Learning for uncertain futures: the role of textbooks, curriculum, and pedagogy

Sustained globalization, together with threats posed by climate change, armed conflict and pandemics, are exacerbating a sense of uncertainty in how children and young people live their lives and prepare for the future. This paper argues that textbooks and pedagogy represent potentially transformative strategies to restructure young people’s learning and expand their social and emotional capacities as they make the journey to adulthood.

The pedagogical strategies and instructional materials prevalent in many schools today rely too heavily on a kind of teaching and learning that implies and conveys a sense of certainty. As a result, the strategies and materials fail to help teachers integrate dispositions such as flexibility, resilience and self-direction alongside academic learning into their daily practice. This serves to undermine deeper student learning.

We argue that innovative curriculum, textbooks and pedagogy should promote students’ ability to flourish in rapidly changing times. They should facilitate approaches to teaching and learning that prepare both teachers and learners to respond to uncertainty. Such approaches recognize the abiding value of both cognitive and affective learning and acknowledge the need for both conceptual mastery and open-ended learning.

Drawing on universal principles while focusing mainly on low- and middle-income countries, the paper proposes embedding social and emotional learning as well as community and societal values into curriculum and learning materials. It also explores the essential role of teachers’ pedagogy in incorporating these dispositions and values. In order to achieve this, we propose the concept of ‘strong textbook content’, in which academic concepts are complemented by examples of their relevance to students’ lives, with particular emphasis on examples that support positive student agency. We also propose the idea of ‘strong pedagogy’, whereby pedagogical support is embedded into textbooks and other education materials.

The vision of teaching and learning described in this paper requires the development of new or reworked education materials and a reimagining of approaches to teacher preparation and ongoing professional support. Time and resources will be needed for curriculum and textbook writers to identify contextualized content and prepare ‘strong–strong’ materials. With these innovations in place, young people of today and tomorrow can be guided to develop a more positive and wider sense of identity and efficacy as they acquire lifelong learning skills to help them traverse their future lives.