What is futures thinking in education? (2024)

What is futures thinking in education?

Dator (2019) explains that futures thinking or visioning process includes: appreciating the past, understanding the present, and forecasting the future, as well as experiencing alternative futures, envisioning the futures, and creating them.

Futures Thinking is a cross-disciplinary approach to considering potential futures through the exploration of trends and drivers for change that may lead to different future scenarios.

Importance of Futures Thinking

Futures Thinking looks beyond immediate constraints. It helps people remember that existing attitudes and frameworks, which often seem immutable and insurmountable in the short term, are ripe for change in the long term.

Futures thinking uses more than 12 tools to examine each of the 4 key functions pertaining to futures thinking and strategic foresight: gathering intelligence about the future, exploring the drivers and dynamics of change, describing future scenarios, and developing and testing, all of which can be useful as you plan ...

Futures thinking is a creative and exploratory process that uses divergent thinking, seeking many possible answers and acknowledging uncertainty. It's a different mind-set to analytical thinking which uses convergent thinking to seek the right answer and reduce uncertainty.

By using Futures thinking, you will have a forward view to avoid future shocks and to create disruptive innovations. Examples of situations where Future Thinking will be highly useful: A CEO looking to lead their company into the future and to avoid being disrupted by new technologies or competitors.

Foresight (Futures Thinking) vs Forecast (predictive models)

While forecasting aims to predict future outcomes with certainty, relying on artificial intelligence and advanced data analytics, foresight emphasizes a more nuanced, flexible approach.

What is Futures Literacy (FL)? FL is a capability. It is the skill that allows people to better understand the role of the future in what they see and do. Being futures literate empowers the imagination, enhances our ability to prepare, recover and invent as changes occur.

The different types of futures contracts include equity futures, index futures, commodity futures, currency futures, interest rate futures, VIX futures, etc. The concept across all the types of futures is the same.

What are the 10 principles of futures studies?

The ten principles are as follows: The future is (1) plural; (2) possible, plausible, probable, and preferable; (3) open; (4) fuzzy; (5) surprising; (6) not surprising; (7) fast; (8) slow; (9) archetypal; and (10) inbound and outbound.

Futures work helps us:

to show how there is no one version of the future but multiple possibilities. Foresight methods help us to explore and make sense of this range of future possibilities.

Embracing Future Thinking empowers us to make informed decisions today that are robust enough to withstand tomorrow's uncertainties. The key to effective Future Thinking lies in staying curious, open-minded, and willing to explore uncharted territory.

The prefrontal cortex, including the mPFC and its subdivisions, forms a network in the brain that is involved in future planning. That network also includes the hippocampus, a brain structure that is central to episodic memory formation and that can track moments as sequential events in time.

Episodic future thinking refers to the capacity to imagine or simulate experiences that might occur in one's personal future. Cognitive, neuropsychological, and neuroimaging research concerning episodic future thinking has accelerated during recent years.

Futures are a type of derivative contract agreement to buy or sell a specific commodity asset or security at a set future date for a set price.

Futures are derivatives, which are financial contracts whose value comes from changes in the price of the underlying asset. Stock market futures trading obligates the buyer to purchase or the seller to sell a stock or set of stocks at a predetermined future date and price.

What Is Forecasting? Forecasting is a technique that uses historical data as inputs to make informed estimates that are predictive in determining the direction of future trends. Businesses utilize forecasting to determine how to allocate their budgets or plan for anticipated expenses for an upcoming period of time.

What do you think is the difference between guessing and forecasting?

Forecast: “predict or estimate (a future event or trend)”. Guess: “estimate or conclude (something) without sufficient information to be sure of being correct.”

Futures thinking was elaborated into futures literacy focusing on the skills or capacity of a person requires to use or perform futures thinking. Miller (2007) first referred to the concept of futures literacy explaining that it is the individual's capability to use the future in the present.

Futures literacy from an experimental futures perspective means individual and collective imaginative power, the capacity to generate new realities and to inspire acts of imagination in others.

Particularly for those managing increasingly diverse classrooms, critical literacy can give teachers the tools to engage different students, many of whom may have perspectives and life experiences that diverge greatly from their own.

Futures are traded with a specific time frame in mind such that there is an expiry or settlement date for each future contract. All the outstanding positions (long or short) are settled on this expiry date. In the equity futures segment, the expiry date is the last Thursday of the expiry month.