Overview

Remaking the Future

Hello and welcome to Remaking the Future, a narrative framework for engaging cross-disciplinary communication and course design. There are four main components to this framework:

An engaging narrative element that can be adapted to nearly any course
A set of archetypal roles that students can choose, or be assigned, in order to provide guidance in how they can engage with the course
Useful practices around creating moments of reflection and engaging assessments
Recommendations for communication with other courses using the framework.

Each element of the course is designed to work together, or independently. Meaning, that you can use any part of the course, and discard the pieces you don’t want.

Narrative

Incorporating narrative elements into the design of a course have been shown to aid in learning (Clark, 2010) as well as as student engagement (Lindgren & McDaniel, 2012) The narrative element of Remaking the Future involves humans living 150 years into the future, sending back information into the past, in order to assist and encourage their ancestors to change their current behaviors. The goal is to prevent, or mitigate, problems that the humans of the future experience. Students take on the roles of people in the present, who are working towards changing the ways that humans currently live, improving the present in order to literally remake the future.

In the narrative of Remaking the Future, the course of history was changed when millions of crystals spontaneously appeared and started raining down from the sky. It was soon discovered that these crystals contained a wealth of scientific data, technological diagrams, historical documents, artistic works and personal testimonials. This spurred the many in the world to focus their efforts towards addressing the issues that were the focus of the data sent from the future. These issues take the form of themes that are incorporated into the courses that use the framework.

Energy Production
Human Migration
Disease proliferation
Food Production
Water Usage

These are large, complex, issues that touch on all manner of topics. The focus of your course, however, doesn't’t have to be on solving these issues though. While this is certainly a tact you could take, and would definitely lend itself to the framework, not every course would fit this model. Instead, the focus could be on commenting on these issues, communicating them to an audience, or exploring the impact it would have on humanity.

We also encourage you to develop your own narrative elements within the one we have created. In order to aid in this we have added a some media assets that you can incorporate into your course elements and your students can use in their projects.

Media Assests Goole Drive Folder

Roles

Hale & Mullen showed that assigning students specific roles in a course can assist in knowledge acquisition and the student’s sense of responsibility for their own learning (2009). While they used the POGIL format, we have taken the basic idea and adjusted it to better fit our goals and the narrative we laid out. We also mapped our roles to the nine team roles theorized by Dr. Meredith Belbin The archetypal roles within the framework are designed to provide guidance to students as to how to engage with the course and any projects they work on within the course. How these roles are implemented, or even if they are, is entirely up to the instructor.

These roles would be the most useful during projects. However, they could also be useful in providing guidance for class discussion, or even reflection during skill building. The roles were developed to spur communication and debate. The roles are:

Researcher
Sustainer
Disrupter
Leader
Communicator
Designer

Useful Practices

This section provides some guidance and examples of useful practices that you may want to consider adding to, or expanding in, you course. The main categories we look at are skill building and project based learning.

Skill building activities are practices that engage in the development of foundational skills. They are the ways that students engage with the information presented in a course. So some examples could be the individual physical movements in a dance class, grammar and spelling exercises in a language class, or practice equations in a math class.

Another practice that is encouraged within the Framework is Project Based Learning. This provides an opportunity for students to directly apply the skills that the instructor has set out to teach them. It also provides a pathway for inquiry into the issues and practices of the discipline that the course belongs to.

Within both of these practices, we have encouraged the use of sharing and reflection to help build a classroom community, and also strengthen and deepen the knowledge and skills that the students are developing. Within the useful practices section you will find some guidance which active learning strategies to implement, as well as methods for sharing within the course and outside of it.

Cross-disciplinary Communication

One of the unique aspects of Remaking The Future is the emphasis placed on Interdisciplinary course communication and reflection. We have included this aspect in the Useful Practices section of the site, but felt it meritied it's own section here. There are numerous benefits to an interdisciplinary approach, including increases in student motivation and critical thinking skills (Appleby, 2019). However, it has been our experience that implementing interdisciplinary programs and activities is difficult and time consuming. In order to provide some of the benefits, without much of the administrative work, we have taken an asynchronous approach, that centers the activity in already occurring courses, without the need for much adjustment to the course. Currently, this is done through a Google sheet that links out to reflections and projects that courses running the framework have completed.

Interdisciplinary work can have many benefits for students in that it exposes them to ideas and processes that they may not have otherwise been aware of it. It also more closely resembles the environments that they will be navigating outside of school, as we are often asked to work in cross-functional teams, or engage with those outside of our area of expertise.

The ideas and issues being discussed in Remaking the Future are complicated and, most likely, require the talents of many different people from a variety of disciplines. In order to accommodate this, courses that use the framework are encouraged to engage with courses that are also using it, regardless of the discipline. This is done at points throughout the course, usually asynchronously, and provides students an opportunity to think beyond the material they are learning, and make broader connections.

This practice can be implemented as part of a coordinated effort with your college, department or university. Multiple courses could run the framework at the same time, and intentionally design their courses to interact with each other at various points.

However, there could also be value in looking at courses that haven’t been intentionally designed to interact with each other. Students would still have the opportunity to see how other disciplines view the issues under discussion.