At Teach the Future we always like to collaborate with likeminded collectives around the world in our quest to take futures thinking into schools. In Germany we are in touch with Die Zukunfstbauer, a School Future Lab. They just executed their first pilot, read on to learn more!
As Aileen Moeck, co-founder of Die Zukunfstbauer explains: “We did a seven week pilot on futures thinking in grade nine of the Sankt Franziskus Schule in Berlin. Grade nine is the phase when youngsters have their first internship and work experiences.”
“We created a learning space called ‘personal futures’ where we traveled with the pupils in the future. We had six phases in our program. We started with introducing ‘change’ and ‘future’. Phase 2 and 3 is where we explored trends and technology by having open discussions about it. The youngsters used the framework from the Teach the Future Playbook to describe how future people would communicate, work and travel in those worlds.”
Aileen continues: “Phase 4 and 5 was the futurist phase where we used the Futures Wheel technique to make the kids think about system influences and long-term impacts. Finally, in the last phase the kids formed teams and created a day in the future and fictive jobs of the future. These jobs they then presented to their parents.”
"We were so fortunate to be able to execute this as a part of a prize we won, a German science'future of work' university challenge. As a follow-up of this pilot, we are now in the midst of creating open education material which can be used by teachers for free. We are also working on developing ‘train the trainer’ sessions to learn others how to moderate these types of sessions with youngsters themselves.”
Thanks so much Aileen! Are you living in Germany and do you want to know more about Die Zukunfstbauer or want to help them out, either via volunteering or funding, please contact them via hello@zukunftsbauer.schule. You can also stay updated via their Facebookpage.