Paper short abstract:

High school teachers in Japan taught an imaginary subject “Futures Studies”. Not only 500 students but also 5 teachers changed their ways of understanding futures - from a future that is already fixed and unchangeable, towards futures that they have autonomy to speculate upon, design, and execute.

Paper long abstract:

Education today is designed for children to be well prepared for a fast-growing, globalized, digitized future. However, anchoring the education system to this most plausible future scenario deprives students of the autonomy to speculate upon and design multiple future possibilities, resulting in no change in the current social dynamics that generate such a scenario. How might students and teachers celebrate the uncertainties of futures and have autonomy to imagine more desirable future scenarios? We proposed to five secondary school teachers to create lesson plans of an imaginary subject “Futures Studies” and to execute the lesson plans in their class.

As a result, we observed that not only students but also teachers transformed (1) their ways of understanding uncertain futures and (2) the master-servant relationships between them into the corresponsive one. Before the experiment, five teachers believed that education should be premised on the most plausible future scenario and forced students to adapt to it. While teaching “Futures Studies”, however, the teachers transformed such ignorance of the future into the possibility of imagining futures together with students, which was the revelation of corresponsive relationships between students and teachers.

In this roundtable, we would like to introduce "Futures Studies" as a case of introducing anthropological framework into high school classrooms in Japan, where extremely few pre-university opportunities of learning anthropology are available.