Future Scenarios

Maasai warriors greet each other with the phrase, "Kasserian ingera." Translated it means, "And how are the children?" I work in a school where, like the revered Maasai warriors, we ask this question of ourselves every day. Caring for our children and their well-being is at the heart of everything we do, and it can be no other way.

Many of my students come from adverse backgrounds; trauma and stress, intergenerational cycles of poverty, family and community violence, neglect, lack of resources, parents with drug and alcohol addictions, and mental health issues. Late last year, 84% of our students in Years 3-6 said in an anonymous survey that they had witnessed or been directly exposed to physical or sexual violence in their lifetime and 68% said that they worry that nobody at home or school cares about them. As a staff, we were collectively shocked and saddened by these staggering statistics. Behind this data are the faces of the real children that we come in to bat for every day. Since then we've worked hard to take strategic action to continue to improve the well-being of our children.

My main role at school is to teach STEM, which basically means I get to do all the fun stuff... and what that really means is that I get to guide our kids through student-led, hands-on inquiries about the real-world things that matter to them. Our school formed a partnership with some outside businesses and connected our students with STEM professionals, and from there we somehow found ourselves with outside recognition and media attention. It has been so inspiring and rewarding to witness the personal transformation that each student has had with this program. They come from a climate of poverty that engenders an environment of powerlessness, disinvestment and deprivation... and suddenly they have an authentic audience and a powerful message that their voices do matter and there are people who believe in their ideas. There was a real inequality of opportunity and that's what we're trying to shift with this program.

I am so proud of these kids, but even more important than that is that they are proud of themselves. They believe in themselves and they have confidence and they have hope. Working with future scenarios and solving problems that will help to improve their futures and their world has been empowering for them. Young people often have very little control over what happens in their lives and the idea of a future can be quite an abstract concept, particularly when you need to put a lot of energy into simply surviving. Anything that disempowers you in the present will detract from your ability to see into your future.

Solving current issues has helped to pave a pathway that allows them to picture the future they want and it's spurred on by a vehement belief of how things ought to be. They're on a mission!  The future scenarios are a stimulus for action and this work empowers students by inviting them to take more control of their future. Having a shared vision with their peers has also helped to build a sense of belonging in the school community; they're building relationships and friendships and there's a real feeling of them being "in this together" with this shared goal of changing their futures for the better.

I am so appreciative of the zest and empowerment that this project has created. One of my students reflected that she had never really known how to answer the question, "what do you want to be when you grow up?" because she didn't really feel like she would grow up. It didn't seem real. She said she still isn't sure what she wants to do with her life, but she feels like there is going to be a life. Her future matters and RIGHT NOW matters too. That was a really powerful moment for me, and it's feedback that lets me know that we're on the right track.

Something I have found difficult to articulate about my own experiences is that sense of a not having a future. Like many of my students, the concept wasn’t real to me as a child. It’s a time in your life where you really do have limited control over the things that happen to you. Without a sense of future you are perpetually stuck in a feeling of hopelessness, like you have no control or agency over anything. That sense of a foreshortened future hasn't made me live my life any differently (though perhaps I took more risks than I otherwise would have!), but it has certainly been a pervasive part of my landscape.

When my husband proposed to me I struggled with wondering how I could marry someone and plan for a future when I didn't even really believe I had a future.  I don't know that there is a specific or tangible fear, it's more a feeling of perpetually waiting for "the other shoe to drop" or a belief that you can't really count on something that might not happen. I had to tackle it from a very hypothetical perspective, "how do I feel right now, and if there was such a thing as a future what would I want it to look like?" 

I guess that's what I'm working on with my students: "If you had the power to change something, what would would it be? What would your future look like? What kind of action would you need to take to get there?" I hope that it is one of those opportunities they will look back on when they are 30 or 40 and say "remember when..." (By the time they get there, technology will have advanced so much that will probably have a great laugh about what they thought was ground breaking and novel!)

So if you asked me today how the children were, I feel like I could say, "All the children are well." I can't wait to see where the future takes us.

Art by Galuh Edelweiss Sayyidina, 8-yr-old artist from Indonesia.