Time for something FRESH

In the last edition of Pondering Careers I asked the question Are STEM skills perishing? and it sparked some real conversations. When I’d started writing, I was hoping that I could think through some of the concerns in my own head, and also see what else people were thinking – was anyone else worried about this, and what did they think we could do?

While putting the article together, I realised that if I’m going to challenge the supremacy of STEM and its place on the pedestal then I needed to come up with a possible solution. I very clearly remember being taught at ADFA to never turn up with a problem to which I had no solution, so I spent a couple of weeks rolling around ideas for a companion acronym which might offer some clarity.

I ended up with FRESH – Foresight, Reasoning, English, Society, and Humanities. As with any good (and catchy) acronym, I had to consider a whole range of things and massage the words and letters until we got something workable. I needed an acronym that:

• Is a real, recognisable word, not a string of letters or a made up word – something that people could immediately recognise and use,
• Is easy to say and spell – it should roll off the tongue with no awkward letter combinations,
• Has unambiguous pronunciation, so that everyone reads it in the same way and feels confident using it,
• Feels similar to STEM, so that they work together as a pair,
• Works well in combination with other words – ie STEM careers = FRESH careers, STEM subjects = FRESH subjects,
• Maps to actual subjects and disciplines that are commonly taught in schools, not just abstract or higher-level skills, so that people can easily define what’s included, and
• Uses letters that correspond to the right topics clearly, and as close to how they are used in schools as possible.

Suffice to say this was a bit of a brain twister. Let me explain my process a bit more…

Step 1 – Identifying the gap

Once I realised we needed something that could stand up to STEM and champion the durable skills we’ll need in the future, I started out by thinking about where the gap actually was. At first, I wondered if we should be focusing on durable skills in general, not as they connect to any formal subject, but then I realised that much of the strength of the STEM movement comes from the way it embeds itself in existing subject areas and brings them together.

In order to get people thinking about alternative skills, we needed something that would be able to hold its own, and this meant it should mirror STEM in shape and form wherever possible.

So, I needed an acronym which described subjects and skills which covered things like cultural awareness, critical thinking, and communication.

Step 2 – What already existed

Next, ever the optimist I figured surely someone has already done this, I just need to find it. So I searched for frameworks and acronyms which would be capable of filling the gap I’d identified.

Unfortunately, while I was able to find some great existing work, there wasn’t anything (that I could find, anyway) that quite fit the bill.

SHAPE (Social Sciences, Humanities and the Arts for People and the Economy) was developed in 2020 by the British Academy, the London School of Economics, the Academy of Social Sciences, and Arts Council England. It’s the closest thing to what I was looking for – a deliberate attempt to create a STEM-equivalent acronym for the non-science disciplines. Professor Julia Black, one of SHAPE’s architects, has said it’s about “levelling up the agenda” and establishing equality, not opposition to STEM. There’s even a SHAPE in Schools initiative working with UK primary and secondary schools to increase the visibility of these subjects.

SHAPE does a lot of things well, and I have enormous respect for what Julia Black and her colleagues have built. But for my purposes, it groups everything non-STEM into one big category – social sciences, humanities, and arts all live under one umbrella. It doesn’t explicitly call out critical thinking or reasoning as a distinct component, and it doesn’t include foresight at all. It also doesn’t map neatly onto individual school subjects the way STEM does. STEM works partly because you can point to specific timetabled classes — science, technology, engineering studies, maths — and SHAPE doesn’t quite do that.

Interestingly, Julia Black herself has pointed out that STEAM (the popular extension that adds Arts to STEM) “captures the ‘A’ but not the ‘S’ and the ‘H’” – meaning it acknowledges the value of integrating art and design with STEM, but misses the social sciences and humanities entirely. So STEAM was never going to fill this gap either.

Before SHAPE, Australia and the UK commonly used HASS which stands for Humanities and Social Sciences. In Australia, HASS is actually an ACARA learning area covering History, Geography, Civics and Citizenship, and Economics and Business in schools. The Council for the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (CHASS) has used the term in the Australian research and policy context for years. HASS is useful as a descriptor, but it was never really designed as a campaign or advocacy tool in the way STEM is – it doesn’t have the same punch, and it doesn’t include communication, reasoning, or futures thinking. Plus, the word itself doesn’t actually mean anything and I feel like that holds it back

Then there’s HEAL – Health, Education, Administration, and Literacy – which was coined by Richard Reeves at the American Institute for Boys and Men. HEAL is doing something quite different from what I was after. It’s primarily about occupational categories and gender equity in the workforce, specifically, getting more men into care-related professions like nursing, teaching, and social work, in the same way STEM campaigns have encouraged women into science and engineering. Reeves has written extensively about this in his book Of Boys and Men and in TIME. It’s important work, but HEAL is about job sectors, not about curriculum subjects or the skills and capabilities that underpin them.

So each of these frameworks does something valuable, but none of them quite filled the gap I’d identified: a memorable, subject-level acronym that captures the disciplines which develop durable skills like critical thinking, communication, and an understanding of how society works, and that could stand alongside STEM as an equal companion, not just a catch-all for everything else.

Step 3 – What should be included?

After I finally accepted that I wasn’t going to find something that would work, the next step was to think about what should be included in any kind of framework that we could create.

I knew I wanted to include subjects that build durable skills, like communication, critical thinking, reasoning, and cultural understanding – the things that will help us navigate a future where AI writes the code but we (hopefully) write the rules. Much of the strength of STEM comes from its relationship with actual subjects which are already taught and understood, and I felt that it would be important to keep this relationship to existing subjects in the new framework so I pulled out the subjects which teach us to communicate, evaluate, and think critically about society and the economy: English, History, Geography, Commerce, and Civics and Citizenship.

But I also felt strongly that a framework like this needed to go beyond subjects that look backwards or examine the present. We’re very good at teaching young people to reflect on where we’ve been – history does this beautifully – and to understand the world as it is now through subjects like economics and civics. What we’re less good at is teaching them to think forward.

Foresight is a growing field, grounded in university think tanks and futures institutes around the world, and it’s fundamentally about helping us anticipate what’s ahead so we can prepare for it rather than just react. I wanted that future-facing element in the framework because it felt like the missing piece, and if we’re going to argue that these skills matter for the future of work, then we need to actually include the discipline that’s dedicated to studying the future.

I also wanted to pull critical thinking and reasoning out as a standalone component rather than leaving it buried inside other subjects. Philosophy has been teaching us to think logically, evaluate evidence, and construct arguments for thousands of years, but somewhere along the way we started calling it “critical thinking” and listing it on job ads as though it were a new invention. Every employer wish list includes it. Every future of work report names it as a top skill. If it’s that important, and I believe it is, then it deserves to be visible in its own right, not hidden away as a byproduct of studying something else.

So my list of what needed to be included grew to: communication and literacy, critical thinking and reasoning, an understanding of how society and its systems work, an understanding of the human story and experience, and foresight.

Step 4 – Finding the right word

This is where it got hard.

I needed a real, recognisable English word that was easy to spell, easy to say, and impossible to mispronounce. It had to have a positive or at least neutral connotation, and the letters had to map onto the subjects and capabilities I’d identified. That’s a lot of constraints working at once, because you’re essentially working backwards from two directions: the topics you need to include AND the word you need to land on.

I started by writing down the primary terms I felt best described each area, and then listing alternatives for each. At first, I was thinking about History and Geography as distinct, named components, which would keep them specific the way STEM keeps Engineering and Mathematics specific.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realised that the real distinction wasn’t between individual subjects but between two different ways of understanding the world. The social sciences, including economics, political science, sociology, psychology, are empirical and pattern-seeking; they look at how systems work and try to find evidence-based explanations. The humanities on the other hand – history, geography, philosophy, ethics – are interpretive and values-oriented; they’re about understanding human experience, meaning, and the past. This is an established academic distinction which meant I could group subjects more meaningfully under Society and Humanities rather than listing them individually, just as ACARA do already with HASS.

With that, I had my five areas:

1. Something about futures,
2. Something about reasoning and critical thinking,
3. Something about language and communication,
4. Something about social systems, and
5. Something about the human story.

Then came the part where I sat with lists of words, trying every combination I could think of.

One obvious option was RICH – Reasoning, Inquiry, Communication, Humanities – but it had financial connotations that didn’t sit right. I can’t tell people we should be focusing on ‘RICH’ careers or ‘RICH’ subjects.

Then I tried LIGHT — Language, Inquiry, Geography, Humanities, Thinking — but that missed the social sciences entirely and ‘LIGHT skills’ felt like it undermined the seriousness of what these disciplines offer. I tried dozens of combinations, swapping in and out words like Language, Communication, Inquiry, Culture, and Thinking, but nothing quite worked — either the word wasn’t a real word, or it had the wrong connotations, or the letters forced me to include or exclude the wrong things.

And then, FRESH.

Foresight, Reasoning, English, Society, Humanities.

Like the others, it’s not perfect (especially as I needed to use English for the communication/language stream), but it comes a whole heap closer than anything else.

It’s a real word, easy to spell and say, with positive connotations of fresh thinking and perspectives. All the subjects were included, without any non-core areas or weird ‘the’ or ‘and’ add-ons to make it work. And while we ended up with English rather than Language or Communication, I’m not too upset about it because that’s what ACARA actually calls the subject in Australia, and just as STEM became CTIM in Spain, STIM in French Canada, and MINT in Germany, the “E” in FRESH could be adapted internationally.

How I define each component of FRESH

While the overall concept for FRESH is a field which brings together the skills and knowledge we need to understand and interact with humanity, it’s important to also think about what each component means – what it encompasses, where it sits in existing structures, and why it should be included as a distinct element.

Two of the components, Foresight and Reasoning, are capabilities that are typically embedded within other disciplines, but I’ve chosen to elevate them here as standalone items because they represent distinct and increasingly important skills. As Technology and Engineering sit alongside the more familiar subject areas of Mathematics and Science in STEM, Foresight and Reasoning expand on the traditional subject areas to almost put them into practice.

The other three components, English, Society, and Humanities, correlate neatly with existing curricula within my (Australian) context – which is exactly what we want, to work within and alongside existing structures, not to replace them. These subjects are already taught well in schools and universities, they are defined and clear and cover both the core skills and knowledge we need to communicate, collaborate, analyse, inquire and evaluate.

Each component interacts and reinforces the others:

• Foresight draws on all four other components: understanding history (Humanities) to imagine futures; reasoning critically (Reasoning) to evaluate scenarios; communicating futures clearly (English); understanding social systems (Society) to model change
• Reasoning underpins effective work in every other component – it is the line which runs through them all
• English is the medium through which all other components are expressed, shared, and debated
• Society and Humanities represent the two major modes of understanding human experience: empirical and interpretive

Working together, FRESH covers the competencies and knowledge that complement STEM, rather than duplicating what is already being covered well.

Here’s how I define each:

Foresight

The ability to think systematically about the future, to anticipate what may come, explore possibilities, and prepare for a range of future scenarios is at the core of FRESH and why it is so important. In my mind, Foresight is often the end product of the other four components – when we can reason about society and then communicate our thoughts, we are essentially doing this so that we can learn from what already exists so we can do better in the future.

Why do we learn history? Why is it important to understand what has happened in the past, and why it happened? Because the past can teach us about the future. We don’t learn about history so that we can fill museums or create period dramas, we learn about it so that we can (in the words of the ACARA Curriculum):

…appreciate how the world and its people and environments have changed, as well as the significant continuities that exist to the present day.

As a discipline, Foresight lives within future studies (and could technically be called ‘futures’ instead? Something to ponder further…) which is a relatively new but well established field. Sohail Inayatullah‘s paper Six pillars: futures thinking for transforming (2008) laid a lot of the groundwork for the field, and explained that “in an increasingly complex and heterogeneous world, futures studies can help people to recover their agency, and help them to create the world in which they wish to live.” In other words, this is a field designed specifically to help us take control of our future. Richard A Slaughter’s 1996 paper The Knowledge Base of Futures Studies as an Evolving Process provides more background and prophesied that the field would become more global over time in response to the increasing complexity mentioned by Inayatullah.

Strategic Foresight as a discipline has been adopted at the highest levels of policy and governance, such as through the OECD’s Strategic Foresight Unit, the EU’s Strategic Foresight Commission, Singapore’s Centre for Strategic Futures, and the UK’s Foresight Programme. UNESCO have set up the Futures Literacy Lab to “help people understand how and why we use the future to prepare, plan and interact with complexity and novelty in our societies.”

Foresight is integrative – it draws on understanding of history, reasoning, social systems, and communication. It sits at the intersection of the other FRESH components, but it is also a distinct capability: the ability to work with uncertainty, use scenarios, and think in systems terms. It’s not about predicting exactly what will come, but rather about exploring possibilities, and I feel that it needs to accompany the other four components to focus the FRESH framework.

Reasoning

The ability to reason is a skill that we develop over adolescence, and continue to build over the course of our lives. This skill helps us think critically, logically, and systematically, so that we can evaluate evidence, construct arguments, identify assumptions, and reason through complex problems.

We deploy our reasoning skills in all areas of our lives, from our workplaces and in our projects, to the choices we make about our careers, money and relationships, even when we decide what to cook for dinner, and you can find reasoning skills scattered across all subjects but particularly within English and HASS. To pull from the ACARA Curriculum again:

Through studying Humanities and Social Sciences, students will develop the ability to question, think critically, solve problems, communicate effectively, make decisions and adapt to change.

Within English, we use reasoning to both understand and craft a range of types of texts; from the NZ Curriculum:

As readers, they become thoughtful and discerning textual critics and gain insights into the diversity and complexity of human experience. As authors, they learn how to craft texts that express their ideas with clarity, creativity, and control. 

As a discipline, reasoning sits within philosophy, which technically is itself a subcomponent of humanities. Unlike Foresight, this isn’t a new idea; in ancient Rome, the Trivium were liberal arts of Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric, which one was required to master before they could study the sciences, and logic included reasoning/thought. Today, both the Australian Standard Classification of Education (2001) and the International Standard Classification of Education (2013) place philosophy with other subjects such as ethics or religious studies under society and culture/humanities. The ISCED actually lists logic as a sub-subject under philosophy and ethics. So in choosing to extract reasoning from the humanities and elevate it to a standalone position in the FRESH framework I’m making a deliberate decision to prioritise one skill over many others BUT (and it’s a big but) I feel that this is justified.

Critical thinking is the one term that keeps coming up whenever the people at the forefront of the current technological revolution talk about the skills they want to see in their employees. Google Trends shows a 60% rise in searches for critical thinking over the past few years, which is a reflection of how we’re starting to realise just how important it is.

And this makes sense – we’re going to need our logic, our reasoning, our critical thinking skills even more as we tackle more complex ideas in a rapidly changing global landscape. This morning the news broke that Anthropic has chosen not to allow the Pentagon in the US to remove their AI security and safety checks, which means they have turned down a $200m contract. This might look like a tech issue at first glance, but the reality is this was a decision which required them to think deeply and critically about their position and options.

Which is why it is so critical to pull reasoning as a discipline out of the broader humanities in the FRESH framework. The entire point of this framework is to highlight and be explicit about the skills and knowledge we will require in the future, and reasoning is a key part of this.

So, for the purposes of the framework I’ve chosen to use the ‘R’ from Reasoning, but it also often goes by other names, including:

• Reasoning
• Critical Thinking
• Logic
• Inquiry
• Evaluation
• Metacognition

Side note – if you want to hear someone explain what goes on inside their head and explain metacognition check out Olympian Eileen Gu’s interview from the other day – it’s fascinating to see how her mind works.

In this context, reasoning is the applied, transferable capability, extracted from a broader field so it can be clearly separated as an equally-important component. This is a deliberate choice, but one I think is necessary.

English

English in the FRESH framework refers to two connected things: the well-defined ACARA learning area of English, and the broader concept of communication, language, and literacy – how we read, write, speak, and listen as a society.

The ACARA Curriculum organises English around three interrelated strands: Language, Literature, and Literacy. Together, these cover everything from understanding how texts work, to crafting written and spoken communication, to critically analysing media and multimodal content. These are not abstract or aspirational skills, they are already defined, sequenced, and taught throughout school.

I’ve chosen to pull English out of the Humanities, where it traditionally sits alongside literature and language studies, and elevate it as a standalone component because literacy and communication are foundational to everything else. You cannot do foresight without being able to articulate what you see coming. You cannot reason without the language to construct and evaluate an argument. You cannot analyse society or interpret the humanities without a sophisticated command of how texts work. Language is the medium through which all other FRESH components operate, and as Ellerin (2015) argues, it is foundational to how we construct meaning about our occupations and our lives.

One important note: English is deliberately Australia-specific because that is what ACARA calls it, and it is also the way this learning area is described in New Zealand and the UK. But, just as STEM became CTIM in Spanish, STIM in French Canadian, MINT in German, LUMA in Finnish, and FeTeMM in Turkish, the E in FRESH could be adapted internationally, for example, becoming Français in parts of Canada, Español in Spanish-speaking contexts, or sitting alongside te reo Māori in Aotearoa New Zealand. This is the component most in need of international adaptation, which is itself a reflection of how central language is to identity and culture (Machin & Mayr, 2012). I am not bilingual and had a hard enough time coming up with a suitable acronym in English, so if you speak another language and want to work on a translated acronym for FRESH please let me know.

Society

Society refers to the empirical, systems-oriented disciplines that study how human beings organise, govern, and sustain themselves in groups. This includes economics, political science, sociology, psychology, civics, business studies, anthropology, and cultural studies.

The distinction between Society and Humanities in this framework follows established academic convention. Jerome Kagan (2009), building on C.P. Snow’s (1959) foundational “Two Cultures” lecture, argued that the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities constitute three distinct academic “cultures” with different assumptions, vocabularies, and sources of evidence. The social sciences are empirical and pattern-seeking; the humanities are interpretive and meaning-oriented. This isn’t a new or controversial idea; it’s how universities have been organised for decades.

In the Australian context, ACARA already groups many of these subjects together under its Humanities and Social Sciences (HASS) learning area, which combines history, geography, civics and citizenship, and economics and business. The FRESH framework makes a finer distinction: it separates the social sciences (Society) from the interpretive disciplines (Humanities) because they ask fundamentally different kinds of questions. Economics asks “what patterns can we observe in how resources are distributed?” History asks “what did this experience mean, and what can it teach us?” Both are essential, but they are doing different work.

Through this lens, within Society we include the subjects of economics and commerce, politics, civics and citizenship, sociology, psychology, business, anthropology, culture, media, and demography, but we don’t include history, geography, or other topics found in the Humanities.

Humanities

Our final component, the Humanities, refers to the interpretive, values-oriented disciplines that study human experience, meaning, culture, and the past. This includes history, philosophy (as a discipline rather than a capability), ethics, religious studies, some aspects of art and literature (as scholarly study), human geography, and cultural heritage.

Where the social sciences measure and seek patterns, the humanities interpret and seek meaning. They ask “why does this matter?” and “what should we value?” and “what can the past teach us about who we are?”

As Martha Nussbaum (2010) argued in Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, these disciplines are essential for creating competent democratic citizens; people who can think critically, engage with complexity, and understand perspectives beyond their own. An education focused solely on economic productivity, Nussbaum warned, erodes our ability to criticise authority and deal with complex global problems. That warning feels even more relevant now than when she wrote it.

In the FRESH framework, the Humanities are doing specific work: they provide the interpretive lens, the historical depth, and the ethical grounding that the other components draw on. Foresight draws on historical understanding. Reasoning draws on philosophical method. Society draws on the values and questions that humanities scholarship surfaces. As Cochran (1997) showed in applying narrative approaches to career counselling, and as Savickas and Savickas (2019) traced in their history of the field, the humanities tradition of interpretive analysis runs deep through how we understand work and careers — which is precisely why it matters here.

Two important notes on boundaries. First, English-as-communication has been elevated to its own standalone component; what remains in Humanities is the scholarly study of literature and language. Second, Reasoning-as-capability has been elevated to standalone; what remains in Humanities is philosophy as a discipline — its history, its ethics, its traditions of inquiry. These are deliberate choices, consistent with the FRESH framework’s goal of making the most important capabilities visible rather than leaving them buried within broader disciplinary groupings.

FRESH is the counterpoint to STEM

Together, FRESH and STEM cover the bulk (although not all) of the subjects and skills young people need in a way which pairs the scientific with the interpretative and communicative. Rather than an either/or, we need both to thrive, even if many of us lean more in one direction than another.

FRESH gives us a language framework we can use to highlight which skills will be in demand as we continue to tackle the complex challenges of our time.

What about Arts and Health?

As I mentioned, FRESH and STEM could never possibly cover everything, and there are some topics which can’t be limited to either area. In particular, I’m thinking about the arts and health; these are the two learning areas not clearly represented in either STEM or FRESH – and this is not a reflection of their lack of value, but rather that they transcend other fields to touch everything.

Take the arts, for example. In STEM, the arts build core innovation and creativity skills which we rely on to solve scientific and technical problems, and design engineered solutions. In FRESH, art performs as cultural expression, both within culture and reflecting it at the same time. Our creativity enables us to engage as we communicate and adopt other perspectives. You can’t assign art to one or the other, because it belongs in both.

The same goes for health and physical education. This learning area prepares students so they can understand and take ownership over their own health and that of their community. Core health-related sciences such as biology and chemistry clearly sit within STEM, but this is only half of the picture – FRESH covers who has access to healthcare and where they can access it, who pays for it, how health issues are communicated and shared, and where health falls as a government priority.

I find it helps to think of an example, so let’s look at the HPV vaccine rollout across Australia. Medical Researchers worked for years to develop the science required to produce and test the vaccine – and this sits clearly within STEM. But the vaccine would never have been developed or rolled out without FRESH – the ethics committees who approved the clinical trials, the policy makers who put the vaccine on the national agenda, the fundraisers and media teams who let people know what was happening and raised money to continue the trials, or the health communication teams who explained that the vaccine was safe and effective.

It took both STEM and FRESH skills to eliminate cervical cancer, which is what we’re on track to do in Australia by 2035.

This is early days

At this point, FRESH is really just a concept. What happens from here is unknown, and in writing this article I’m not presenting a finished product, rather aiming to start a conversation.

These are just my thoughts and ideas, and FRESH shares one of the key benefits of STEM which is that it doesn’t belong to anyone. As a concept, it’s broad and flexible enough to fit into whatever existing structures you have, without replacing them. In one context, the focus may be on bringing subject areas together into transdisciplinary projects, but in the next context FRESH might appear as a lens through which to evaluate career possibilities. How it is used in one specific context isn’t as important as how useful it is as a conceptual, thinking tool that helps us understand how these vital areas work together.

If you define any of these components in another way, that’s equally valid, provided the concept is useful in your context, and adds value to your programs. The outcome is what matters, not some rigid definition.

Where to next?

Personally, I like to let things sit and percolate for a little while, which is what I’ll do next while I think a bit deeper about FRESH and how it could be used.

• If you have ideas for how you could use or adapt the concept, then share them with me and we can work on it together, or test it out yourself and let me know what you find.
• Next, we need to do some work to determine if this grouping is useful – can people understand it? Adopt it? Utilise it?
• How should it be adapted for different contexts? Languages? Belief and value systems? This work should be done by people in those contexts.
• Can we tighten our definitions? Or do we need to incorporate more ideas?

I’ll spend some time thinking about how FRESH might map to my own work, and how it might appear in my practice before I come back to these questions again. If you want to join the conversation, please share your thoughts, ideas, observations, and plans in the comments.