Futurons
Basic information
Project Title
Full project title
Category
Project Description
Futurons is an educational program designed from the territory's specificities. It aims to help children from kindergarten to high school understand the interdependencies between individuals and their environments and to design more sustainable lifestyles around four themes: Cultivating, Travelling, inhabiting and Using. Together with teachers, students and territorial actors, Futurons designs a digital platform with adapted educational resources, citizen cartography and ready-to-use workshops.
Project Region
EU Programme or fund
Description of the project
Summary
In a constrained and constantly evolving world, how can we enable children and citizens to think and act on their interactions with their environment ?
Futurons is an educational program to help children understand and act on their practices and those of their territories. To acquire a systemic vision and understand the interdependencies between individuals and environments, the program is structured around four themes :
- Cultivating concerns the agricultural techniques, the specificity of the land, the distribution…
- Travelling is about the infrastructures, the ways of traveling (objects, people, energy)…
- Inhabiting deals with the ways of building, insulating, producing part of our energy, domestic equipment, the neighborhood...
- Using, it's our relation to consumer goods such as clothing, electronics, packaging...
The program unfolds over the long term in a progressive manner from kindergarten to high school. It is based on an active pedagogy where each theme is developed in three phases:
- Understanding, starting in kindergarten, aiming to figure out what are the themes, how do they work and how do they impact the territory.
- Experimenting, starting in middle school, aiming to experience new practices that involve the family.
- Engaging, starting in high school, aiming to intervene with stakeholders (local elected officials, local businesses, populations), propose solutions adapted to the territory and get involved in concrete actions.
Teachers, students and citizens will be able to use a digital platform offering adapted educational resources, a civic map, and ready-to-use workshops. Each workshop developed by Futurons is designed to meet the objectives of the school program while providing a sustainable territorial dimension.
Key objectives for sustainability
Futurons was designed in collaboration with teachers to support environmental education without creating an overload in their work. It encourages transdisciplinarity, group work and critical thinking through workshops.
The principle is to embody the national program through local specificities. The objectives of the program from different disciplines (mathematics, science, language, physics, civics, geography) are grouped and contextualized through the specificities of the territory, with its limits and potentials in the short and long terms.
The combination of themes allows to acquire a systemic vision of the territory by starting from the practices in order to be in a position to reflect and act on them, at the individual but also collective level.
The citizen map of the digital platform allows to understand the territory from different points of view :
- Economy : its allows you to see the types of agricultural activities, the businesses, the meeting points, etc.;
- Initiatives : events, citizen projects, ongoing struggles, etc.;
- Flows : it concerns the circulation of flows through the territory (energies, water, materials, etc.), the type of production and their quality level ;
- Trajectories : it concerns the visible impacts and those to come (such as the evolutions of : the temperature, the coastline, the history of floods, etc.). Each impact is embodied by testimonies of inhabitants.
Key objectives for aesthetics and quality
Teachers have access to workshops on the online platform, classified according to age and program themes. These workshops are the result of the work of Futurons, other teachers, collaborations, etc.
Each workshop is composed of turnkey resources that include: a methodological guide, global and local educational resources and the necessary tools. By selecting some criteria (cost, time, redundancy in the workshops…), the teacher will be able to choose the contents and the tools of the most relevant version :
- A paid version to be ordered on the platform;
- A free license version that gives access to the files and the instructions for use, allowing it to be made with few means and if possible by the students.
The workshops encourage group projects, with varied formats to avoid redundancy and capture attention. They encourage critical thinking and the involvement of the students.
For the moment, 3 workshops have been developed. They are adapted to each of the 4 themes mentioned above:
- The first one at the end of kindergarten is the creation of a collective story. Each child will create one of the pages of the book using a collage technique ;
- The second workshop is a collective challenge. A logbook will accompany the student throughout the challenge. Afterward, they will have to choose a challenge. There will be a vote for the challenge of their choice and its duration, and a debate will follow (arbitration, development of solutions);
- The third workshop "interaction" consists of 3 steps composed of leaflets that will serve as a guide:
- Questioning: the first step helps the participants to raise questions, to define an issue and its scope;
- Challenging: the students will try to question the stakeholders around their question (writing a letter, building a speech and training in the art of rhetoric, etc.);
- Proposing: the last step is to propose a solution adapted to the issue, to get involved in concrete actions (good practice guide, event, draft law…).
Key objectives for inclusion
Futurons is intended to be set up and regularly adapted with schools through work residencies, which will have the role of triggering and facilitating the anchoring of the establishment within its territory.
The program links actors in the territory who are not usually included (municipal agents, associations, municipal teams, businesses, craftsmen, citizens, etc.). To achieve this, one of the roles of Futurons would also be to work on the links and forms of cooperation between these parties and the educational institutions.
The involvement of citizens can be done at different levels : They can contribute to the citizen mapping, propose workshops on the platform, or be questioned by the students on a particular topic.
To facilitate class dynamics, the workshops encourage group projects by design. They facilitate debates between students and discussions with other stakeholders as in the "interaction" workshop.
At the end of each workshop, the teacher or the students will be able to document the work on the online platform, which will be placed in the archive category so that the students can keep track of the work they have done and distribute it.
Innovative character
The principle is to embody the national program with a local dimension. The objectives of the program from different disciplines (mathematics, science, language, physics, civics, geography...) are grouped and contextualized from the specificities of the territory, with its limits and potentials in the short and long term.
Futurons allows to learn from the youngest age, the complexity of our system, from what there is under our feet and around us : Our living environment.
The student's field of action will expand and unfold as he grows. The objective is that he understands and acts on this environment as quickly as possible, from understanding to action.
From the isolated initiative of a teacher, Futurons results from a community that creates a framework. The idea is that Futurons will be established in a multiplicity of territories that will have the capacity to group together via a national website : Many local initiatives that will allow the national territory to be meshed.
Futurons brings together designers, teachers, elected officials, territorial mediators, innovation consultants and project managers from the Ministry of Education. Futurons bridges the gap between theoretical research on the subject and its concrete implementation through pilot territories.
