Promising Futures

Abstract

Teachers spend their working days preparing young people for the times to come. Teachers also imagine a wide variety of ideas about possible, probable, and preferable futures. This chapter explores how teachers feel and think about the potential futures for themselves and their students, and how teacher perceptions of futures inform their teaching practices. The study sets integral theory as the basis for the methodological pluralism and analytical blending which are sustained throughout this trans-disciplinary study as a whole. The findings show that although high school teachers envision many possible futures, they are most likely to trust shorter term empiric predictions, and they rarely think about futures more than a few years away. Learning more about how often, how deeply, and how optimistically teachers envision possible futures matters because teachers are educating the people who will become adults in all versions of the near futures.