The Future of Education

During the years and the decades the world has changed rapidly and so has the character of learning and the learners as well. But how is it with the schools’ corporate culture, pedagogical models of teaching, school buildings and their architecture, decoration and equipment? In Finland, even though our education system is very strong, it still seems, that the school is amazingly stabile: the teaching methods are often quite “traditional” and teacher-centered, and the classroom looks no different than dozens of years ago.
AVATAR 2020 – Traveling Towards the Future School 2012-2014 is a nationally targeted teachers’ continuing education project carried out by the University of Turku and funded by the National Board of Education. The project's starting point is that the school and the teaching must be developed to meet the present time and its challenges, 20th century learners' needs, and the future’s change of society and operational environment. In Finland we've had a lot of innovative projects, research and developing work concerning the school of the future from different point of views. In AVATAR 2020 the primary aim has been to bring this multidisciplinary expertise and the experiences into the teachers’ consciousness, in order to expand their knowledge and to motivate and inspire their own future oriented developing work at the context of their school/everyday teaching. Other aims have been 1) Offering the teachers the tools to perceive and to model the future from the schools’ and the school society’s point of view, 2) Inspiring and supporting teachers in their professional development and in increasing their know how/capacities of utilizing ICT, new medias, virtual and digital learning environments, materials and resources in teaching/to promote learning and 3) Developing the teachers’ facilities to support the learners in promoting their future citizens’ skills.
AVATAR 2020 has been carried out collaboratively, in a team of multidisciplinary experts. The participating teachers have been offered diverse knowledge, point of views and visions to be able to form their own impressions of the future’s possibilities and trends. In workshops they have been challenged to figure out and to create their own visions situated in the context of school and teaching. During the project the teachers have gained knowledge and examples as well as practical experience on future’s physical and virtual learning environments, based on which they have been able to structure the opportunities and challenges concerning the developing of their own school and teaching. Additionally the teachers have gained the capacities to seek for the new and innovative solutions and to support the new working culture with the help of the new pedagogical methods and technologies.