The Joseph Jaworski Next Generation Foresight Practitioners Award aims to identify the innovators in the foresight field and support them in their endeavours. The award supports winners in developing new foresight initiatives and in developing both personally and professionally. The long term aim is to create a global sensing-network of future-alert activists combined with a platform to showcase innovative practices from around the world.
We are pleased to announce that two foresight practitioners associated with Teach the Future, Erica Bol and Aileen Moeck, have won the Education Special Award! 👏🏻👏🏻
Erica Bol received her award based on her sustained effort over the years to introduce futures thinking to schools in the Netherlands and throughout Europe and Latin America. She specifically was recognised for setting up a pilot program with schools in the Netherlands. Together with five teacher-in-training programs, five schools of secondary education, and five schools of primary education she is piloting the integration of futures education in their curriculum.
Another objective of this pilot initiative is to gather data on how to effectively teach futures thinking at primary and secondary education. Erica plans to gather and analyze the data from every pilot school to develop a ”Best Practice” database that presents the most effective approaches to teaching futures thinking categorized per age group.
Aileen Moeck co-founded a similar program in Berlin called Die Zukunfstbauer (The Futures Builders) and she just finished conducting their first pilot. She conducted 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. She created a learning space called ‘personal futures’ where we traveled with the pupils in the future.
The youngsters used the framework from the Teach the Future Playbook to describe how future people would communicate, work and travel in those worlds. Learn more about this pilot via this blog we posted recently on our site.
We are grateful that the impact education of youngsters can have on futures thinking is recognized by this award. We will keep on preparing students for tomorrow by teaching the future today! ✨
// Text by Els Dragt