Joan Gould, a librarian at Westbriar Middle School in West Houston, facilitates a table of students during the College of Technology’s Futures Camp. | Boi-Yeanoh Adams/Courtesy College of Technology
UH’s College of Technology hosted the My Future=My Vision week-long camp that focused on area middle school students developing the concept of futures literacy.
“The world is changing before our very eyes,” the camp flier states. “Futures literacy, an understanding of the basics of change, is a key 21st century skill.”
Peter Bishop, professor in the UH future studies in commerce master’s program, further explained why the concept is an important one for younger students to learn.
“We used to wait for change to happen to us, but now with the increasing rate of change we need to start predicting and preparing for the future sooner,” Bishop said.
Bishop, along with Department of Human Development and Consumer Sciences lecturer Kay Strong and volunteers, encouraged the students to think about, talk about and actively imagine what the future will hold.
Students were walked through the process of portraying their story of 2020 — the year the 7th and 8th graders would presumably reach graduate school. Volunteers helped the students arrange a two-minute presentation, which consisted of 10 images and a story that represented their vision of the future.
“If you can imagine it, you can create it, but chances are if you can’t image it, we’ll never see it,” Strong said.
Bishop and Strong asked the students to think in “steep categories” such as technology, environmental issues, economics and politics. The goal, Strong said, was to help students understand the possible, plausible, probable and preferred future.
The future studies program at UH is one of only two programs of its kind in the country and the camp was the first of its kind at UH.
Retired professor Oliver Markley, who pioneered the future studies program at UH-Clear Lake, documented the camp from planning until completion in hopes of spreading the idea to others.
The goal was to not only get the children to start thinking about the future, but for them to tell their teachers in order to spread the idea throughout the rest of education.
Future studies has caught on at Westbriar Middle School in west Houston.
Westbriar librarian Joan Gould, 7th grade future problem solving teacher Margaret Fitzgerald and 8th grade Language Arts teacher Sheryl Brown, were all volunteers at the camp.
What made the program successful, Gould said, was that the students all really wanted to be there and were eager to learn.
“(Strong) has such an open vision,” Gould said.
Strong attributes the program’s success to the community.
“When I asked people in the community if this was something they would be interested in, I received an overwhelmingly positive response,” Strong said. “Once I heard everyone’s ideas, we got to work on making it happen.”
The planning for My Future=My Vision started in November and the team worked on organizing a meaningful experience for the students.
“I’m a different person now and each day at camp is better than the one before,” 12-year-old Julian Finley, a Westbriar Middle School student, told his mother.
With the success of the first futures camp, Bishop and his team of futurists are already planning the next.
Along with the College of Technology, partners for the camp included A+ Challenge, Dialogue Houston, Professional Development Services at HISD, and C@R: Publishers of Growing Up in Houston.
