Welcome to the JFS Community of Practice
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 JFS 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 JFS 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 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’m currently developing Futures Studies curricula for teacher development programs and futures literacy skills in high school. We’ve just completed the first module/semester (Fall 2021) of the four modules/semesters I’m designing at Tamkang High School in Tamsui, Taiwan. All the while, I felt there must be more of us doing something similar: creating teaching materials, trying them out in class, tweaking the exercises in response to student reactions. Making learning easier, more fun, and more effective is an iterative process. But this kind of content was seldom published in peer-reviewed journals.
How do we reach out the the community that wants to teach and learn futures thinking, to share ideas and learn from each other? I constantly search for new ideas, for inspiration in order to create more engaging activities for different levels and types of learners. I thought, wouldn’t it be ideal for all of us to have access to futures thinking materials all in one place, and to be about to bounce ideas with like-minded people. I realised that what I really want is a Community of Practice.
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 graduated with a PhD in Operations Research from University of Strathclyde. She is the editor for the Journal of Futures Studies and the co-Editor-in-Chief of World Futures Review. She teaches Futures Studies and Foresight for Strategy Development for the Graduate Institute of Futures Studies, Tamkang University, in Taipei. Her current research focuses on learning environments and curriculum development for futures thinking and literacy, business process improvement, scenarios, and transformative foresight.
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.
