Louise Couceiro
The theme of this year’s Children and Childhoods Conference is ‘children and future-making’, and the University of Suffolk’s main campus has a fittingly futuristic feel. Located on the Ipswich waterfront, its architectural design features clean lines, coloured blocks of white and grey, and expansive glass windows.
A group of children from a local primary school have been asked to open the conference by responding to the question, ‘What would your priorities be if you had 60 seconds to change the world?’ One by one, the children are ushered onto the auditorium stage where they use poetry and storytelling to emphasise the importance of celebrating difference and eliminating discrimination, of upholding rights and ensuring education for all, and of protecting the planet and striving for peace.
Mentions of technology are markedly absent from their presentations. Perhaps because technology is so ingrained in their present lives, its presence in their future seems unremarkable. However, the paper we are presenting highlights that children and young people do have remarkable insights on the future of education and technology, remarkable in their reflection of current debates and discourses, and remarkable in that they raise important questions about how we foster opportunities for imaginative thinking.
Scheduled for early afternoon on the first day, our paper contributes to a panel focusing on children’s digital lives. Together, the presentations cover different corners of children’s digital environments, from social media platforms such as TikTok and Instagram, to Roblox and other KidTech platforms, to educational technologies associated with schooling and education.
Drawing on ethnographic data from three of the secondary schools we have worked with so far, our presentation centres young people’s voices to offer a sense of how the younger generation are thinking about educational futures. As one would expect from a series of in-depth ethnographies in schools with different student demographics, varying levels of resourcing, diverse cultures and distinct pedagogic approaches, our analysis does not suggest there is one over-arching story to be told about how children and young people perceive the future of education and technology. This said, the data does suggest at least three prevailing narratives.
The first concerns access. In interviews and workshops, many of the young people have told us that children will or should have access to educational technologies in the future: “it’s unfair if someone doesn’t have access to technology or the internet because of their financial situation […] they will be disadvantaged because their quality of education is not the same”. Recognising the consequences of inequitable access – “their quality of education is not the same” – the young people often demonstrated a keen sense of justice, asserting that this should always be prioritised.
The second narrative stands in stark contrast to the first. Some of the young people we have spoken with clearly stated that in their imagined futures, there is not an abundance of technology. In one young person’s ideal classroom of the future, “there wouldn’t be a visualiser. There wouldn’t be a telly, there would just be a whiteboard. I know I’m very like, I feel like, I’m like, how can I say it like, twenty-years ago type of stuff”. They raised concerns about risk, particularly in relation to mental health, the need to self-regulate one’s use of technology, and the potential for technology to cause distraction at school.
The third prevailing narrative focuses on digital skills. Many have mentioned the importance of schools preparing children and young people for the working world, with digital skills emerging as a key priority. “Since everything’s becoming more centralised in work forces…in workplaces, like schools, I think it’s really important to have those digital skills, especially in the future. But they might change, digital skills, like what is an important digital skill might change like hugely in the future”. Yet, while many children and young people stated that digital skills will be essential in the future, some pointed to the lack of consensus or uncertainty about what these skills might be.
It is striking that these three narratives reflect broader discourses about technology and the future of education found in media, academic literature, and policy debates. For example, the Covid-19 pandemic reignited conversations around the digital divide, with schools scrambling to ensure all children had access to a device and adequate Internet connection for home learning (Coleman, 2021). There has been an uptick in discussions concerning the dangers and risks of young people’s technology use, with recent discussions focusing on distractions and the implementation of mobile phone bans in schools (see Rahali, Kidron & Livingstone, 2024), and the government continues to grapple with addressing the UK’s ‘digital skills gap’, of which schools are expected to play a pivotal role (House of Commons, 2024).
These discourses surrounding technology and education are conflicting. On one hand, there is a narrative that technology is harmful and should be restricted. On the other hand, children and young people are positioned as tech-savvy ‘digital natives’ who must hone their digital skills to succeed in the workplace. Given the prevalence and pervasiveness of these discourses, it is unsurprising that children and young people are drawing on them when envisioning the future of education and the role of technology. There appears to be a near-acceptance of these imagined futures, rather than a re-imagining of alternative possibilities.
This complex picture leads us to wonder, what are we expecting from children and young people? What does it mean for them to be agentic in imagining the future? To what extent are we enabling or restricting opportunities for imaginative thought?
Reflecting on the conference, one prominent insight emerges: envisioning future possibilities and eventualities is not easy. How and in what ways educational technologies might exist in the future remains to be seen, but we must continue to encourage thinking beyond existing norms and towards new avenues of possibility, to support children to feel empowered to play an active role in shaping their own and others’ futures.
Image by Simon Pearsall.