This is the first episode of Futures4Europe conversations, initiated by the Eye of Europe project – a series of dialogues between Bianca Dragomir and professionals from all over the world, who engage in work that is future sensitive.

About this episode - On engaging meaningfully with futures

Often framed as a professional activity essential for 'planning', guiding 'decision making' or 'orienting strategies', futures studies could be more generously placed in the realm of humanities where, along other human capacities, imagination and anticipation should be nurtured and celebrated.

In this light, futures education is more like a tending a garden. Like doing the soil work that turns it into the fertile ground for seeds to grow into 'flowers' such as human creativity, a heightened awareness of the mechanisms of change, agency coupled with humility, a sense of taking part into shaping something yet non-existent.

Peter Bishop, founder of Teach the Future, argues that this garden should be welcoming everyone, including young people, or perhaps especially them.

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Collaborative research on the human capacity to understand, anticipate, prepare for, and embrace the future.

About Futures Consciousness

The futures consciousness concept and scale has been developed by researchers at the Finland Futures Research Centre (University of Turku) and University of Geneva, with help from other contributors. Teach the Future received a grant from the World Futures Studies Federation (WFSF) and the Prince Mohammad bin Fahd University (PMU) to adapt the Scale for use by young people, ages 12-18. The results of that grant are being submitted for publication by the partners. After that, the Scale will be available for use by schools and other organizations that work with youth. The details will be published on this page shortly.
Take the test.
The Five Dimensions of Futures Consciousness are:

• time perspective; the ability to be aware of the past, present and future, as well as the way events follow each other over time
• agency beliefs; basic sense of confidence that an individual has in their own ability to influence the external world
• openness to alternatives; abilities used to critically question commonly accepted ideas and influences an individual’s willingness to consider alternative ways of being and doing
• systems perception; the ability to recognize human and natural systems around us including groups, societies and ecosystems
• concern for others; relates to the degree to which an individual pursues favourable futures for a group beyond themselves
  

Our partners

Teach the Future collaborates with the University of Turku in Finland, the Finland Futures Research Centre and Digital Futures to research and promote the work in the context of education and (young) students. Sanna Ahvenharju, Matti Minkkinen and Fanny Lalot are the research experts that developed the futures consciousness concept and scale. 

Our activities

Teach the Future supports the de velopment of a scale matching the language and level of young people. This project is in collaboration with schools in the Netherlands, Italy, Turkiye, United States, and United Kingdom. And we thank our sponsor the Prince Mohammad Bin Fahd, Center for Futuristic Studies.
Next to this we support the testing. Erica Bol has wo rked with Martin de Wolf of the Master Learning and Innovation at the Fontys University of Applied Sciene. She designed a futures lesson program supporting the Master program and tested if the students futures consciousness improved. The students did a test before and after the lessons program. A paper on the project and results are published in FUTURES issue 12-2022.

It would be short-sighted to assume that we, as humanity, have reached such a level of maturity that our descendants will not find some aspects of our – apparently civilised – everyday life repulsive and sad.
So we asked 60 futurists from around the world: “What will we disgust our descendants with?”
Many of the submitted ideas are already present in public discourse and confirm areas in which we need to change. But we were especially interested in novel barbarisms that humanity is still largely oblivious to.
The resulting infographic shows the futurists’ answers grouped into 93 contemporary barbarisms ranked in a public vote according to how eye-opening they are.

4CF The Futures Literacy Company 

4CF The Futures Literacy Company is a consultancy entirely focused on strategic foresight and long-term strategies. For nearly two decades, 4CF has been on the mission to help its clients prepare for an uncertain tomorrow. The Company has executed hundreds of projects for private companies, public institutions and international entities, including the European Commission and its agencies (EUDA, ENISA), FAO, UNFCCC, UNESCO, UNEP and UNDP. 4CF is at the forefront of global innovation, and actively contributes to the development of cutting-edge foresight tools, including 4CF HalnyX (Delphi platform), 4CF Sprawlr, 4CF FLEx.

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