DEVELOPING A NEW ATTITUDE TOWARDS THE FUTURES: THE EXPERIENCE OF ECIU CHALLENGE 'ENGAGING WITH THE FUTURES'

The paper focuses on the application of Challenge Based Learning to the area of Future Studies and the set-up of specific pedagogical methods to assess the students’ engagement and critical thinking skills in developing future scenarios and acquire Future Literacy (Poli, 2021; Miller, 2010). The ECIU Challenge 2025 ‘Engaging with the Futures’ is a blended intensive program for European students of BA and MA level, that is aimed at promoting Future Literacy. Students from different disciplines participate in presence and online workshops and lectures on Future Studies to develop a future scenario about relevant social/political/ecological issues e.g. Migration policy, Quality of air in Urban areas. The learning activity, organized by Trento University and Linkoping University is already established at its third edition (2023, 2024, 2025) and also involves one short term international mobility within the Erasmus program. The pedagogical framework of the program stimulates the students to discuss societal and environmental megatrends, to adopt a future oriented mind-set and solicits their capacities to imagine and design alternative futures, applying foresight methods. According to the perspective of complexity approach, the learning module is aimed at improving ‘the capacity to understand and access global knowledge systems; the awareness of multi-perspectival orientations to self and culture, based upon an understanding of diverse human experiences; as well as the ability to construct new ideas’ (Olssen, 2011: 387). Participants are thus involved in an innovative learning environment, dealing with in-presence participatory workshops and lectures and online meetings and seminars with experts and academics. Within the ECIU educational framework, Future Literacy, specifically, is aimed at providing multidisciplinary experiences that provide a forma mentis to anticipate systemic disruptions and ecological changes and the capacity to cope with their related social impacts on European and global societies. Collaborating in groups and supported by tutors, students are called to challenge the world with a visionary attitude in formulating ideas about new educational paths and multidisciplinary competencies for ‘engaging with the futures’ (Cahan and Erduran, 2014). During intense in-presence workshops, students debate how anticipatory perspectives can be stimulated at the individual and social level and explore the possible interconnections between disciplines (anthropology of the future, foresight and scenario planning, risks and disasters anticipatory plans) and across relevant global issues (demographic crisis, ecological transformations, social and political hysteresis, cultural changes). The innovative approach of the course also involves the evaluation framework; during the first and second edition of the learning activity, rubrics and tools to assess the participants outcomes in terms of personal reflexivity, cooperation and understanding of complexity have been designed and tested and the development of students’ Future Literacy was monitored across tutoring sessions. The paper will describe and explore: a) the conditions under which a common reflexivity on the futures can be activated within this specific educational experience; b) the organizational challenges associated with the promotion of futures literacy, such as reformulation of educational programs and experimentation with alternative teacher-student approaches.