Educator as Futurist: Moving beyond “Preparing for the future” to “Shaping the future”
By Laura McBain and Lisa Kay Solomon
We shape the future and the future shapes us.
Educators shape the mindsets, behaviors, and skills their students will carry with them into the future. And while this has always been true, the global pandemic, nationwide public attention to social justice, and the need to dismantle historically inequitable systems have heightened our collective sense of urgency to design more equitable and abundant futures with — and for — our students.
This moment has made us realize that we cannot just prepare students for the future, we must help them develop the imagination, agency, and will to shape the future. As educators, we spend an inordinate amount of time preparing students for the future as if we know how the future will unfold for them. But in an ever accelerating moment of uncertainty and ambiguity — merely being ‘prepared’ feels insufficient. In a world filled with more unknowns than knowns — how do we help our students not just be “prepared” but capable of envisioning and building the futures they want to bring to life?
Educators have a responsibility to our collective futures.
We need educators to be futurists.
To be an education futurist means weaving the practices of futures thinking and design into our learning experiences with leaders and students. In a rapidly changing world, futures thinking helps us imagine a wider range of the possible, plausible, probable futures in which we will be learning and living. Design helps us build toward more preferred futures by giving form to ideas, rapidly experimenting, and learning through iterative processes and feedback. Through these lenses, we see the world not just as it is, but how it could be if we took a more empathetic and human-centered approach to uncover and solve complex challenges in the hopes of creating a more equitable, humane, and anti-racist future. We believe educators have the capacity to enable these capabilities at scale by co-designing experiences with students that provide opportunities for intentional practice, and a protective space to develop them.
Embracing the mindset of an educational futurist requires a foundational shift that will challenge our vision of why, how, and where we implement learning. In K-12 schools we are comfortable teaching the past; but not the future. There are plentiful lesson plans, teacher training, multiple-choice options, and even essay prompts on how to examine what already exists in the world. But there is no teacher preparation program that prepared us to teach about how to intentionally shape the futures we want to bring to life.
We have to help students understand their context and capabilities in more holistic, interdisciplinary ways than ever before. We have to teach our students to become adept time travelers — to make sense of the past in order to envision new futures; to be sense makers of disparate types of information — moving seamlessly between what’s known and unknown; to flex their imagination in expansive and applied ways, and to become critical and contextual thinkers. We need them to understand the equitable and ethical considerations of policy, technology, and power dynamics of systems and structures. And, all capabilities must integrate emotional intelligence and mental wellbeing into our curriculum as a core investment in the future health and resilience of our students.
Over the last couple of years, we’ve been co-creating new practices and approaches with school leaders, educators, and students to develop these new capacities and behaviors to shape more expansive and equitable futures. The K12 Lab’s Futures Fest in January 2020 brought together educators from around the country to showcase some of their and our newest prototypes and to highlight how some educators, in varying formats, are creating programs that enable their students to shape the trajectory of their communities. The last seven months have accelerated the urgency of this work.
This summer we worked with 36 school-based design teams to help them envision and co-create prototypes for the various scenarios unfolding this year in schools. Using scenario planning tools and design processes, teams went from thinking about the fall as a singular plan they needed to create, to adopting an emergent design approach that adapts to their community’s unfolding needs.
And, more recently, we’ve begun to help school leaders build their adaptive capabilities and mindsets through an emergent posture that enables them to become navigators of their shifting context. Moving beyond linear strategic plans, our work equips them with sense making skills to help them better understand their own ecosystems and co-construct new strategic intents for their communities. This new work requires leaders to move from uncertainty paralysis to embracing ambiguity and to really see this moment as an expansive opportunity to co-design with students and communities who have been historically marginalized and underinvested within our educational system.
We are committed to learning more. Right now, we are learning with and from others like Lonny Avi Brooks from CSU East Bay who is the leading voice in AfroFuturism 2.0, the co-producer with Ahmed Best of the Afrofuturist Podcast and Afro-Rithms — a game aimed at democratizing futures that represent a multiplicity of voices and identities which was developed in collaboration game designer, Eli Kosminsky. We are also experimenting with futurists Aisha Bain and Meredith Hutchinson from Resistance Communications who use immersive reflective community practices to reclaim stolen histories and to envision equitable futures for young women.
Moving forward, we are building on our own expertise and networks in futures, design, and equity to create a fellowship for education leaders who are ready to cultivate their futures and design capabilities and mindsets as they actively engage their communities in shaping equitable futures together. And we’re committed to sharing our learning along the way so this work can be owned by everyone.
This is inherently new territory, and we are committed to discovering and shaping this emergent work through co-creation, network building, rapid experiments with networks, administrators, school leaders, teachers, and, most importantly, students.
This isn’t just another fad. This is an inflection point.
We are being shaped by this moment, and outcomes of the choices we make will shape us for years to come. Educators and students are the futurists we need today.
