Teaching the “heads, hearts, and hands” of futures literacy in sustainability education using radical seeds of change

Abstract

There is a need for sustainability education to offer students a concrete means to imagine and enact more sustainable futures. Students need to develop futures literacy that is both prefigurative, imaginative, and creative as well as critical and able to challenge existing power. Furthermore, futures education needs to engage students’ “heads, hearts, and hands”: their knowledge, affective orientations, and skills. This paper investigates the use of the “Seeds of Good Anthropocenes” (SoGA) approach in an educational context. “Seeds” are radical initiatives, projects, and practices that currently exist, but that are not yet mainstream. Our research was developed by teachers, teaching assistants, students, and focus country experts involved in a second year mandatory BSc course at Utrecht University. In this course, student teams work with focus country experts to find and combine seeds into transformation pathways to aspirational futures for different national contexts worldwide. Students then use the X-Curve to develop their pathways and explorative future scenarios to test the key assumptions made for these pathways. In this paper, we investigate how the SoGA approach impacts students’ learning and affective orientation about transformative futures. To do this, an extensive qualitative survey was conducted with 92 students, supported by feedback meetings and conversations with all student teams to reflect on their learning experience. Students developed an expanded sense of what futures are possible and of the challenges of systems change (heads). The course process made many students more hopeful, but also more concerned about the future (hearts). Finally, students learned new methods for engaging with the future but also struggled to work internationally (hands). We conclude that using seeds can be powerful for the development of futures literacy in educational contexts, but that their bottom-up character also has limitations that require complementation by other methods.