Advancing A New Social Contract For Education: Collaborations to Reimagine our Futures Together

This book presents work carried out by students at the Harvard Graduate School of Education examining how to improve education systems around the world, using UNESCO’s International Commission on the Futures of Education recent report Reimagining Our Futures Together: A New Social Contract for Education (International Commission on the Futures of Education 2021) as an analytic framework. Between September and December of 2021, teams of students in the course Education Policy Analysis and Research in Comparative Perspective, partnered with education authorities, school districts, and other large scale systems at the municipal, state and national level in Bogota-Colombia, Ecuador, Israel, Kenya, Guanajuato-, Jalisco-, and Nuevo Leon-Mexico, Mongolia, Nepal, Palestine, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Central Falls-United States, and Uruguay to identify the key education challenges facing students in those systems, the ongoing efforts to address those challenges, and to suggest avenues for improvement based in the application of ideas in UNESCO’s report. Foreword By Stefania Giannini, Assistant Director-General of UNESCO “I am delighted to see the publication of this book in which a group of graduate students at Harvard University use the recently published report of the International Commission on the Futures of Education to identify opportunities for educational improvement in settings across the world. In publishing ‘Reimagining our Futures Together. A New Social Contract for Education’, this was exactly our ambition. This report is not a blueprint or a roadmap. Informed by wide consultations, it sets out a vision, suggests foundational principles, and offers recommendations for dialogue and action. The course on education policy analysis and research in a comparative perspective led by Professor Reimers, and the experiences analyzed in this book, mark a world first in confronting the Report’s broad recommendations with realities at the local level. The ambitions that animate our Report are considerable. Aligning education systems so that they can contribute to addressing some of the most significant challenges facing humanity – the risks to human rights, democratic backsliding, poverty, social exclusion or climate change – is a significant undertaking, one that will require resources, capacity, knowledge and partnerships. Universities can indeed make significant contributions to the reimagining of our futures together and to a new social contract for education, through their role in advancing innovation and research and partnering with other educational institutions to collaborate in domains such as reimagining pedagogy, curriculum or the teaching profession. The collaborations that have produced this book exemplify what is possible, engaging graduate students, as part of their education, as thought partners of education authorities at the municipal, state or national level. This speaks to the social relevance of universities, and to their indispensable role in guiding and supporting educational policy and change. As a former university professor, myself, I know how transformative education can be when it is authentic and relevant, when it aligns with real world problems and with values that matter to students. This book is an example of the opportunities the report ‘Reimagining our Futures Together’ provides for university students and professors to make education more relevant. I applaud Professor Reimers, whose intellectual and humanistic contribution as a Commission member was decisive in shaping the Futures report, and his graduate students for this initiative. In so doing, it makes visible that universities are invaluable institutions to helping all of society, indeed all of humanity, in addressing our most pressing challenges and building better futures together.”