Imagining futures – Re-tooling pedagogics for accessible and just futures
This is a personal project with the aim of finding, creating accessible and just futures, it is about changing the narrative together with school pedagogues – for students’ with (dis)abilities[1], and changing for change.
This project is not solely mine, throughout the design journey, the I translated into an we, and this project translated into, our project. And our project is about a process of co-creating a pedagogical tool through the means of play, care and respect, together with school pedagogues and students’ with (dis)abilities in upper secondary school within the age of 14–16. It is about the process of creating a tool and a bridge for a marginalized group to claim their agency, abilities and identities, while offering them equal opportunities for future making in our society. It is about taking their present needs and dreams into consideration when creating new worlds and futures.
It is about seeing and actively working against the inequalities that exists within the educational arena while offering students’ with (dis)abilities tools and methods to be their own narrator of their futures.
But to grasp this project as a whole, it is crucial to know about, and understand the reasons for why this project is important in the first place. It all started when The Swedish school board (2022) disclosed the result of their educational evaluation where the statistic displayed that only every third student with (dis)abilities that had employment after graduating.
The result is highly problematic since it can in a broader prospect lead to lifelong social exclusion for young adults with (dis)abilities. The school board proposed that the reason for the worrying result, were that the curriculum for the compulsory school for students’ with (dis)abilities lacked in terms of preventive pedagogical tools and experiences in relation to professional work life (such as internships). This means that the students are not being taught the necessary tools, nor getting the right experiences that are required before entering high school, and the next steps into their independency.
Claiming Futures Pedagogy
Throughout this process, we have been co-creating a future-claiming pedagogical tool, Iterating the Claiming Futures — A Co-designed Pedagogical tool, containing three different phases.
Phase one is about the practice of persona-making, of self-consciousness and highlighting the students’ present abilities, knowledge and powers. Phase two is about the ability rocket, that carries the students’ wishes for their futures, to as well spur a conversation about which of the students’ present knowledge they wish to bring with them into their futures. Lastly, phase three being that the pedagogues use the gathered network of potential companies for internships, to find and give the students internships based on what the students wish for their own futures.
The design exemplifies how a co-designed future-claiming pedagogical tool, developed within the concept of situatedness, can offer to facilitate students’ with (dis)abilities presence resources, to be the foundation of their future ambitions. To essentially bridge the gap of futuring between students in upper secondary school, the educational system and their up-coming future-claiming in high school.
The Futuring Website
Concretizing the pedagogy, we decided to translate it into a website, where all the important aspects would be accessible for both pedagogues and collaborators for internships. On the website one can find, information about the project, the downloadable version of the pedagogical tools, as well as an open folder where the pedagogues can upload and build onto the futuring pedagogics.
Centrally, the Futuring Website — for change, serves as a meeting point for pedagogues and potential collaborators (non-profit companies or others) for internships, where they can unite and co-create the continuance of the claiming-futures pedagogy. This would allow the schools, the pedagogues, teachers and the students to actively work with and strengthen their own agency. To essentially create empathic systems, from the students, teachers, schools, municipalities and beyond.
The website is made and written in Swedish, but please, feel free to scan the QR-code and visit it anyway.
With this project, I bring up and criticize the power and privilege imbalance that exists throughout our systems, while asking people with power to share that power with marginalized groups. But this project is also a receipt for me as an ally, a +Change designer and as an able-bodied privileged woman, that the futures that are dreamt about is meant to be heard, listened to and acted upon. Thus, these dreams are allowing us to see the pattern of an imbalanced un-empathic system privileging the privileged, where if the voices are not strong enough to make everyone listen, they must simply not be there.
“Keeping most people unaware that freedom of confident action is there for just a small number of people props up those in power and serves to keep power in the hands of the same groups that have most of it already.” – Peggy McIntosh 1988, 34
This project is for those who dream about accessible futures within and throughout communities and the systems above, this is for uniting and welcome the change. This is for kids and young adults with (dis)abilities who are establishing their very own identity, in their very own context, in our common home.
Yes, one single person may not be able to inflict systematic change on its own, but together, we can do a hell of a lot more. Because, this is not just any story, this is our future.
“As critics of utopian thinking have long argued, the futures we imagine reveal the biases of the present; It seems entirely possible that imagining different futures and temporalities might help us see, and do, the present differently.” – Alison Kafer 2013, 10
References
Kafer, Alison. 2013. Feminist, Queer, Crip. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
McIntosh, Peggy. 1981-2019. ”White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” In On Privilege, Fraudulence, and Teaching As Learning. 29-34. New York: Routledge.
The Swedish School Board [Skolverket]. 2022. Asserted February 3 2023. https://www. skolverket.se/om-oss/aktuellt/nyheter/nyheter/2022-12-21-var-tredje-ungdom-saknade-sysselsattning-efter-gymnasiesarskolan
[1] I spell (dis)abilities with the parenthesis intentionally which points out that a person is acknowledged and identified by what they can do, rather than what they cannot do.
