School Futures

Promote learning in complex and dynamic worlds.

Initiative phase: Closed

School and learning for worlds in transition

The simplified representation of our highly interconnected world through predominantly linear-causal interrelationships and their consideration through delimited fields of knowledge is proving to be an insufficient basis for being able to participate in society and the economy in a future-oriented way. In order to enable students to participate in society, schools have the task of providing them with tools for dealing with complexity and uncertainty.

Accordingly, the two central research questions of the School Futures project are:
1. how can schools teach how to deal with more complex contexts, even if the subject matter is fragmented into school subjects and hardly any time can be spent on bringing knowledge together?

2. how can the existing curriculum be linked to hands-on learning and self-efficacy experiences to enable active exploration of place-based, complex contexts?

Research approach:
The project is part of Transformative Sustainability Research in Luxembourg, an interdisciplinary research approach embedded in practice with a concern to transform practice for sustainability. To this end, the School Futures research team is working with the three schools École Privée Fieldgen, Lycée Guillaume Kroll and Athénée de Luxembourg. The research project (2017-2021) is co-funded and supported by SCRIPT.

Results
Conclusions: The collaboration with the schools resulted in methods adapted to the needs and interests of the school community on how to teach dialogue-based, networked and interdisciplinary thinking:

1. teaching level: learning materials to initiate sustainability dialogues through common visualisation of systems.

2. workshop level: creating dialogical spaces on school-relevant topics in small groups

3. school community: Whole School Approach - how can the whole school be supported in finding a common vision and realising it step by step?

Conditions for the successful dissemination of these approaches in the national school system are, among others, appropriate training opportunities for teachers, freedom for the participation of pupils and teachers, the possibility of a flexible evaluation of future-oriented, networked thinking as well as criteria for quality assurance in teaching.

The materials and scenarios can be found at sustainabilityscience.uni.lu.

Name of Organization

Address & geo

  • 6 Rue Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi
  • Rue Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi 6
  • 1359 Luxembourg

Contact person

Participation opportunities

Engaged citizen

Institution type/carrier

Research facility

Institution-Name

Universität Luxemburg

How is your initiative financed?

The project is funded by the university and co-funded and supported by SCRIPT

Participation opportunities

The project has been completed and the funding has expired. Information about the project and materials can be found on the website.

What’s needed

Engaged citizen

Objectives

The School Futures project aims to address three levels of the school system:
Concepts, methods and learning materials for learning and evaluating networked, systemic thinking in the classroom are developed together with teachers and students. The basic learning objective mainly concerns the learning of networked thinking through dialogues in mixed groups in which one actively engages with different views. The method development therefore builds on approaches to sense-making through the joint elaboration of so-called systemic maps.

Target audience

Schools and teachers.

This page was translated automatically with DEEPL.
The initiative information was originally written in German