Salzburg Global Fellows Katherine Prince and Fran Wilby share insights on reimagining teaching roles to foster equity, creativity, and human-centered education
This article was written by Salzburg Global Fellows Katherine Prince and Fran Wilby, who attended "The Future of Teaching" session from December 8 to 13, 2024.
What educator roles might help education changemakers realize new approaches to learning? A series of interactive workshops, “Educator Roles for New Approaches to Learning,” engaged 100 attendees from around the world in exploring this question using futures and design thinking.
Convened by Salzburg Global, KnowledgeWorks, Learning Planet Institute, and Rethinking Assessment following a Salzburg Global session on "The Future of Teaching" in December 2024, this workshop series invited participants to think deeply about possibilities for the future of learning in their own contexts and imagine new educator roles that could help make desired approaches effective.
This article shares insights from the workshops to encourage continued thinking and planning for educator roles in the context of the changing landscape characterized by accelerating technologies, the intensifying climate crisis, civic polarization, and climate shifts.
Aspirations for Education in 2045
The global workshop attendees, who represented educators, leaders, community practitioners, arts and pedagogy practitioners, and youth workers, shared their aspirations for education in 2045. They emphasized intersectionality and equity, the purpose and design of education systems, and the integration of technology through principled and human-centered approaches.
Intersectionality and Equity
Participants expressed a strong concern for intersectionality and equity in the context of future education systems. Participants highlighted the risk that drivers such as AI and neuroscience could deepen existing inequalities, particularly for children lacking access to technology or supportive environments or navigating low confidence of aspirations. To help counter this risk, they emphasized the importance of personalizing education to support character development, social-emotional skills, and cultural identity. They also called for education to move beyond school buildings and narrow curricula to embrace broader, more inclusive learning ecosystems that are responsive to learners’ lived realities.
Purpose and Design of Education Systems
In considering the purpose and design of education systems, participants observed that current systems are overly competitive, assessment-driven, and rooted in outdated models that prioritize productivity and economic outcomes. Instead, educators should work toward a recontracting of education's purpose anchored in lifelong learning, flourishing, and interdependence. Future learning environments should be interdisciplinary, intercultural, and community-based, with educators acting as facilitators who model positive values and equip students with practical and civic competencies. Participants also called for co-construction with learners and future generations, recognizing the need for holistic, relevant, and socially enabling education.
Integration of Technology through Principled and Human-Centered Approaches
In emphasizing the importance of integrating technology through principled and human-centered approaches, participants were wary of overly techno-centric futures, particularly those that visualize efficiency without community or cohesion. While acknowledging the power and inevitability of technological acceleration, participants expressed hope that, by 2045, education would use technology in more hybrid, ethical, and intentional ways. Instead of being driven by technology, systems should integrate it in ways that serve core educational values, ensuring equity, agency, and collective well-being are not sidelined in the process.
Exploring Shifting Educator Roles
To inspire thinking about how new educator roles could help realize these aspirations, the facilitators introduced eight possible future educator roles from KnowledgeWorks’ "Envisioning Educator Roles for Transformation." In responding to them, participants noted movement toward more human-centered, community-orientated education systems and creative and arts-based pedagogies, along with the potential for assessment systems to support further change. A note of caution was sounded around increasing the burden on teachers and other educators in any workforce development.
Human-Centered, Community-Oriented Education Systems
Participants expressed a strong desire to reimagine education as a social project, focused on the kind of societies we want to build and the values we want to instill in young people. Via thinkers such as Tagore, they advocated for education to be embedded in local cultural contexts, hands-on experience, critical inquiry, and care. Learning should cultivate the whole person - emotionally, socially, and ethically, not just cognitively. Participants also highlighted physical learning spaces and the natural environment as being essential to maintaining this sense of connection.
Creative and Arts-Based Pedagogies
Participants advocated for how placing the arts at the center of the curriculum can powerfully counterbalance the dominance of digital technology, helping to foster empathy, expression, and social cohesion. Examples such as Singapore’s digital learning vision and the Alpha School in Texas, where learning guides prioritize mental health over traditional instruction, can serve as inspiration for more flexible, student-responsive models. Across contexts, participants also emphasized the value of broad learning ecosystems that integrate community members, families, and diverse adult roles. For example, Latin American initiatives such as Ensena Peru and Haiti’s College Catts Pressoir catalyze student agency and holistic learning through networked educator teams and community-anchored approaches.
Assessment as a Transformative Lever
Lastly, participants saw current assessment models as narrow and outdated – focused on memorization and academic output at the expense of curiosity, resilience, metacognition, and oracy. Digital learner profiles and “skills wallets” can offer alternatives to standardized testing, allowing for richer, longitudinal evidence of learning, including socio-emotional development and community participation. Participants expressed hope that technologies such as AI could support the reliable assessment of complex skills while also enabling more personalized learning journeys. But there was consensus that technology should serve education’s human values, not replace them. The overarching vision was for an education system that prioritizes identity, meaning, equity, and collective flourishing.
Designing Educator Roles for New Approaches
Participants built upon these general principles to design future educator roles. From their discussions and role designs, driving questions highlighting future possibilities emerged.
What if a learning designer crafted authentic learning experiences?
An Authentic Learning Designer role would create meaningful hands-on learning experiences that integrates technology as a supportive tool. Collaborating with educators, community members, and other stakeholders, they would identify key competencies and lead the design and refinement of relevant and impactful real-world learning experiences. Operating at a system level – such as within a school or district – this role would also include some classroom engagement to observe, evaluate, and continuously improve the effectiveness of the designed experiences in practice.
What if young people helped their peers engage in real-world learning?
A Real-World Exploration Mentor role would support the Authentic Learning Designer and guide their peers in engaging with real-world learning through civic, creative, and community-based experiences. They would provide support through the full learning cycle – from discovery to ideation to real-world action – ensuring each learner builds a meaningful and emotionally connected learning journey. Meeting students where they were, this role would make learning personal, immersive, and rooted in real-life relevance.
What if near peers helped young learners develop the self-knowledge needed to shape their own learning?
A Young-Adult Peer Mentor role would enhance the traditional school structure by serving as a relatable role model to younger students. This role would support peers in developing self-awareness and understanding their learning processes through subject-specific guidance, coaching conversations, and the co-creation of personalized, interest-led “Spark” projects spanning multiple disciplines. Peer mentors would also assist senior educators, extending the capacity of the wider teaching team.
What if an educator helped connect learning to community impact when problems arose?
A Collective Problem Solving Leader role would bridge academic learning with real-world contexts, shifting the focus of education from individual achievement to collective impact and purpose, with a particular focus on local challenges and needs. This role would guide students to learn through meaningful, community-based activities and foster strong collaboration within student teams. This approach would require coordination across the school to ensure coherence and sustained impact.
What if an unconventional educator helped children in high-needs contexts make good use of limited time for education?
A Just-in-Time Teacher role would support learning in high-needs contexts by modelling a deep passion for learning and mentoring young people to make the most of their educational time. This role would empower learners to take ownership of their learning journeys and to see themselves as capable contributors who could also teach others. While not required to hold a traditional credential, this educator would be paid comparably to qualified teachers and rely on ongoing, just-in-time professional development to remain effective and responsive.
What if a system-level role focused on cultivating belonging?
A Belonging Officer role would work at the system level to expand meaningful educational opportunities by confronting systemic and cultural oppression. This role would focus on fostering belonging and affirming identity, ensuring educational environments meet the equity needs of their local communities. By addressing both structural and cultural barriers, the belonging officer would play a critical role in creating inclusive and responsive education systems.
What if a counselor-educator supported learners as full humans?
A Mental Health Educator role would support students as whole individuals, offering personalized guidance alongside resources such as mindfulness training and stress management strategies. Positioned on the front lines of the learning ecosystem, they would work closely with other educators to ensure that each learner progressed effectively and received the support they needed. This role would also help young people navigate both academic and personal challenges, including balancing the physical and digital aspects of their lives.
What if a role helped ground young people in physical reality?
A Digital Detox Facilitator role would reconnect young people with the physical world by encouraging reflection on their relationships with technology. This role would support learners in critically examining their digital habits and intentionally shifting attention toward embodied, offline experiences that foster presence, connection, and well-being. Through structured activities, dialogue, and modelling of balanced technology use, the Digital Detox Facilitator would help students develop healthier, more conscious relationships with digital tools as part of a broader commitment to sustainable and grounded learning.
What if nature were treated as a co-educator?
A Nature-Based Educator role would create experiential learning experiences where nature was treated not only as a setting but as a co-teacher and co-therapist. Drawing on training in psychology or therapeutic practice, this role would support young people in navigating eco-anxiety and fostering a deeper sense of connection to place, play, and the natural world. Grounded in the local landscape, this role would integrate nature-based learning and care as part of a holistic educational approach.
What if a role focused on connecting learning experience design with emerging workplace needs?
A Cross-Curricular Designer role would align learning experience design with evolving workplace demands, ensuring education remained relevant. By monitoring job-market trends and consulting with both young people and adults across education, employment, and training sectors, this role would surface a wide range of future-focused skills and translate them into meaningful learning opportunities. This role would integrate disciplines through project-based approaches and real-world application, fostering cross-curricular connections that prepare learners for life beyond school.
What if education research and development were embedded in schools?
A Research and Development Educator role would embed innovation and institutional learning within the school environment, acting as a catalyst for educational experimentation and positive disruption. They would collaborate with staff and students to explore, test, and refine new practices – such as how technology is used in relation to pedagogy, equity, and democracy. Designed responsively, this role would help bridge the gap between classroom realities and external societal shifts, ensuring schools remain adaptive and forward-thinking.
What if an educator connected local history and knowledge to learning?
A Storyteller role would connect local knowledge, histories, and place-based experiences with broader issues affecting education, including climate change and artificial intelligence. This role would hold and transmit both institutional memory and evolving community narratives, ensuring learning were rooted in cultural continuity and context. The storyteller would help learners locate themselves within global conversations through a deeply local lens.
Realizing Our Aspirations
These roles reflect a wider range of skills and focal points than is common today. Many of the roles would involve direct contact with students at the classroom or a similar level, prioritizing the cultivation of high-trust relationships as the basis for meaningful engagement.
In contrast, several of them would operate at the systems or organizational level to influence policy, strategy, and culture across schools or districts. These systemic actors would work to embed equity, reframe readiness, and reshape learning ecosystems. Their existence would signal a move away from isolated innovation and toward institutionalized transformation, ensuring that values such as inclusion, curiosity, and sustainability were embedded throughout education systems.
To help realize such roles and alleviate today’s teacher shortages, more alternative pathways to becoming an educator are needed. Allowing for a middle ground between a diploma and a full degree could make the profession more accessible and enable new ways to combine pedagogy with real-world skills while incorporating mentorship and modeling a passion for learning.
Situating supports for teaching and learning more solidly within the challenges of our time could also help broaden approaches to learning. As the UNESCO learning pillars highlight, learning to learn and learning to live together remain our biggest challenges, and educators need to focus more on them. We also need to explore ethical and positive ways of learning with current technologies – and of doing so with the goal of positive social transformation.
We need to bring broad and courageous thinking to the question of what educator roles will help realize desired approaches to learning. Together, we can help shape the future by starting with our own contexts and then connecting across them.
Katherine Prince leads KnowledgeWorks' exploration of the future of learning and stewards the organization's strategy around engaging people with education transformation. As Vice President, Foresight and Strategy, she leads a team of professional futurists who explore possibilities for education and help people grapple with change. Katherine also collaborates across KnowledgeWorks to define, implement and monitor the impact of KnowledgeWorks' publication and engagement strategy.
Fran Wilby's work is located in the areas of educational innovation and network building, curriculum and assessment development, and to support the education sector through training and development to deliver high quality, meaningful experiences and outcomes for learners. Currently, with her role with Rethinking Assessment, she designs and delivers training and development programmes for school and college teachers and leaders, and is a lead member of the product offer development team.
"The Future of Teaching" session is part of the Education for Tomorrow's World program in the Salzburg Global Center for Education Transformation.
