Our planet is shared by over seven billion people. While a small number of people use the majority of global resources and enjoy unfettered access to public services, too many people face extraordinary challenges in building dignified lives, free of poverty, powerlessness and fear. These inequalities result in unacceptable human deprivation. Our fragile planet is also under increasing environmental stress to the extent that we are transgressing planetary boundaries. According to the Future Generations (Wales) Report 2020, ‘never has the need to think and plan for the future been so relevant’. Thinking and planning long-term is something humans are capable of, but it requires certain ways of thinking and skills – these skills will be critical for our young people as they add their voices to questions such as: How we balance the needs of current and future generations? How we foster empathy for people that have yet to be born? How we balance resource use and our impact on nature to avoid dumping multiple problems on our children and the generations to come? How we become ‘good ancestors’? The aim of this project is to capture the imagination and creativity of pupils and teachers taking them on a journey through time into the deep past to explore their place in history, then to imagine 100 years into the future. The project has 3 parts all of which stimulate the development of creative skills and develop active citizenship : 1. to take an expedition into the deep past to explore our place in history and share experiences through creative responses 2. to imagine and share visions of the future we want to see in 100 years time through storytelling, letters and visual techniques 3. to identify and start to take collective action in your class, school and wider community to build towards that positive future It will achieve this through teacher training ahead of each project exchange and pupil exchanges to share and create visions together. Throughout the project, we'll develop and pilot intellectual outputs so these kinds of activities can be used by other teachers and in the wider youth sector, that also make the best use of the blended learning techniques honed during COVID. These include baseline data produced in a way to engage learners, school communities and policymakers, online teacher training module in the project techniques and activities, recorded webinar and workbook in some of the creative techniques and an exemplar gallery to stimulate ideas. The target of the project is teachers and learners in primary and secondary schools, including special schools with some beneficial impacts in school communities and, of course, for future generations as more people become accustomed to long-term thinking, take account of our impacts on current and future generations and seek to live with everyone able to live a life of dignity and respect within planetary boundaries.
The main aim of this project was to capture the imagination and creativity of pupils and teachers taking them on a journey through time into the deep past to explore their place in history, then to imagine 100 years into the future. The project had 3 parts all of which stimulate the development of creative skills and develop active citizenship: 1. to take an expedition into the deep past to explore our place in history and share experiences through creative responses 2. to imagine and share visions of the future we want to see in 100 years’ time through storytelling, letters and visual techniques 3. to identify and start to take collective action in your class, school and wider community to build towards that positive future This project looked beyond the short term COVID recovery planning by supporting participants to look further into the future so that as we realign and rebuild from the pandemic, the focus is on a fairer, greener future for young people and future generations.
We applied for this project because the world is facing an increasingly high level of inequalities, which result in unacceptable human deprivation. Our planet is shared by over seven billion people. While a small number of people use the majority of global resources and enjoy unfettered access to public services, too many people face extraordinary challenges in building dignified lives, free of poverty, powerlessness and fear. Our fragile planet is also under increasing environmental stress to the extent that we are transgressing planetary boundaries. Thinking and planning long-term is something humans are capable of, but it requires certain ways of thinking and specific skills. We identified a need to help at helping pupils to train and strengthen these skills, critical for them when considering questions such as the way to balance the needs of current and future generations, how to foster empathy for people that have yet to be born, the way to balance resource use and our impact on nature to avoid depositing multiple problems on our children and the generations to come or how to become ‘good ancestors’, and that is exactly what the project wanted to address.