Info
(Image from: The Universe is My Home / By Bill and Sally Fletcher)
Early Futures is a continually updated source of research, projects and notes regarding ideas that provide necessary alternatives for and by young children. The focus is on advocating futures oriented approaches for children which include: alternative institutions, play spaces, utopian visions and education. Future studies for children focuses also on major questions concerning our futures: What will the citizens of Earth need to know for the year 2050, 2100, etc? What are the most important survival skills for sustaining Earth and its citizens in the near and far future? How do we prepare ourselves and our children for the near future where 8 out of every 10 jobs have not been invented yet?
What is Future Studies for Children?
Future studies education for children creates a framework within which children can develop ideas, vision and agency towards the future and their place in it. Future studies education, when implemented with care, can facilitate spaces which give children the ability to relate to the subtlety, exuberance and mystery of the human, non-human and ever porous, becoming world. All the while, keeping David Harvey’s critique of Utopias in mind, “the future must be constructed, not in some fantastic utopian mold, but through tangible transformations of the raw materials given to us in our present state.” (Spaces of Hope, pg. 191).
As Jennifer Gidley and Sohail Inayatullah, two leading future studies thinkers, believe quite simply, “youth futures can be defined initially as how young people think about and envision the future (probable, possible and preferred).” Our future studies framework ought to take on many manifestations, but should include some, if not all of these elements:
+ Building imagination, creativity, and critical reflection.
+ Creating literacy in future terminology (history of time, understanding of plural futures, perception, social constructions).
+ Producing images, spaces, institutions, inventions and projects that recognize, deconstruct and create alternative futures.
+ Being comfortable with chaos, rapid change, large integrated systems and diverse relationships.
Future studies is important mainly because most of our social systems only allow children to look at a single (or, at best, dichotomous) simulated classroom world through a simulated/protective lens, rather then being a lens which is participating with many present worlds. Teaching a child to become fluent in relating to, and acting on, the ever shifting multitude of worlds is what we are striving for with future studies education.
Where can I learn more about Future Studies?
The best online resource is: metafuture.org. Read Jane M. Page’s book on the subject “Reframing Early Childhood Curriculum.” You can also view the 10 Early Childhood + Future Studies Books post to view some reading which relates to future studies education. The World Future Studies Federation also has many articles and places to start learning more about the global community of future studies thinkers.
