As southwestern Pennsylvania looks toward the next decade, educators, families, and community partners are navigating accelerating change, from evolving policies to shifting trust in institutions to the growing presence of artificial intelligence. At the same time, our region has a long legacy of turning imagination into reality through cross-sector collaboration.
Today, Remake Learning is proud to release Nurturing What’s Next: Imagining the Future of Education in Southwestern Pennsylvania, a 10-year forecast developed with KnowledgeWorks and supported by The Grable Foundation, to help our region make sense of the forces driving the future and make the most of opportunities to shape the futures we prefer.
To help readers get the most out of the forecast, we spoke with Jason Swanson and Jeremiah-Anthony Righteous-Rogers of KnowledgeWorks.
Remake Learning: For someone hearing about this for the first time, what is Nurturing What’s Next and what do you hope readers take away from it?
Jeremiah-Anthony Righteous-Rogers: Nurturing What’s Next is a publication that illustrates the power of collaboration, community and creativity within Southwestern Pennsylvania and how this power can continue to nurture the future of the region and its learners. I hope that readers take away that there are great things happening within the region and that they feel supported to take the steps they need to nurture what’s next.
Jason Swanson: Nurturing What’s Next is a forecast that explores future possibilities for education for the region—and actually, I would go back to say learning, not just education. What we are seeking to do with this is to surface and make sense of those forces that are acting to make the future different than the present. Our hope with this is that folks could work with this document in a way that expands their own thinking about what might be possible or even preferable in the future. Nothing in this document is intended to be a prediction. This is an exercise in generative, expansive thinking rooted in methods and systematic thinking about change. So much of our discourse around change, particularly in the sector of learning, is that change happens to us—and that the narrative is often that education is slow to change. I would like to challenge that narrative to say that we all have agency to respond to change in different ways. Our systems of learning and our systems of education actually do their best to work to transform themselves, because our core belief is that everybody in these systems wants to serve learners to the best of their ability.
Remake Learning: Why was now the right moment for a 10-year forecast, especially for Southwestern Pennsylvania?
Jason Swanson: I think there are a few factors. We are at the precipice of the near ubiquity for artificial intelligence. There’s a lot of uncertainty around its potential, but we all seem to agree that it’s going to be transformative in some way. With that acceleration and uptick in disruptive factors to systems, we’re presenting new problems to solve, new ways to think about management and structuring of services and systems. There is both broad agreement that things should shift, yet also declining trust in systems. But paradoxically, we’ve seen evidence too that most families rate their own schools and teachers highly. At the same time, we’re seeing a sea change in policy in Pennsylvania, where we really have a policy landscape that is an enabling force when we think about things like seat time, graduation requirements, competency-based learning, personalization. When we look at all of these things as they begin to collide amongst all the turbulence that we’re feeling, it causes us to take a step back and say: what do I want from the future generally if I look at the trajectory of all these trends, and then what happens when everything starts to mesh together? What possibilities does that create for me?
Jeremiah-Anthony Righteous-Rogers: There is so much uncertainty right now — both nationally and regionally — and it is important to ground people in their power and agency when things can feel so overwhelming. It is important that we don’t lose hope or forget what we were able to accomplish through innovation and interdependence. What feels possible is that those who call Southwestern Pennsylvania home can continue (or begin to) make their desires for the future reality one action at a time.
Remake Learning: How does a forecast like this actually get made? What’s the process?
Jeremiah-Anthony Righteous-Rogers: Approaching this forecast, KnowledgeWorks built upon our 10-year forecast, Charting A New Course for Education, which spoke to a more national audience. Using it as a foundation, we connected with a cadre of local community members and change makers in Southwestern Pennsylvania through interviews and workshops. From there, we were able to tailor our research to the needs of the region.
Jason Swanson: Any forecast follows roughly the same process. First thing is we’ve got to decide the forecast question. What is the thing that we’re seeking to explore? For us, the forecast question is: What might future possibilities for learning in southwest Pennsylvania be in 10 years’ time. Once we’ve got that question, that’s when the research phase begins. This is a mix of primary research—we’re out there asking questions of folks that are involved in the topic, in this case our neighbors, our colleagues, our friends within the learning community. And we’re also doing secondary research. All of that research is driven by a systems thinking understanding of the domain. We look at the research and we say: what might be most impactful? What’s the evidence telling us as a starting place? Is there evidence for us to make counter assumptions from? This is where making and managing of assumptions comes in. And then we start to tell our stories: what happens when these trends get together? What happens when they get together and slow down or speed up or morph into something entirely different?
Remake Learning: What felt distinctly “Southwestern PA” in what you heard and what made it into the forecast?
Jeremiah-Anthony Righteous-Rogers: What feels most distinctive about Southwest Pennsylvania in this forecast is its history of and commitment to innovation. This forecast is not about how to start making change; it’s how to nurture the change that is already happening. The region’s history shows up throughout the publication, as it watered our words and helped us to create the framing. As far as tensions, I think it is a question of how the region continues to innovate while honoring that some changes come with challenges that are not readily rectified.
Jason Swanson: We could not talk to folks without them raising this idea of collaboration as a regional superpower. To hear people say: we do this, we’re very proud of it, and in the future we are going to continue to do it with more folks, at a deeper level. When we think about the turbulence that the forecast can point to, what stands out is this idea to cultivate collaboration as a strategic asset. It doesn’t happen by chance. It happens by choice. I think that superpower is a direct result of 10-plus years of sewing that culture: embracing the notion that we do things better together.
Remake Learning: If readers only take one big thing away from the forecast, what do you hope it is?
Jason Swanson: I hope folks recognize their own agency to shape the future. That’s why we do this. When they look at all of the possibilities we presented and all of those trends, they say: we can harness this in some way. Our ability to respond with agency might be limited in some ways, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have the agency. A core belief of our work is that the future is not fixed. It really is ours to shape. By studying the future and reading up on it, we can see those places where we might want to push.
Jeremiah-Anthony Righteous-Rogers: I would want readers to ask themselves: “What changes can I make today that honor that changes that have occurred, are occurring and may occur? How can I move forward while honoring the past?
Download the Forecast
Nurturing What’s Next: Imagining the Future of Education in Southwestern Pennsylvania is available now.
Download your copy at remakelearning.org/nurturing-whats-next.
