacher education, youth learning, adult learning, futures literacy, futures studies, foresight, anticipation, scenario, speculative design, futures games, Causal Layered Analysis, Polak Game, and future imaginaries. Targeted searches also examined recent issues and advance online publications in specialist futures journals and related education-futures outlets.

The review included peer-reviewed journal articles, scholarly books or book chapters, substantive field reports, and field-archive articles when education and futures thinking were central to the publication. It excluded items where education was peripheral, where future language was rhetorical rather than analytical, or where the publication did not provide enough conceptual, empirical, or methodological detail for coding.

The search process identified 2,105 records, including 1,846 from databases and registers and 259 from targeted journal archives, citation searching, books, and reports. After 512 duplicate records were removed, 1,593 records were screened, of which 1,382 were excluded. The remaining 211 reports were sought for retrieval and assessed for eligibility, with no reports unavailable for retrieval. Eligibility assessment excluded 104 reports because of insufficient educational focus (n = 39), peripheral use of futures concepts (n = 34), publication type or date outside the criteria (n = 18), duplicate or derivative status (n = 8), or insufficient detail for coding (n = 5). The final corpus comprised 107 publications (Figure 1). Table 1 sets out the inclusion and exclusion criteria. The discussion also draws on conceptually relevant scholarship used to situate the findings rather than as units of descriptive coding.

For each included publication, descriptive data were extracted on publication year, publication type, first-author region, educational setting, methodological approach, and primary conceptual vocabulary. A second coding stage classified each publication by principal future orientation, temporal horizon, learner position, and degree of epistemic plurality. These categories were developed iteratively through repeated reading and memoing. The principal future orientation was coded as the dominant frame of the publication, even when secondary orientations were present. This allowed the review to distinguish among techno-economic adaptation, sustainability or resilience, civic-democratic participation, and decolonial, plural, or justice-oriented futures without artificially inflating overlap.

Table 1. Inclusion and exclusion criteria

Dimension	Include if …	Exclude if …
Publication type	Peer-reviewed journal article, scholarly book or book chapter, substantive field report, or field-archive article.	Editorial notice, short announcement, book review, conference abstract, dissertation, or item with insufficient scholarly detail.
Date range	Published from 2000 through 17 July 2026.	Published before 2000 or after the search cut-off.
Language	Available in English.	Not available in English.
Educational relevance	Education, pedagogy, curriculum, teaching, learning, school, higher education, teacher education, youth learning, adult learning, or community education is a primary focus.	Education is peripheral or only illustrative.
Futures relevance	The publication engages futures literacy, futures studies, foresight, anticipation, scenario work, speculative design, futures games, CLA, or explicit future imaginaries.	The future is mentioned only rhetorically or without analytical development.
Analytic scope	Contains sufficient conceptual, empirical, or methodological detail for extraction and layered coding.	Insufficient detail for analysis or duplicate indexed publication.

Figure 1. Flow of study identification, screening, eligibility assessment, and inclusion

CLA was applied to the corpus after descriptive and thematic coding. At the litany level, coding focused on visible problem frames and solution vocabularies. At the systemic level, the review examined institutional pressures, policy drivers, and preferred intervention sites. At the worldview level, the analysis considered how the literature positioned learners, agency, temporality, and knowledge. At the myth-metaphor level, recurring images and narrative structures were identified through close reading of titles, abstracts, framing sections, and discussion passages. As with all reviews, the study has limits. It privileges English-language and publicly discoverable scholarship and does not capture every local, practice-based, or non-indexed futures education initiative. Even so, it provides a robust account of the dominant publication circuits through which educational futures discourse travels.

Findings

Field profile of the corpus

The corpus shows both historical depth and recent acceleration. Of the 107 publications reviewed, 51 were published between 2021 and 2026, compared with 22 between 2015 and 2020, 16 between 2010 and 2014, 8 between 2005 and 2009, and 10 between 2000 and 2004. Higher education remained the most common setting (n = 52), but the corpus also revealed a substantial base of school and K-12 work (n = 26), teacher education (n = 8), non-formal or community learning (n = 10), and cross-sector or general educational analysis (n = 11). The pattern confirms that educational futures research is not new, but its publication volume and topical visibility have increased sharply since 2020.

The geographic distribution was similarly concentrated. Europe was the most common first-author region (n = 35), followed by North America (n = 22), Oceania (n = 17), East Asia (n = 16), cross-regional or global work (n = 8), Latin America (n = 5), and Africa (n = 4). Seventy-four of the 107 publications therefore had first authors based in Europe, North America, or Oceania. This concentration matters because the published discourse on educational futures remains disproportionately shaped by Global North academic circuits. The point is not that these regions lack internal diversity. Rather, the field’s center of gravity remains within institutional settings where futures discourse is often entangled with innovation agendas, international benchmarking, university strategy, and digital transformation.

Methodologically, the corpus was mixed but uneven. Conceptual or theoretical work was the largest group (n = 36), followed by qualitative studies (n = 27), design-based, action, or practice reports (n = 23), mixed-methods designs (n = 14), and quantitative studies (n = 7). The conceptual vocabulary was diverse, yet clustered around a limited set of labels. Futures thinking or futures studies was the most common primary descriptor (n = 29), followed by futures literacy (n = 25), scenario or foresight approaches (n = 18), design or speculative futures (n = 17), anticipation or policy imaginaries (n = 10), and games, experiential, or arts-based futures (n = 8). Terminological expansion did not necessarily produce balanced epistemic diversification. Table 2 summarizes the descriptive profile of the corpus.

Table 2. Descriptive profile of included publications (n = 107)

Dimension	Category	n
Publication period	2000-2004	10
	2005-2009	8
	2010-2014	16
	2015-2020	22
	2021-2026	51
Educational setting	Higher education	52
	School or K-12	26
	Teacher education	8
	Non-formal or community	10
	Cross-sector or general education	11
First-author region	Europe	35
	North America	22
	Oceania	17
	East Asia	16
	Latin America	5
	Africa	4
	Cross-regional or global	8
Methodological approach	Conceptual or theoretical	36
	Qualitative	27
	Design-based, action, or practice report	23
	Mixed methods	14
	Quantitative	7
Primary concept label	Futures literacy	25
	Futures thinking or futures studies	29
	Scenario or foresight	18
	Design or speculative futures	17
	Anticipation or policy imaginaries	10
	Games, experiential, or arts-based futures	8

Litany: Dominant surface problematics

At the litany level, the field was organized by recurring language of uncertainty, disruption, preparedness, innovation, future skills, sustainability, technological change, and learner agency. Across the corpus, the dominant question was how learners and institutions might become more ready for fast-moving social and technological change. When the publications were coded for principal future orientation, 39 emphasized techno-economic and institutional adaptation, 24 sustainability or resilience, 25 civic or democratic participation, and 19 decolonial, plural, or justice-oriented futures. Figure 2 presents this distribution. The balance is notable because much of the literature described itself as open-ended or exploratory, yet the most visible concerns remained concentrated around employability, digital transformation, institutional responsiveness, and innovation-oriented readiness.

Figure 2. Principal future orientations across the reviewed corpus

This surface pattern was especially evident in work tied to digitalization, artificial intelligence, higher education strategy, graduate capabilities, design education, and organizational change. In these studies, the future often appeared as a changing external environment to which learners, teachers, or institutions had to respond through flexibility, creativity, competence development, or governance reform (Barbara & Ma, 2025; Fu et al., 2025; Georgiou, 2026; Gidiotis, 2026; Kosbar, 2025; Torri et al., 2025). Even when pedagogical interventions were reflective and participatory, the problem frame frequently began from assumptions about turbulence in labor markets, technological acceleration, or institutional competitiveness. Similar dynamics have been observed in wider educational imaginaries of technology, where visions of future schooling are frequently driven by the promise or threat of disruption rather than by democratic debate about educational purpose (Kaviani et al., 2025; Rahm, 2023; Selwyn et al., 2020).

Sustainability-oriented publications broadened the agenda by connecting futures thinking to ecological limits, interdependence among systems, and long-term responsibility. However, many still framed the problem in terms of building competencies for resilience rather than interrogating the political economy that produces crisis. More transformative work was present in scholarship that linked futures thinking with social justice, youth voice, critical pedagogy, decolonial critique, more-than-human perspectives, design transformation, and participatory world-making (Barendregt et al., 2025; Facer & Sriprakash, 2021; Hovenden, 2024; International Commission on the Futures of Education, 2021; Kligyte et al., 2025; Maingon, 2026; Martin, 2025; Matos-Castaño et al., 2025; Monittola et al., 2026; Røkenes et al., 2025; Stead, 2026). Yet such contributions remained less dominant. At the level of surface discourse, the future was most often narrated as a challenge that education must keep pace with, not as a contested terrain that education might help reconstitute.

Systemic layer: Why adaptive futures dominate

At the systemic layer, the dominance of adaptive futures was closely tied to the institutional locations from which much of the literature emerged. Forty-six publications explicitly linked futures work to employability, innovation ecosystems, digitalization, organizational agility, professional readiness, or industry change. Thirty-two oriented futures work primarily toward sustainability, citizenship, or social responsibility, while twenty-nine foregrounded justice, decoloniality, public pedagogy, youth agency, design transformation, or structural critique. These distributions suggest that the field is strongly shaped by policy and organizational pressures that reward responsiveness to economic and technological change. In higher education especially, futures thinking often served as a strategy for institutional modernization, curriculum renewal, faculty development, and graduate capability formation.

This pattern resonates with Robertson’s (2022) account of anticipatory governance in education, in which international organizations and policy actors frame reform through future-oriented rationalities. It also aligns with Webb et al.’s (2020) argument that education is increasingly governed by policy futures that shape present action through anticipated scenarios. In the reviewed corpus, futures methods were often mobilized to help institutions navigate volatility, redesign programs, or align graduates with emerging conditions. These are legitimate educational concerns, but they narrow the horizon when the future becomes synonymous with external adaptation to conditions defined elsewhere.

The corpus also makes visible an important countercurrent. School-based foresight, preschool futures, K-12 teaching practice, community futures, futures literacy projects, and experimental schools show that educational futures can be grounded in reflective practice, child and youth agency, play, metaphors, cultural critique, and community problem-solving (Gustafson, 2011; Hicks, 2000; Kaviani et al., 2025; Mack, 2011; Maingon, 2026; Røkenes et al., 2025; Selwyn et al., 2025, 2026; Shostak, 2011; Strong & Bishop, 2011). However, these strands are less institutionally dominant than university-centered and policy-centered approaches. The systemic center of gravity helps explain why adaptive and instrumental futures recur so consistently even within a field that explicitly values plurality.

Worldview layer: The learner as adaptive subject

The worldview layer revealed a recurrent image of the learner as an adaptive subject. Fifty-two publications positioned learners primarily as self-managing actors who must cultivate agility, creativity, resilience, entrepreneurial capacity, or futures literacy in order to navigate uncertainty. Thirty-seven positioned learners more collectively as collaborators, co-designers, citizens, or world-makers. Eighteen centered the learner as a political subject who confronts structural power, historical injustice, coloniality, or contested social futures. This distribution is significant because it shows that even when the literature rejects prediction and embraces plurality, it frequently retains an individualized theory of agency. The future becomes something one prepares for rather than something one contests collectively.

Temporal assumptions pointed in the same direction. Fifty-six publications focused on short- to medium-term horizons of roughly five to fifteen years. Twenty-eight engaged longer intergenerational or civilizational horizons, and twenty-three explicitly worked with non-linear, layered, ancestral, or otherwise critical temporalities. The prevalence of near futures is understandable in applied educational settings, yet it privileges immediacy, readiness, and adaptation. By comparison, research on futures consciousness suggests that richer futures engagement requires attention to multiple horizons, including probable, possible, and preferable futures, and to the ways anticipation reorganizes present perception (Ahvenharju et al., 2018; Koch et al., 2025).

A further worldview pattern concerned epistemic universality. Many publications assumed a relatively generic learner and a transferable set of anticipatory competences. Explicit attention to context, coloniality, culture, place, or knowledge pluralism was present but not evenly distributed. This supports Facer and Sriprakash’s (2021) caution that futures literacy can be universalized in ways that flatten difference. The issue is not whether general capacities matter, but whether the field treats anticipation as culturally situated and politically contested or as a neutral skill set that can circulate independently of history and place.

Myth and metaphor layer

At the deepest CLA layer, the corpus was organized by a small repertoire of recurring metaphors. The most common was the coming storm. Here, the future appears as turbulence, disruption, crisis, or accelerated change, and education is tasked with equipping learners to withstand it. A closely related metaphor was navigation, in which learners are cast as explorers or navigators who require foresight tools, maps, and adaptive capacities. A third recurring image was the toolkit, which framed futures thinking as a portable set of methods that can be applied across contexts to improve readiness. Taken together, these metaphors support a view of educational futures as a matter of agility under pressure.

Alternative metaphors were present but less influential. A smaller group of publications invoked the future as commons, repair, care, stewardship, play, critical design, youth voice, or collective design. In these texts, education was not primarily a buffer against disruption but a practice of shaping desirable social relations and renewing shared worlds. Such work aligns more closely with critical and transformative traditions in futures studies and pedagogy, including the UNESCO commission’s framing of education as a public, relational, and intergenerational good (International Commission on the Futures of Education, 2021). Yet these metaphors remained less influential than the dominant images of volatility and preparedness.

Table 3 synthesizes the CLA reading of the corpus. Read together, the four layers suggest that the field’s surface vocabulary of openness often rests on deeper assumptions that are considerably narrower. Dominant myths do not simply describe the future. They authorize particular dispositions toward it: to prepare, adapt, optimize, and cope. More demanding political and epistemic questions about whose worlds are being protected, repaired, or imagined appear less frequently.

Table 3. Causal Layered Analysis synthesis of the corpus

Layer	Dominant pattern	Marginal or less dominant futures
Litany	Uncertainty, disruption, future skills, innovation, AI readiness, employability, resilience.	Repair, solidarity, Indigenous resurgence, reparative justice, democratic contestation, community world-making.
Systemic	Higher education reform, digitalization, competitiveness, organizational responsiveness, policy anticipation.	Community futures, teacher education, place-based work, non-formal learning, redistributive agendas.
Worldview	Learner as adaptive self; future as external environment; transferable anticipatory competence; short-to-medium horizons.	Learner as political subject; situated anticipation; long duration; knowledge plurality; historical repair.
Myth or metaphor	Storm, navigation, toolkit, agility, frontier innovation.	Commons, care, stewardship, repair, relational world-making.

Discussion

Whose futures are being taught?

The findings answer the title question directly. The futures most commonly being taught in the reviewed literature are institutionally authorized futures of adaptation within already dominant socio-technical orders. This conclusion is supported by the concentration of 52 publications in higher education, 74 first authors in Europe, North America, or Oceania, and 52 publications that positioned learners primarily as adaptive subjects. These are futures in which learners are expected to become agile, innovative, resilient, futures literate, and employable; institutions are expected to modernize and remain responsive; and the future is imagined less as a political struggle over collective life than as an environment of accelerating change. Critical and transformative work is substantial, but it remains less firmly institutionalized than adaptive futures.

This finding extends prior review work. Menéndez-Alvarez-Hevia et al. (2022) showed that futures studies have entered educational research through a variety of concepts and methods. The present analysis suggests that this diffusion should not be mistaken for epistemic plurality. A field can appear methodologically diverse while still being governed by a relatively narrow set of futures. In this respect, the review supports the critical arguments advanced by Amsler and Facer (2017), Facer and Sriprakash (2021), and Inayatullah (2020): educational futures are shaped by anticipatory regimes, and even emancipatory vocabularies can be absorbed into competence-based and universalizing frameworks.

The historical contrast is instructive. Foundational futures education scholarship emphasized reflection, imagination, ethics, social foresight, and cultural change (Gidley & Hampson, 2005; Hicks, 2000, 2002; Inayatullah & Gidley, 2000; Milojević, 2005; Slaughter, 2008). Pedagogical work on teaching futures stressed process, experience, discipline crossing, and age-inclusive practice (Bishop & Strong, 2010; Dator, 2003; Lombardo, 2010; Mack, 2011; Masini, 2011; Shostak, 2011; Tiberius, 2010). The contemporary field has not abandoned these commitments, but they are increasingly mediated through institutional demands for future-ready learners, innovation ecosystems, and policy responsiveness. The result is not a simple decline from critical roots. It is a tension between plural futures pedagogy and the organizational systems in which such pedagogy must operate.

Recent studies reinforce this tension. Student-centered scenario work reveals both the value of participation and the persistence of familiar school scripts (Kaviani et al., 2025; Selwyn et al., 2025, 2026), while research on futures consciousness, sustainable future-making, education fiction, and queering pedagogy expands the field’s critical and participatory repertoire (Gidiotis, 2026; Kligyte et al., 2025; Koch et al., 2025; Monittola et al., 2026; Røkenes et al., 2025). These studies do not overturn the overall pattern; they clarify the institutional conditions under which alternative futures can be imagined and enacted.

The implications are consequential, as framing the future as an external force to which one must adapt reorients pedagogy toward preparation, optimization, and psychological readiness. Structural inequalities, colonial histories, and conflicts over educational purpose become secondary. Learners may be invited to imagine alternatives, but the permissible range of alternatives is often already bounded by assumptions about innovation, digital transition, or future skills. In that sense, the politics of anticipation operates not through overt closure but through selective openness. Many futures can be discussed, but only some futures are institutionally legible.

Institutional legibility, then, is not the same as imagination. A future may be named in classroom discussion yet remain difficult to enact when it encounters curriculum standards, assessment regimes, funding logics, policy narratives, and organizational routines. Institutional inertia, path dependence, and competing interpretive frames help explain why some possible futures become viable pathways for change while others remain symbolically present but practically weak (Robertson, 2022; Webb et al., 2020). This matters pedagogically because students require support not only to identify multiple futures, but to move beyond anxiety, inherited narratives, and institutional scripts toward more empowering images of agency and collective change.

Toward a plural futures pedagogy

A more adequate response is not to abandon futures thinking but to pluralize it. Epistemic plurality asks whose knowledge traditions, temporalities, bodies, and life-worlds are centered in content, pedagogy, and research design. Recent feminist futures scholarship clarifies that plurality is not achieved by adding diverse voices to an unchanged framework. It also requires examining how patriarchal, colonial, binary, and technocratic assumptions organize futures-as-practice, futures-as-methods, and futures-as-visions. Feminist futures therefore connect representation to systemic change, cultural recognition, care, relationality, and epistemic justice (Abdullah, 2025; Nassiri-Ansari et al., 2025).

These commitments have concrete pedagogical implications. Al-Noaimi’s (2025) account of a Gulf futures course shows how role-play, speculative design, games, and the Futures Triangle can help students challenge fixed, state-sanctioned narratives and neoliberal imaginaries, and develop alternatives grounded in marginalized experience. Recent work on craft and ancestral knowledge further expands what can count as futures pedagogy. Textile making, weaving, memory work, and embodied practice can transmit intergenerational knowledge, cultivate care, and connect learners with land, community, and non-linear temporalities (Deacu, 2026; Rodriguez-Fransen, 2026; Willcocks, 2026). Plurality thus concerns not only what is discussed, but who produces knowledge and through which materials, relationships, and practices.

Hoffman’s (2019) cross-cultural study of university students’ environmental futures similarly demonstrates how survey work, drawing, visioning, and CLA can move learning from abstract plurality toward embodied and reconstructive engagement with preferred futures. Collaborative and cross-cultural designs provide complementary pathways: structured group work can support participation and positive interdependence, while comparative workshops can surface culturally situated images of the future (Abdullah, 2023a; Abdullah et al., 2024). The Futures Triangle can further connect future images with the conditions and inherited assumptions that enable or constrain them (Abdullah, 2023b).

Plurality also concerns learners’ capacity to become otherwise. Dator’s (2022) account of human becomings and destination identities treats identity as dynamic, relational, and futures-oriented rather than as a fixed inheritance. This perspective complements Abdullah’s (2026) argument that social imagination is a shared civic capacity shaped by institutional conditions and that classroom design and participatory futures methods can reopen agency, care, and collective responsibility. Drawing, visioning, play, metaphor work, CLA, responsible co-speculation, and preferred-futures exercises can therefore help learners surface inherited assumptions, critically examine inherited identities, and co-create futures.

The second requirement is temporal plurality. The corpus shows a strong bias toward short- and medium-term horizons. Educational practice also needs intergenerational, civilizational, ancestral, and layered timeframes to address ecological breakdown, democratic fragility, technological disruption, and historical repair (Ahvenharju et al., 2018; Hicks, 2002; Rasa, 2025).

The third requirement is structural literacy. If futures education remains focused on individual adaptability, it risks reproducing the conditions that make the future appear threatening. Learners need opportunities to examine how institutions, technologies, economies, and colonial histories distribute risk and opportunity, and to ask who is making a projected future, who benefits, and which alternatives dominant narratives foreclose.

Finally, plural futures pedagogy should treat education as public world-making. Scenarios, speculative prompts, futures games, and futures literacy workshops are not inherently plural; they become so when they are organized around democratic participation, situated knowledge, relational responsibility, and the redistribution of authority over future-making. The aim is not simply to multiply scenarios, but to widen who can know, imagine, become, and act.

Implications for research and practice

The review suggests several priorities for future research. More work is needed in school education, teacher education, adult education, and non-formal community settings, where questions of citizenship, intergenerational justice, and local knowledge may be framed differently than in universities. There is also a clear geographic imbalance. Scholarship from Africa, Latin America, parts of Asia, and Indigenous communities remains underrepresented in indexed educational futures research, which makes it difficult to assess how plural the field actually is beyond dominant publication circuits.

Methodologically, the field would benefit from more robust evaluation designs. Many intervention studies report strong participant engagement and positive self-assessments, which is valuable, but evidence remains thinner on long-term pedagogical effects, institutional change, and the redistribution of voice within educational settings (Chen & Hsu, 2020; Kazemier et al., 2021). Comparative studies that examine how similar futures methods function across different cultural and policy contexts would be especially useful. So too would research that combines participatory futures methods with discourse analysis, policy analysis, and ethnographic attention to how futures are enacted in practice.

For educators and curriculum designers, the findings suggest that method choice alone is insufficient. Scenario building, speculative prompts, design fiction, futures literacy exercises, and futures games can all reproduce narrow imaginaries unless paired with explicit questions about power, absence, and positionality. CLA remains valuable here because it pushes analysis from surface trends to deeper metaphors and structures (Inayatullah, 1998, 2008). A practical implication is that futures-oriented pedagogy should routinely ask four questions: What future problem is being named? What systems are producing it? What worldview organizes the response? What deeper myth or metaphor is being reproduced? Even simple classroom futures exercises can become more critical when these questions are foregrounded. In practice, this means that futures lessons should be judged not only by how many futures they name, but by whether they help learners connect surfaced assumptions to credible pathways for agency, responsibility, and collective action.

For policy, the article suggests a shift from the language of future skills to the language of future publics. Education systems certainly need capacities for anticipation, but those capacities should be linked to ethical judgment, collective agency, and responsibility for shared worlds. Without that broader frame, futures discourse can easily become a refined language of adaptation for unequal times.

Conclusion

This article has argued that the growth of futures thinking in education does not by itself guarantee plural or transformative educational futures. Across the reviewed literature from 2000 to 2026, the field contains a rich and varied tradition of reflective practice, youth futures, school futures, university futures, games, futures literacy, design futures, and post-pandemic educational experiments. In answer to the article’s guiding question, the futures most often being taught are those that existing institutions can most readily recognize and support: adaptive, techno-economic, future-skills-oriented, and largely produced through higher education and Global North academic and policy circuits.

Causal Layered Analysis shows that the field’s surface language of openness often rests on deeper metaphors of disruption, navigation, toolkit use, and coping. Asking whose futures are being taught therefore reveals both the content of educational futures discourse and the institutional conditions that authorize it. Indigenous, decolonial, community-grounded, youth-led, more-than-human, and structurally transformative futures are increasingly present, but they remain less firmly embedded in curricula, policy narratives, funding priorities, and organizational routines. Plurality therefore concerns not only multiple scenarios, but also who can know, imagine, become, and exercise authority over future-making. A more adequate futures education would cultivate plural temporalities, epistemic diversity, structural literacy, and democratic world-making. The challenge is not simply to prepare learners for the future, but to widen who gets to imagine, contest, and shape it.

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