Is the future determined? Can we change it? Can we influence it? Can we teach the future as a subject or should we use it transdisciplinarily and consider it a set of skills? Yesterday, Dr. Peter Bishop, founder of Teach The future, offered a workshop to a team of teachers and answering all of our questions.
If the future was determined, we wouldn’t have any choice, but it’s not. Introducing future(s) into the curriculum is a way of empowering the students so that they can influence change. Plurality in the world “futures” is intentional. Why? Because the future(s) is not a determined scenario.
Dr. Peter Bishop introduced some interesting concepts during the workshop: the “expected future” as the one we are headed to if we don’t change anything; the “alternative futures”, as plausible scenarios that could appear if something unexpected occurs, and lastly, the “prefereable futures”, the ones that we would like to achieve in accordance to their values. If we can empower the students for their own prefered future, then they will start acting and walking towards this vision. This is what we mean by St PETER’S students as “change makers”.
Dr. Peter Bishop was accomanied by the Spanish team of Teach the Future: Lourdes Rodriguez (co-ordinator), Pilar Blazquez (New Business Development / Creativity and Futures Thinking /Trends Research), Sandra Martinez (Strategic Foresight | Digital Workplace | LEGO SERIOUS PLAY Facilitator) and Paola Caballer (Futures thinking practitioner & trends analyst. Also, PMP-SCRUM certificated, facilitator and consultant in M&R).
You might be asking yourself, how can we teach the future? It could be a very complex subject to teach, but there are tools and methods to do it. We had the opportunity to get to know some of them during the workshop. In fact, since the beginning of the school year, our teachers have already been designing learning experiences using the future as an empowering tool. The following is an example, used with our Year 5 class, as part of their last unit of inquiry «Societies govern in diverse ways to create decision-making structures.» Designing the future also includes imagining new ways of thinking and making decisions.