Welcome to the Futures Studies Channel
This is a place for teachers and learners: for the futures-passionate, the futures-curious, and anyone in between who believes, as we do, that futures thinking is a survival skill for the 21st Century.
You’ll find ways to teach futures studies to students of all types; ideas for futures-oriented projects, workshops, and exercises; and resources for making futures thinking accessible to people of all ages, from many different continents. We have global challenges; we need a global network.
Visit the Futures Studies Channel (formerly JFS Futures Community of Practice) space to see what others elsewhere in the world are trying, thinking, wondering. Build your futures thinking and teaching capacity. Dream forward. Connect here.
If we were all futures thinkers, how different would our collective future be?
What is The Futures Studies Channel Community of Practice and Why?
How we can share our Futures thinking mindset as broadly and quickly as possible with minimum friction? It was felt to be urgent.
What if Futures thinking was available to small world communities?
What if Futures thinking started in high schools or earlier?
What if any teacher who wanted to learn about Futures thinking and then teach it so that their students can do so for free; choosing exercises and approaches that felt right to their particular students. What if those same teachers can then also participate in the creation and sharing of knowledge about how to teach Futures. What if a great way of teaching Futures from a small school in Malaysia could ripple outward to help students in Ghana or the United States.
How would the practice of teaching Futures be changed by these activities. and not only what if but how do we do this? There are lots of folks working on the problem of how to democratise foresight. The JFS Community of Practice is our attempt to start to answer these questions.
We are at our early days, there is a growing list of resources from the Futures Studies in high school in Taiwan.
Through sharing what worked well and didn’t, we can get better at teaching Futures. We want to build an optimistic global dialogue and connection.
We welcome contributions from teachers and practitioners all over the world.
Listen to Lavonne’s 6-minute presentation about JFS Community of Practice
Our Monthly Community Meet
The JFS Futures Community of Practice began in June 2022 as a space for connection, shared inquiry, and collective futures thinking. We held our first Community Meet in January 2023 with Sohail Inayatullah on Personal Futures -, creating a regular rhythm for dialogue across practice, research, and pedagogy.
In March 2023, we launched our Substack to extend these conversations in writing—capturing reflections, provocations, and insights emerging from the community.
Learn more about our activities:
JFS Substack https://jfscop.substack.com
YouTube channel. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-SiKY9nrKiY_pa3uaD7A0Q
LinkedIn page : https://www.linkedin.com/company/jfs-community-of-practice/
Our Mission
We build and connect a welcoming, diverse global community of futures-literate thinkers and doers
Our Vision
A world where futures thinking is considered a core skill set for individuals, organizations and communities, and where “the future” is viewed with imagination, empathy, energy, realism, optimism, and a sense of serious play. People come to Community of Practice when they want to learn, create, teach, or share about futures thinking.
Our Values
imagination, inclusion, reflection, emergence and mindful change
Our Team
Dr. Chen See See/ Anisah Abdullah
Hello there,
I teach Futures Studies at Tamkang University in Taiwan, where my work centres on reimagining how futures thinking can be taught, lived, and experienced. Over the past few years, I have designed and facilitated futures curricula across different levels, from high school to postgraduate programmes, with a focus on futures literacy, collaborative learning, and social imagination.
Much of this work happens in practice. In classrooms, workshops, and community spaces, I experiment with methods, adapt activities, and learn alongside students. Teaching futures is never static. It is an ongoing, iterative process shaped by context, culture, and the people in the room.
Alongside this, my work engages with feminising futures. This involves bringing in relational ways of knowing, care, inclusivity, and multiple voices, while gently questioning dominant, often technocratic and patriarchal framings of the future. It is an effort to create space for different ways of imagining, knowing, and becoming.
Along the way, I realised that many of us are doing similar work in isolation. Educators and practitioners around the world are creating materials, testing ideas, and refining approaches, yet these experiences are rarely shared in ways that are accessible, practical, or grounded in lived reality.
This led to the creation of the Futures Studies Channel, formerly the JFS Community of Practice. It is a space for connection, exchange, and collective learning. A place where we can share what we are trying, reflect on what works and what does not, and learn from one another across contexts.
We continue to stay connected through our monthly community meets, informal spaces for conversation, reflection, and shared inquiry. In 2026, our ongoing series explores Imagination and Futures Studies. You can follow and join us here: https://jfscop.substack.com
We are about making Futures Studies more accessible, more relational, and more widely practiced. And doing so together.
Lavonne and I created this Community of Practice as a space to create, she, learn and preserve knowledge, teaching and learning materials for Futures Studies.
Bio: Chen See See/Anisah Abdullah graduated with a PhD in Operations Research from University of Strathclyde. Anisah Abdullah is a Futures Studies educator at Tamkang University in Taiwan, working across high school to postgraduate levels. Her work focuses on futures literacy, collaborative learning, and reimagining education through social imagination. She integrates relational, care-centred approaches through her ongoing work on feminising futures. She is the founder of the Futures Studies Channel, a global community for sharing practices and learning in futures thinking. Through teaching, research, and community building, she creates spaces for dialogue, reflection, and collective exploration of possible futures.
Dr. Lavonne Leong
Welcome!
It’s always been clear to me that futures thinking needs to be part of humanity’s core skill set, going forward. As a discipline, futures studies/foresight has been used by governments and organizations across the planet, on every inhabited continent. Now it’s time to make sure everyone has access, because the wider this mindset spreads, the brighter our future is, as a species—and we want to be part of the movement to amplify it as broadly as it can go. As we looked for names for our Community of Practice, we wanted to incorporate a feeling of welcome, co-construction, experimentation, and mutual learning. The idea: that we may feel very “post-“–postmodern, postnormal–but we are also all at the beginning of something, that we get to create together.
Was it a Makerspace? A Foundry? A Lab? In the end, we decided that it was all there already: a Community.
The JFS Community of Practice is a digital space, equally close to almost anywhere, belonging to all of us, where we can gather, ask, answer, try things out, succeed, flop, cheer each other on, and share more widely, in order to build paths to the inclusive, sustainable, global futures we need.
Bio: Lavonne Leong graduated with a D.Phil. in English Language and Literature from Oxford University, and is working on an M.S. from the Strategic Foresight program at the University of Houston. She is an award-winning former journalist, and a current Associate Editor at World Futures Review. Lavonne lives in Canada.
