Table of Contents
Teaching materials
Teach the Future Europe
Up and Coming
Teaching Materials
FINALLY! Teach the Future is proud to announce that Tomorrow’s Learning Library is now available. The Library supports the mission of Teach the Future by providing teachers with classroom-ready activities, lessons, units and courses for elementary, secondary and college teachers and classes. Developing one’s own teaching material is difficult in the current educational environment. As a result, the Library is intended to make it easier for teachers to teach the future, particularly now at the end of the academic year in the U.S. and elsewhere when testing is over and teachers have more time to offer enrichment activities.
The Library contains 46 separate teaching resources of the following types –
Foundation Sets – 3 entry-level lessons for elementary, secondary and college classes
Teach the Future Library – 28 activities, lessons, units and courses for every level developed by Teach the Future staff
Additional Libraries – 8 collections of teaching resources made available by others
Games and Simulations – 8 modules that teach the future using games
Methods and Tools – a collection of professional foresight techniques that teachers can turn into lessons as they wish.
The Library is a living repository so we are not done yet! We have a backlog of materials for the Library that we will be posting over the next month. What is more, teachers have the chance to contribute their material to the Library, and Teach the Future will pay them for those materials according to this process.
So teachers, please visit the Library, download one or more modules, use them to teach the future, and send us your comments either in the Review attached to each of the modules or through the little envelope icon at the bottom right of every page.
Teach the Future!
Teach the Future Europe
Teach the Future is an international initiative, and we are proud to announce that we have the first affiliate outside the U.S. Erica Bol is a founding member of the Teach the Future Board of Directors. She is also a social entrepreneur and a former faculty member at Fontys University of Applied Science where she taught foresight in the International Lifestyles Studies program. Erica has established a not-for-profit organization in the Netherlands (known as a stichting) called Teach the Future Europe. She has worked for over a year networking and organizing interested parties in the Netherlands and elsewhere to Teach the Future.
That effort began to pay off this month with two important meetings.
A pabo in the Netherlands is a university program that prepares teachers for professional practice. The Durzamme Pabo is an association of 20 pabos which include sustainability education in their curriculum. Andre de Hamer, the Director of the Durzamme Pabo, invited Erica and Peter Bishop to meet with their members to discuss the overlap of sustainability and foresight education. Representatives from two programs attended--Windesheim University and Marnix Academy. They will exploring the possibility of including foresight education in their curriculum in cooperation with Teach the Future Europe.
The Dutch Future Society is an affiliate of the World Future Society in the United States. The Director of the Society, Freija van Duijne, invited its members to a Hackethon about Teach the Future. The meeting was held at Mmousse, a design agency in Amsterdam that also provides an outstanding facility for meetings and design sessions. Erica led the meeting by asking the following questions –
What should students learn about the future?
Who is currently involved or could be involved in the promoting futures thinking in schools?
Peter Bishop also described the history of Teach the Future and where it is going from here.
Up and Coming
Summer workshop on futures thinking and gaming
Teach the Future has a contract with the Institute for STEM Education, an office of California State University-East Bay, to help design and facilitate a summer workshop for high school students in which they will develop scenarios for the future and then embed them in a video game. Katie King, a former middle school ELA teacher and Teach the Future staff member, is developing the process that students will use to develop their scenarios. Then Jateen Bhakta, a local game developer, will help students put those scenarios into a video game.
National Council on the Social Sciences
Joe Sears is a high school teacher at Emery High School in Houston. He developed the unit called “The Next Chapter in World History” for the Library. The unit has students imagine an historical even that occurs between 2015 and 2045 that is written up in a history book in 2115. Joe appeared on the AHA panel in Atlanta in January, and he has had a paper on teaching the future accepted by the National Council on the Social Sciences (NCSS) for their annual meeting next December in Washington DC
So stay in touch, and join the conversation on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other social media platforms. And contact us through the website or directly to peter@teachthefuture.org.