Creative Futures Literacies Workshop
It is no surprise that concern for the future is on the rise. Students and teachers are very aware of the threats we now face: Global pandemics, climate change, extreme weather, global conflict, nuclear war, racial inequality, systemic injustice. Terrifying visions of the future can be seen in countless movies, video games, social media, and television shows. Even our technologies continue to evolve at a frenetic pace, causing confusion and anxiety about the problems they will bring into our lives and schools.
It seems the future is a very scary place!
But the truth is – we don’t know what the future will bring. As teachers, we are educating students for a future that we can’t predict. And yet everything we do in our classrooms is focused on building towards it. If we don’t examine our beliefs about the future and its myriad possibilities, the future can feel like a foregone conclusion.
This workshop invites you to consider the futures we are building in our classrooms and suggests ways of getting students to participate in that conversation. Futures literacies is a teaching strategy and curriculum that encourages both teachers and students to imagine and shape the future. It is about connecting classroom practices to future possibility and asking the questions:
- What kind of world do we want to live in?
- What is education for?
- What futures are we being fed by technologies and mainstream media?
- How can we help our students imagine their own futures and make positive changes towards them?
This presentation and interactive hands-on workshop will provide you with practical ways to bring the future into your classroom. You will be introduced to numerous inspiring, interactive activities and technologies that you can integrate into your own lesson planning. In addition, you will be introduced to a wealth of resources, including an array of futures media, fiction, and art that you can share with your students to inspire and ignite their creativity and imagination.
This teaching strategy and curriculum supports students in the following ways:
1. Celebrate and inspire students’ futures thinking and imagining.
2. Invite students to envision their own futures while engaging with their cultural heritage and history.
3. Inspire students to take creative agency in shaping their lives and learning priorities.
4. Ask students to question and critique the futures all around us and identify areas of possibility.
5. Encourage students to imagine the future from different perspectives.
6. Become inspired by multimedia creative futures in the form of fiction, technology, games, and more.
7. Provide students with opportunities to experiment with technologies in their futures imagining.
The project of building a more just and decolonized world is directly tied to education. In this interactive futures literacies workshop, teachers will be invited to investigate their own thoughts and ideas about futurity and become inspired to collaborate with their students in the project of building a better world.