Equitable access, success and quality in higher education are examined from a variety of ideological perspectives. Quality is positioned as a complex generic concept while access and success are identified as key concepts in the social inclusion domain, supplemented by the concept of participation. The topic is approached through an integrative analysis of the theory and practice literature on social inclusion in higher education. After contextualising current higher education within economic globalisation, the notion of quality is uncoupled from the necessity of a neoliberal framing allowing broader interpretations arising from more inclusive ideologies. Access, participation and success are shown to represent degrees of social inclusion underpinned by a nested spectrum of ideologies-neoliberalism, social justice and human potential respectively-with human potential ideology offering the most embracing perspective. Australian higher education is foregrounded, yet contextualised within European historical precedents and contemporary global issues.

Humans have always been driven by both a fear of the unknown and a curiosity to know. They have prophesied, foretold, predicted, and tried to control the future. The Future: A Very Short Introduction considers some of our most burning questions: What is ‘the future’? Is there only one future or are there many possible futures? It introduces the exciting field of future studies, spanning social, cultural, and environmental innovations, as well as technological advances. It asks if the future can ever be truly predicted or if we create our own futures by our thoughts, feelings, and actions. The book concludes by exploring the grand global futures challenges.

This paper analyses which aspects of spirituality are valued by adolescents, and how they are interconnected with youths´ life satisfaction and `self-centeredness´. The participants were 254 adolescents (11 th grade) of four different high-schools from West-Germany. After re-validation of the 6-factorial student's version of the ASP questionnaire (ASP-S, Cronbach´s alpha = .90), we found that they appreciated most Conscious interactions, Compassion / Generosity and Aspiring for Beauty / Wisdom, while particularly Religious orientation Prayer (Trust in God), esoteric Transcendence conviction, or Quest orientation were of lower relevance. The importance of these aspects of spirituality is known to increase with higher age. The correlation pattern between aspects of spirituality and life satisfaction dimensions differed remarkably between female and male adolescents. In particular Conscious interactions correlated with future prospects in females, while in males it correlated much better with family life and school situation. It became obvious that the non-formal aspects of spirituality in terms of relational consciousness are still vital, particularly secular humanism (i.e., Conscious interactions, Compassion / Generosity). These findings may have implications for religious educational programs

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This paper points to the value of broadening the palette of approaches to climate change futures beyond the dominant methods of empiricist predictive trends and expert scenarios. The fi rst half of the paper contextualizes the climate change discourse within the fi eld of futures studies and explores potential points of dialogue between a number of futures approaches and the most prominent of the climate protection work. The second half of the paper introduces a case study of community based participatory approaches involving community scenario writing and community visioning, which enacts a collaborative engagement between futures researchers and climate-vulnerable communities. However, any participatory futures method chosen to facilitate climate change adaptation must be context aware in both its design and implementation if it is to facilitate adaptability and resilience in climate-vulnerable communities.

claim that human consciousness is evolving beyond the 'formal', abstract, intellectual mode towards a 'postformal', integral mode. Wilber calls this 'vision-logic' and Steiner calls it 'consciousness/spiritual soul'. Both point to the emergence of more complex, dialectical, imaginative, self-reflective and spiritual ways of thinking, living and loving. Very little 'evolution of consciousness' literature appears in educational discourses. This article distils hermeneutic fragments of psychological, cultural-historical and philosophical texts and begins to examine education in this light. This evolutionary perspective may illuminate the emergence of contemporary understandings of spirituality as alternatives both to 'formal' secular and 'formal' religious education. A novel educational perspective is introduced based on a contemporised Australian interpretation of Steiner education seen through the lens of Wilber's integral framework. This creative, 'transmodern' educational vision offers one way forward to consciously facilitate the emergence in children of more life-promoting, integral, spiritually aware forms of consciousness.

School education seems to be mostly stuck in an outdated industrial era worldview, unable to sufficiently address the significance and increasing rapidity of changes to humanity that are upon us. An integrated forward-looking view should, now more than ever, be of central importance in how we educate. Yet there is little sign that -unlike corporations -school systems are recognising the true value of futures studies. A brief history of futures in school education shows the significant role played by the World Futures Studies Federation in its evolution to date. The article also introduces integral analysis as a way of opening up new possibilities to help school education develop due foresight and to more fully realise its potential as a prime facilitator in individual and cultural evolution.

This paper focuses on emergent signs of evolutionary change in human thinking that run parallel with many of the exponential changes manifesting in the external world. Weak signals are identified from the early twentieth century indicating the emergence of new knowledge patterns. These signals have strengthened in the last forty years. The paper first identifies new ways of thinking within several disciplines such as science, philosophy, religion and education. New knowledge patterns are then identified in discourses that traverse disciplinary boundaries through transdisciplinary approaches such as futures studies and planetary/global studies. The paper then discusses evolution of consciousness, identifying research that theorises new ways of thinking as being related to individual psychological development and/or socio-cultural evolution. Finally, evolutionary concepts are discussed that attempt to meta-cohere the new knowledge patterns via the terms postformal, integral and planetary. Notably, academic research on "futures of thinking", "evolution of consciousness" and/or "global mindset change" has been, until now, largely ignored by mainstream academic discourse on evolution, consciousness and futures studies.