After more than fifty years in the public domain, foresight education is now ready for the schools. We have been holding conferences, seminars, and workshops, conducting foresight studies, and educating graduate students for most of that time. It is now time we included young people in our conversation about the future.
The real evidence for that timing is the generous response we received from the foresight community in the form of not one, but two special issues on foresight education. The last issue was dedicated to those who are already teaching foresight in the schools. (If you are one of those, let us know at the contacts below.) This issue is dedicated to those who created the content that we now have. The founders of the field are those who initially plowed the field and planted the seed that allows us to harvest the knowledge and skills that we now teach.
Creating a new discipline is exciting, but exceedingly difficult. Not only must the founders create new methods and tools that are not guaranteed to work, but they also have to put up with suspicion and even disdain from the more established disciplines. In those days, “futurist” was a term associated with fortune telling, palm reading, and other superstitious practices. In fact, in the 1980s, we told graduates at the University of Houston not to put the term on their resumes because it was a sure-fire deal breaker. It was not until the Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet Union collapsed, and the first Gulf War started, to name but a few of the many disruptions since then, that people realized that anticipating the future was not as easy as it looked. But the founders’ theories and methods have stood the test of time, and we now enjoy the benefits of their work. As a result, we can now teach younger students how to approach the future in a systematic and transparent way that gives due consideration to what we think we know about the future as well as to its fundamental uncertainties.
The list of contributors in this issue is no less exceptional than the last:
David Staley is a professor of history, design, and information technology at The Ohio State University, USA. He is notable in the futures field for his landmark publication, History and Future, that identifies the similarities (and some differences) between learning about the past and learning about the future. He summarizes those similarities in this article which aligns history and foresight education, not only with the instrumental activities of forecasting and planning, but also with the humanities, where learning about the future for its own sake is an inherently human activity.
Joseph Voros is a senior lecturer in Strategic Foresight at Swinburne University in Melbourne, Australia. He was also on the Board of the International Big History Association. Big History describes our epic journey through the ages of the universe culminating in a look into its future. He describes his use of Big History as an effective approach to the past, but also as a uniquely effective way to prepare students to consider the future.
Stefanie Ollenburg is a researcher at the Institute for the Future and a lecturer in the Futures Studies program at the Free University of Berlin, Germany. She is also an architect and a designer. Her article describes how she teaches the interface between foresight and design to architecture students planning an urban space.
Robert Poli is a faculty member in the Department of Sociology and Social Research at the University of Trento, Italy. He has also initiated a series of conferences that explore how the practice of anticipation appears in disciplines outside futures studies. He and his colleagues describe how they conduct structured workshops on foresight for secondary school students.
Ian Yoeman is an associate professor and head of the Tourism Management Group at the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He describes the details of his pedagogical approach to teaching the future of tourism, an approach that could be used in teaching any complex skill like strategic foresight.
Erica Bol founded Teach the Future EU to promote foresight education in the Netherlands and throughout Europe. She came to foresight education as a lecturer on trend research and concept development at the Fontys University of Applied Sciences. Her article describes a program she is initiating with the Teachers College at Windesheim University to prepare preservice teachers to teach about the future when they enter their careers.
For more information about this issue or about foresight education in general, contact:
Peter Bishop, PhD, APF
Teach the Future
peter@teachthefuture.org
+1-281-433-4160
Peter BishopSpecial Issue Editor
