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UNESCO-Chair
UNESCO Chair in Learning and Teaching Futures Literacy in the Anthropocene
UNESCO-Lehrstuhl „Futures Literacy – Zukünfte lernen und lehren im Anthropozän“
Chairholder: HS-Prof. Mag. Dr. Carmen Sippl
Co-Chairholder: Prof. Karin Tengler, BEd MA PhD
The UNITWIN/UNESCO Chairs Programme has been promoting research and knowledge transfer through cross-border collaboration since 1992. Today, approximately 950 UNESCO Chairs and 45 UNITWIN networks in 120 countries participate in the programme. In Austria, 13 chairs support UNESCO's work in all areas of its mandate, working closely with the Austrian National Commission for UNESCO.
Futures Literacy is an educational concept aimed at empowering people to cope with an uncertain future in the face of climate change. Imagination, as the human capacity to envision the unknown, is the foundation of Futures Literacy because the future only exists in our imagination. Utilizing our future visions to anticipate possible and desirable futures is the first step toward actively shaping transformation. Futures education enables transformative learning experiences in participatory learning spaces, to collectively shape the future responsibly.
Futures education opens spaces for thinking, storytelling, dreaming, and exploring futures in the diversity of possibilities, fostering imagination, strengthening anticipation, and living participation. The UNESCO Chair in Learning and Teaching Futures Literacy in the Anthropocene at the University College of Teacher Education Lower Austria aims to integrate Futures Literacy into teacher education. To achieve this, we develop didactic concepts that:
- Enable learning about the future and teaching about futures
- Utilize creative, cultural, artistic, and media practices
- Support ecological awareness building
- Offer transformative learning experiences
- Promote future thinking
Cultural sustainability in education is a key concept for Futures Literacy. When we anticipate, imagine, think, tell, or visualize the future, we use cultural practices. They help us develop creativity and empathy through collective action and mutual learning, fostering values and shared responsibility. Narratives and visualizations provide a creative, cognitive, emotional, and aesthetic approach to factual knowledge about the interconnectedness and interactions between humans and nature, culture, and technology. Cultural sustainability plays a crucial role in transformative learning aimed at a future-oriented, sustainable redesign of human-nature relationships in the Anthropocene, utilizing SDG 4, Quality Education, as a key to achieving all UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
The Anthropocene, the geological epoch of human influence, provides an inspiring transdisciplinary framework for Futures Literacy. As a scientific concept, it provides factual knowledge about the interconnectedness of all life and matter on Earth and the profound impacts of human intervention in the Earth system. As a cultural concept, it calls for critical reflection on the complex ethical, cultural, and social issues that arise from it. As a bridging concept between the humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences, it supports science communication. It encourages facing an uncertain future in the era of climate change with fact-based, resilient, and solution-oriented approaches.
Environmental humanities provide the interdisciplinary academic framework under which cultures, societies, languages, literatures, and the cultural assumptions, values, attitudes, and meanings encoded within them are explored in the Anthropocene. The pedagogical transfer into transformative educational processes can rely on their research, both for teaching and university education.
Futures Literacy as an educational concept for learning and teaching in the Anthropocene enables a new understanding of our abilities to develop positive images and creative solutions in a future-oriented, responsible manner: locally, regionally, globally. The UNESCO Chair in Learning and Teaching Futures Literacy in the Anthropocene at the University College of Teacher Education Lower Austria collaborates with UNESCO Chairs in Europe, Africa, and Asia as well as communities at school locations. Preparing children and young people for an unknown future is at the heart of futures education as a contribution to peacebuilding.
