FuturEYEzing is a project about the future of our students. To know where they are heading, they also need to know where they come from. They need to know what different directions there can be in the future, how this can affect them and how they can affect the future. Our students come from vastly different cultures, but share the same future. Many of our students have fears about finding work, or the threat of climate change and how it will affect the environment, but they are also hopeful and excited by the opportunities the future can bring. Advances in technology and medical science, travel opportunities, and inter-cultural collaborations are just a few things our students have to look forward to. The goal of FuturEYEzing is to help students realize that their actions affect the future; they have the power to create both positive and negative change in their world. This project aims to cultivate active citizenship through a structured series of activities where students explore their personal, cultural and global contexts from a past-present-future perspective. Through research and collaboration with their peers from other countries, students will explore the interrelated nature of life and the global impact of human choices. This project is topic-based but skills-driven. Meaning, though exploring several topics, students will develop a specific set of skills. The topics will expand from personal to global, starting with health, moving on to education, work and technology, environmental issues , and finally addressing UN goals for 2030. This project will involve approximately 50 students (14-15 years old) and 8 teachers from each participating country. Students will use a methodology developed for Future Studies. The four-stage approach strives towards imagining the possible, assessing the probable, and deciding on the preferable. The first stage is to identify and monitor change. Here is where we look at the past and the present. The second stage is to critique and analyze change, where we will look into contemporary research and trends regarding the topic. The third stage is to imagine alternatives, which the students will do in different groups in collaboration. The fourth stage is to envision the preferred alternative and a course of action for the future. The tools to collect data will be interviews, field trips, media texts analysis and trend assessment. The data collected will be presented through analytical texts and visuals. The aim is to look for patterns and compare them cross-culturally. We will go through these stages for all four steps/topics of the project. The students will research the topics in national groups but will analyze and present their findings in cross-cultural teams. The short term student exchanges will facilitate collaborative work and exchange of ideas. Students will discuss, analyze, edit and present their findings. Each step/topic will start with a brief exploration of history and an evaluation of our current circumstances. Then, students will share this background information with peers from the other countries and in a collaborative way, consider the future ("FuturEYES") through the lens of that theme. Students will publish their reflections and insights on blogs, which will be resources and forums for discussion that could include youth from all over the world. The goal is for students to discuss their shared future in person, and then create an online space (blogs, e-Twinning) where they can continue this discussion with their global peer group. A project dealing with the future, aiming at creating an impact on attitudes towards life, these are qualitative things which hopefully will last much longer than the project. Four years after the completion of the project we will be able to see how many of the students fulfilled their studies within a reasonable time, how many of them have actively engaged themselves in the community, how many of them feel hope for the future, but on a two year basis, this impact is still not fully developed. However, through the methodology we will use, this impact can be projected, and therefore informed and managed on the basis of data obtained from authentic sources. The primary impact of this project will be that the students will be empowered to have a positive impact on their future. We expect our students to be "creators of their own fate", prepared to take responsibility for their actions and make informed choices, manage their uncertainty, and become active citizens in their community and thus the world at large.
FuturEYEzing is a project about the future of our students. The goal of FuturEYEzing was to help students realize that their actions affect the future; that they have the power to create both positive and negative change in their world. This project worked actively to cultivate active citizenship through a structured series of activities, where students explored their personal, cultural and global contexts from a past-present-future perspective. Through research and collaboration with their peers from other countries, students explored the interrelated nature of life and the global impact of human choices. This project was topic-based but skills-driven. Though exploring several topics, students developed a specific set of skills. The topics expanded from personal to global, starting with health and identity issues, moving on to education, work and technology, environmental issues and free time, and finally addressing the UN goals for 2030. Students researched and analyzed the topics, and then presented and discussed their findings. Each topic started with a brief exploration of history and an evaluation of our current circumstances. Then, students shared this background information with their peers from the other countries , and reflected on the future ("FuturEYES") through the lens of that topic in a collaborative way. Students published their reflections and insights on blogs, which have become resources for further discussions beyond the project. This project involved a total of 50 students (14-15 years old) and 8 teachers from each participating country. Students used elements of a methodology developed for Future Studies. The first stage was to identify and monitor change. For example, for the topic of Health and Identity, students designed questionnaires and conducted surveys with their families to collect data about habits and compare similarities and differences. For the topic of Education and Work, the students researched education systems of their respective partners and prepared presentations. Interviews with people doing different jobs featured challenges and prospects in the workplace. For the topic of Environment and Leisure Time, the students researched major environmental issues of the world today to prepare campaigns which they conducted in their respective schools. This work prior to the exchanges was essential for the discussions of trends that followed when participants met face-to-face. The second stage was to critique and analyze change, where students looked into contemporary research and trends regarding the topic. We used online resources, visited institutions, organized workshops, published insights on the blogs. The third and fourth stages involved students in imagining alternatives and focusing on envisioning preferred alternatives and a course of action. These were important stages of the project where the students used their research findings and the understandings gained to make predictions as to the possible scenarios of social development in the future. Topics of future predictions involves healthy lifestyle and the importance of technology, education trends, smart cities, skills to succeed in one’s job or life in general, the most important problem in the future and ways to tackle it. These were captured on video, reflections in blogs or padlets. The UN Sustainable Development Goals, for example, were explored by the students through quizzes, songs, games, problem-solving activities and visits to local institutions. The final activity was a live speech-giving event, similar to a TED-talk show, where the students analyzed trends related to the goals and predicted possible outcomes/scenarios factoring human action, active citizenship, etc. The tools used during the project to collect data were interviews, field trips, media texts analyses and trend assessments. We went through the above stages for all four steps/topics of the project. The students researched the topics in national groups but analyzed and presented their findings in cross-cultural teams and then published on our blogs. This project dealt with the future, aiming for creating an impact on attitudes towards life. From the feedback we received from the students and parents, we noticed increased awareness of the problems the world faces; better knowledge of the factors that affect social trends and the importance of informed, responsible action to fight inequality, poverty, poor sanitation and climate change, to name just a few. In this sense, the project has made the students better prepared for their lives in the future. The dissemination activities on the other hand, informed our respective communities of the issues dealt with by the project.