The July-August 2014 issue of THE FUTURIST is FREE online, as part of WorldFuture 2014: What If.

 

Excerpt:

Creating a Future Forward College: What If. … Collaborations in Transformational Learning — by Benita Budd, Magdalena de la Teja, Butch Grove, and Rick Smyre

Imagine a college classroom where the professor asks students to review the course requirements and then decide, as a group, how to meet those requirements. Imagine the lively discussions as students take ownership of their learning, and the questions to the professor when information becomes “necessary” to the projects. Imagine the professor coaching, guiding, and inspiring each student or group as they need to be uniquely inspired; imagine guest experts visiting the class to mentor and assist; imagine the shift in thinking from “receivers of knowledge” to “creators of knowledge.”

You’ve just imagined a DNA shift in education. And it’s happening now, in Wake Technical Community College’s Future Forward classrooms and at Tarrant County College, through its initiatives supporting transformational learning and its FFC Innovation Forum idea incubator.

…

A time of constant change always hides a developing narrative that often slips past our awareness. The trick is to find the “weak signals” of a new idea in its early stages; then we can witness its development as a force from our position on the cutting edge of thinking and action. Our challenge is to understand what may be occurring and to build collaborative networks, futures projects, and pilot programs that exist in parallel with conventional models and serve as harbingers of a world and society that do not yet exist. The narrative of an emerging Future Forward College is one of these forces pushing the change.

We are shifting from the rigid forms of hierarchies, standard answers, and predictability to an evolving society of interlocking networks, varied solutions, and the need to be comfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity. And we have no models to follow as we explore this unprecedented transformation from an Industrial to an Organic Society.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the field of education. It is as if we are stepping off the cliff of a comfortable past and falling into an unknown abyss, full of false expectations, failing students, accelerating dropout rates, and paths leading to dead ends. And if we ask for guides to help us with direction, we often hear, “look in the literature,” or “this must occur for your college to be accredited.” Somehow, in this time of exponential change, it makes little sense to look to the past for direction in order to be accredited in increasingly obsolete ideas and methods.

 

 

…the following principles are core to the idea of a Future Forward College:

  • Trans-disciplinary Thinking
  • Complex Adaptive Systems
  • Adaptive Planning
  • And/both parallel processes
  • Identifying Emerging Weak Signals
  • Master Capacity Builders
  • Resilience Centered