Our project addresses a foundational gap in democratic cultures: the ability to decrypt narratives of the future, and to consciously use the future in order to explore alternative possibilities, while welcoming uncertainty and contradiction. We call this “Futures Literacy” and believe it is accessible to everyone.
According to UNESCO, Futures Literacy is “an essential 21st-century competency”, indispensable both for coping with the uncertainty of the coming decades, and for imagining futures in which we are actors and citizens. It is a prerequisite for any just and collectively agreed (social, ecological, economic, etc.) transformation. It is therefore a fundamental, and currently weak, building block of democratic cultures.
Together and/or separately, the project partners have tested several ways to develop the Futures Literacy and/or the agency of youths and of socially vulnerable citizens. Ultimately, our goal is to build “commons” of Futures Literacy training tools, adaptable to all audiences and usable by all actors in a variety of contexts.
Mostly focusing on teenagers and young adults (with the belief that methods that work with them should work with other audiences), we will scale this by:
- Designing & testing an active learning, modular “Futures Literacy for Citizenship education Kit” (henceforth, the Kit) working both as a standalone learning tool, and in contexts where democratic procedures are at play;
- Deploying it in one partner’s extended network and learning from it;
- Testing adaptations to other contexts, publics and networks, in France and Germany;
- Finalizing and publishing the Kit as an open-source, reusable and modular tool (content, methods, supporting material, etc.);
- Testing an initial deployment strategy, mostly relying on partnerships with a variety of networks and on the Kit’s collective management as a “common”.
