Co-Designing a Future-Focused Classroom Activity for Middle School Students

• In Event: Education for Planetary Futures (Part 2): Disrupting, Reimagining, and Co-Designing Pedagogies on the Edge

Proposal

To prepare youth for the complex world of the 21st century, education should focus on teaching the skills and knowledge required for engaging with their future. Futures thinking integrates these skills and processes. Although accepted as regular practice in businesses and organizations, bringing futures thinking into education remains a challenge. In response to this, we conducted co-design sessions with teachers and middle school-aged youth to redesign an existing activity called Futures by Chance | Futures by Choice (FbC|FbC). This paper describes our findings on engaging kids in the activity.
The Futures by Chance | Futures by Choice (FbC|FbC) activity is a futures thinking exercise that uses storytelling to help groups of participants envision potential future scenarios. The activity aims to encourage reflection on personal experiences, values, and perspectives, as well as those of others. It also aims to shift participants' approach to the future from reactive to proactive.
Studies conducted in the natural setting of schools suggest positive outcomes in developing futures thinking skills among youth (e.g., Davidson, 2017; Hoffman et al., 2021; Levrini, 2021). To this end, the FbC | FbC activity holds promise to nurture futures thinking skills, providing a practical and engaging platform for young people to begin envisioning and shaping their own future.
Following multiple co-design workshops with teachers from, the specifics of the FbC | FbC were adjusted to better align with a middle school audience. Subsequently, 16 youth participants were invited to play the activity with us. The youth completed pre- and post-surveys to measure their relationship to the future and perceptions of the activity. They then discussed what they liked about the activity, what could be improved, and how it could be implemented into schools.
The analysis process included thematic analysis of the children's comments regarding the game, their use of reasoning, and their prior knowledge. Statistical analysis was used to examine quantitative responses
Preliminary findings suggest that the revised version of the activity worked particularly well for upper elementary school and lower middle school levels. The youngest children found the current version challenging, but provided valuable suggestions for creating a version suited to their age group. Additionally, the older children wanted to see the activity incorporated into a larger context.
Feedback, along with an analysis of discussions, highlighted the need to adjust some of the themes and events in the activity.
Further analysis revealed that some participants adopted leadership roles while others followed, occasionally leading to the silencing of other voices.
Finally, we saw no evidence that engaging with the activity led to an improved time perspective, which aligns with prior research (Davidson, 2017) suggesting that comprehensive programs, rather than single activities, have a broader impact on students' perceptions of the world.
In sum, these findings suggest that our youth version of the Futures by Chance | Futures by Choice activity may need minor adjustments before being ready for classroom implementation. It highlights the necessity to provide youth with collaboration techniques so that they can all have a voice.

Authors

• Bregje van Geffen

• Ruth Wylie, Arizona State University

• Rebekah Jongewaard, Arizona State University