About The Academy
In a field that is constantly evolving and complex, the need for innovative and adaptable education systems has never been more critical. The Education Futures Academy initiative embraces this challenge head-on, offering a dynamic and inclusive community where the learning sciences flourish, boundaries are pushed, and new educational paradigms are born.
Our vision is to co-create the future of learning and develop sustainable pedagogies that work for your context. At the heart of our academy lies a foundational belief: Education is a collaborative journey, woven together by the collective efforts of educators and researchers.
As a community of educators and researchers working together to apply the learning sciences, we foster a culture of lifelong learning that is in accessible, engaging, and tailored to the needs of the 21st century.
Let’s grow together.
Comprised of teachers, school leaders, educators and researchers, our community shares scalable and sustainable pedagogies
Research Based Design
The Education Futures Academy is guided by four principles:
Futures-Oriented
We prioritise forward-thinking approaches that anticipate and shape education futures, so our students can thrive in the world of tomorrow.
Learning Sciences
Grounded in on-going research from the learning sciences, we are researchers, teachers and educational leaders working together to understand how to implement better learning in everyday learning environments.
Navigate Complexity
Students are evolving learners in evolving contexts, and we want to understand and navigate this system together.
Two-Way Process
We are all necessary for change. Practice informs research, and research translates to educational design.
The Learning Sciences Team
At the Education Futures Academy, we’re dedicated to transforming education through innovative research partnerships. The University of South Australia’s* Learning Sciences Team supports the EFA through collaborative research incubator projects, which empowers educators to implement scalable, sustainable solutions for your unique context.
*(Adelaide University coming 2026)
We don’t just study education; we actively shape it in partnership with schools.
Our team uses a dynamic framework—Pragmatic Adaptive Change—for research-based design, to cocreate solutions that directly cater to your school’s context and evolving needs.
This framework gives your educators the tools to build solutions themselves, which means you can sustainably carry on developing into the ever-changing future.
We address education and societal problems that your school is grappling with.
Some examples are:
- Navigating artificial intelligence in Education
- Promoting sustainability to address climate change.
- Implementing equity and inclusion programs
- Fostering wellbeing
To maintain our focus on learning futures, the projects and programs of the EFA are organised using what we call the Pragmatic Adaptive Change (PAC) Framework . As the name suggests, the PAC Framework supports an approach to educational design and research that is anchored in the real world, and that adapts to what we learn as we work.
As can be seen in the figure, the PAC organises our work into six phases. Our projects will often progress around these phases cyclically, although our adaptability means the work will not always proceed so predictably.
The PAC is heavily informed by Cultural Historical Activity Theory and Engeström’s Change Laboratory, and also by the research and evaluation methodology known as Contribution Analysis. This gives our work a lot of methodological depth. The short version, however, is that we build research-informed models of change for real-world learning environments, and we test these models through designing and implementing new educational activities, resources, and even new environments. Then we adapt our models based on our findings on what occurred.
Depending on your needs, we will employ one or more phases of our Pragmatic Adaptive Intervention, to codesign new educational activities, resources, environments and policies. Do you need a short, sharp light intervention, or a longer deep intervention over the course of many months?
The strategies we use in working with our partners varies to suit your context. Some examples of our strategies involve:
- Acting as external consultants
- Providing short-term teacher professional development
- Codesigning interventions with your teachers through research-based design frameworks
- Conducting in-depth reviews on current tensions through quantitative and qualitative data analysis
- Providing and facilitate outreach in your school
We recognise that learning and change is done by people within a cultural and historical context, and both the social and cognitive are necessary to finding sustainable solutions to educational needs.
Our framework draws from both the cognitive sciences and the very real social complexities of your school to generate authentic solutions that suit you and your students.
We prioritise real-world outcomes through building community. You will be involved in crucial phases of school change such as defining goals, observing current practices, modelling potential changes, generating ideas, prototyping new implementations, and reflecting on results. This comprehensive approach ensures that educational decisions lead to lasting, sustainable change.
There is no one size fits all solution to educational problems. Our approach is:
Our approach is deeply integrated in the learning sciences.
First, ‘doing’ is our research. Your participation provides us with authentic insights into the best methods for educational design as they work in the real world, feeding back into the body of design-based research.
Secondly, we transform research into ‘doing’. We work directly with education researchers to translate their work into real world, meaningful applications through research-based design.
This feedback loop closes the gap between research and practice, ensuring our work remains relevant and effective.
Successful and meaningful university-school partnerships are possible – We know, because we are doing it!
Join the Community
The EFA is a relatively informal community held together by a common interest in the future of learning in complex, real world environments. The academy is not an incorporated body, and this website is maintained by staff at the University of South Australia (Adelaide University coming in 2026). ‘Membership’ of our community, therefore, is really just about participation. There are a number of ways to participate:
EFA Community
We invite everyone in the wider educational community to access the research-informed curriculum materials and teacher professional learning on this site. Some of these materials are free, some come with a small charge to support future work.
TFP Associates
Supported by the Australian Government, we provide an employment-based pathway to teaching. People who accept a place in this pathway work in one of our partner schools while they undertake their Initial Teacher Education Degree and complete their first year as a graduate teacher. Along the way, they deepen their knowledge of how learning works through participating the EFA’s Pragmatic Adaptive Tlabs. They also become Associates of the EFA.
Professional Fellows
Highly accomplished teachers who are looking to drive the future of learning are invited to join our community as Professional Fellows. They can do this either through participating in our Pragmatic Adaptive Leadership program, or by taking a supporting role within our Future Teachers Pathway. This involvement normally takes place in the context of a formal partnership between the University and the teacher’s school.
Researchers
As we’ve noted, the EFA is a relatively informal Community of Practice. The community is driven by the Learning Sciences team at the University of South Australia, but research membership is really just about participating in the collaborative projects undertaken under the EFA banner. Researchers will normally also maintain membership of a formal research centre within their university.
Senior Professional Fellows
Teachers who are released from face-to-face teaching to work on our projects are referred to as Senior Professional Fellows and are appointed as adjunct staff of the University.
Graduate Researchers
People undertaking a PhD or Masters by Research (PhM) are Graduate Researchers within our community.
Find Out What We Can Offer You
With a range of professional development opportunities, highly engaging incursions and excursions as well as research informed curriculum linked units, find out more