Imagination and futures thinking for K12

Future focused research question

How can we best prepare youth to think critically about and take agency for their futures?

Description

Why does every school teach history but hardly any have courses on the future? This project seeks to establish a working group around futures thinking and foresight in K-12 education with an aim of building community and developing an interdisciplinary program of research.

Subgroups

Timequakes invite anyone to explore their connections to important topics like planetary health. By shifting their perspective on time, individuals and groups can think differently and take action to invent, choose, and ultimately shape an emerging future.

Our Ecosystem Accelerator inspires and enables students, teachers, parents, education partners, communities, and other innovators to rapidly envision and implement transformative ideas for integrating pragmatic imagination in education. By fostering a culture of imagination, we accelerate the development of ingenious engagement that meets the evolving needs of learning communities. Our platform fuels collaboration and experimentation, accelerating the future of education in metropolitan Phoenix, and beyond.

The Futures Thinking in Classrooms subgroup aims to create and assess curriculum for formal education environments. Our initial efforts have focused on creating a new iteration of the existing Futures by Chance | Futures by Choice timeline activity for middle school classrooms. We are currently working on a manuscript that describes our co-design process, and in Spring 2025, we plan to collaborate with ASU Prep to test the impact that doing this activity has on young people’s futures self-efficacy and agency. Broader goals include working with teachers and students to develop additional futures thinking curricula to be used in a variety of classroom contexts.

Achievements:

• Futures Thinking & Imagination in K12 Education LFC Annual Report 2022-2023 (PDF)
• NSF AISL proposal involving 5 LFC faculty submitted January 2023
• AERA Workshop/conference proposal involving 5 LFC faculty submitted March 2023
• Initiating a collaborative relationship with the Guadalupe community to co-create an intergenerational community futures project
• Futures games infrastructure project initiated – planning for pilot implementation summer 2023 with graduate student support

Readings discussed in LFC ‘Journal Club’

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1275942/full

Gidley, J. M. (2017). The future: A very short introduction. Oxford University Press. (Amazon)

Pendleton-Jullian, A., & Brown, J. S. (2016). Pragmatic imagination. (Amazon)

Harjo, L. (2019). Spiral to the stars: Mvskoke tools of futurity. University of Arizona Press. (Link)