Grade 1 Futures Literacy: Melissa Pritchard, Inspire Citizens MTE, June 2021
In her thorough vignette, unit design, and student video, Melissa illuminates why she is a powerful elementary advocate for student voice and an inspiration in our inaugural cohort.
She created opportunities for young learners to engage with transformative skills and dispositions embedded in futures literacy, imagination, art, language and communication related to concepts of cause, effect, sustainability, equity, and well-being.
In the accompanying vignette, unit design, and in this 3-minute student read-aloud, Melissa maps her journey and thinking while capturing the voices of her learners exploring and communicating futures literacy around well-being and sustainable thinking: future scenarios, compassion, hope, and the power of asking, “imagine if…?”
WHAT
I invited year 2 students to imagine the future in relation to the choices they make regarding their health and wellbeing in a futures literacy summative assessment project for their unit of inquiry. Futures literacy is an essential global competency for the 21st century.
It is a 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. As Sir Ken Robinson, a British author and international advisor to creative and cultural education projects, said, “It is within our power to recreate our world if we harness our innate powers of imagination, creativity, and collaboration.” Children have an innate ability to imagine and create and this futures literacy project will guide them towards dreaming a future based on their actions to be happy, healthy, and safe today!
The project sits under the PYP Transdisciplinary Theme “Who We Are,” with the central idea: The choices people make affect health and wellbeing. Health and wellbeing were explored not only in regard to choices individuals make and how they affect themselves, but also the affect their choice has on others and the planet.
WHY
It is important to make children in the early years classroom aware of the concept of futures literacy by amplifying the school’s mission, “educate students to be global citizens with the courage and capacity to create a just and joyful tomorrow together".
By exposing them to the concept of futures literacy, they actively used their imagination and creativity to solve problems that arise in their immediate environment, while becoming aware of global situations. It will build upon the transformative learning goals and global competencies of creative thinking: (idea generation, idea exploration, and imagination) and global mindedness (empathy).
SDG 3 Health and Wellbeing: Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all, at all ages.
Good Life Goals Targets:
3.2: Be more active
3.3: Eat a healthy diet and drink a lot of water
3.7 Never stop learning!
School’s Mission Statement: Our mission at the International School of Geneva is to “Educate students to be global citizens with the courage and capacity to create a just and joyful tomorrow together”
PYP Language Scope and Sequence Phase 2, Writing: Write to communicate a message to a particular audience, for example, a news story, instructions, a fantasy story.
PYP Language Scope and Sequence Phase 2, Visual Language, Viewing and Presenting Phase 2: People use static and moving images to communicate ideas and information.
HOW
Using the book series, What If Everybody Did That? By Ellen Javernick and Change Starts with Us by Sophie Beer, as mentor texts/sources of inspiration, students imagined the future using their imagination, creativity, and senses. They did this by looking at an action or choice they could make today that would lead them to feeling happy, healthy, and safe.
By exploring the cause and effect relationship in conjunction with the past, present, and future, students participated in visual mapping. Using images in a slideshow, they observed various examples of people’s choices, and the impact they have on the world if other people follow their examples. The images reinforced both positive change and devastating choices. They participated in the visual thinking strategy: Think, See, Wonder to make further queries into what they were observing.
Next they revisited the images using the cause and effect relationship: What happened?(effect) Or will happen? (future) What caused this? (cause). From here, students used their imagination to be solutionaries and think of a way they could make the problem better or resolve it. They were given sentence starters such as “If I. . . . . ”, What if……” and ‘Imagine if…..” to help explore different scenarios and generate ideas and possible solutions in the future.
Diving into their personal action, students explored what makes them happy, healthy, and safe by creating a heart map. When this was complete, they chose one element from their heart map that makes them happy, healthy, or safe to expand upon. Applying their knowledge of the cause and effect relationship, they used their element of choice from their heart map to create a scenario similar to that they had previewed when the project was launched.
They first explored the cause and effect relationship of their action, then looked at how it would impact others close to them, as well as a larger community. Lastly, to understand how a simple action or choice they make could impact the world, they used their imagination to create an original “Imagine if” statement looking ahead at what our future could be based on our actions today. Ultimately they used their imagination and creativity in hopes of taking action today to make a better future tomorrow. An overview of the project can be accessed in the PDF linked here.
IMPACT
The goal of this futures literacy project was to create a short movie/podcast recording students reading their future literacy project. This can now be viewed on the screen around the primary campus and will be submitted to TedED project “Imagine if. . . .” In the end I made a full length version movie of their futures literacy project as well as a trailer, only with their imagine if sentence.
Assessment: Sliding Scale
I developed a sliding scale integrated assessment feedback as discussed in Greg Curtis’ book, Moving Beyond Busy. The sliding scale incorporated both academic goals and impact goals as shown below. For students, self-reflection was done using “I Can” statements.
Empathy to Impact
My futures literacy project was only part of a unit of inquiry in Grade 1 at an international school in Switzerland. Although the Program of Inquiry had already been developed, I did some unit planning using the Empathy to Impact Framework which I was able to incorporate into the unit.