A seminar with trainee educators about ways to actively shape the future:
The outlook seems rather bleak. By 2025, face-to-face communication and physical interaction within families have completely ceased. Silently, everyone swipes across the room, pursuing their individual digital paths on what are now immaterial surfaces. Is this what our future will look like in ten, twenty, or more years? What opportunities do we have today to actively and constructively shape tomorrow?
The described scenario offers insight into the introductory discussion "What if 2025…?" in the seminar "How We Want to Live – Future Scenarios: Thinking About Tomorrow Today." From December 14th to 18th, 2015, trainee educators worked in five parallel workshop groups – Multimedia, Comic Printing, Audio, Staged Reading, and Black and White Photography – on various thematic focuses related to shaping the future. These included exploring diversity, the changing landscape of media communication, examining the relationship between freedom and solidarity, and the requirements for and education in democratic action. All participants were united by the challenge of considering risks and dangers as well as positive opportunities throughout the seminar, in order to develop their own options for shaping a democratic society with a desirable everyday life.
From Thomas More's "Utopia" and George Orwell's "1984" to the current UN Millennium Development Goals, the megatrends of futurologist Matthias Horx, and current events – there are many different starting points and inspirations for discussing the future. In all workshops, the individual approach to the group's focus area formed the basis for developing shared questions and research. Depending on the medium, project ideas were developed, tested, and implemented. Participants focused on family and school as places of everyday social life and discussed the associated conflicts of interest, needs for action, and opportunities for shaping society – both now and in the future. It is particularly important for future educators and other key players in society to learn about and later be able to communicate different perspectives.
During the seminar, participants were able to actively produce both analog and digital content and try out action-oriented learning approaches. The products presented to guests at the end of the seminar, ranging from the exhibition to the video, are the results of diverse research and discussion processes, which they partly reflect.
Conceived as satire, the radio play by the audio group explores the issue of equal access in everyday school life. Through a fictional story, it illuminates the discussion surrounding hierarchies, power dynamics, opportunities for participation, protest, and engagement within the school setting. In their performance "What Now?", the workshop group "Staged Reading" reflected, through their own texts and scenes, their discussion on whether and how children can be educated towards democratic understanding and action. The comic print group presented graphic narratives on the themes of individual freedom and solidarity within society in their exhibition. The black-and-white photography group explored images as constructions of "normality" and "otherness," including photo series such as "Families" and "What is Normal?".
The multimedia group's film "Flash back to…" tells the story of a grandfather-granddaughter dialogue about changes in the use of digital devices and the shaping of social relationships. Comparing then and now, conflicts arising from differing perspectives on and usage patterns of digital technology become apparent, reflecting the digital divide – and requiring societal discourse!
Engaging with shaping the future is and remains a fundamental subject of political education. Whether technological development or the refugee crisis – given the increasing number of open questions in a globalized society, the learning process also includes recognizing the lack of universally valid answers and the associated necessity of developing one's own perspectives and attitudes from diverse information, positions, and viewpoints, which in turn are subject to constant change. How we want to live together must be a conscious topic of dialogue and learning.
The seminar was funded by the Senate Department for Education, Youth and Science and took place as part of the collaboration of the wannseeFORUM in the project group „Globalization and Media Communication“ in the federal program „Political Youth Education in the AdB“ (Working Group of German Educational Institutions), funded by the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth.