Today’s teachers have a limited understanding of how to help students think through their learning process. This project presents a proposal to help teachers, parents, and youth workers move from rigid systems of learning to more adaptive systems. Participatory design, design futuring and social-emotional learning can support students, teachers, and school leadership in creating a sense of agency and possibility, empowering students to create the futures they want to be a part of. 

This project was created around the concept of social dreaming and the question of how we might democratize learning by moving from teacher-centered models to student-led models and by creating time for sense making within classrooms. It was developed with insights collected from seven workshops in three countries (India, China, and the U.S.) and a series of prototype middle school classrooms in New York City during the 2015–2016 school year. It uses model making and systems thinking to translate insights into design principles, then into prototypes. Ultimately this project uses design to support the creation of new learning systems based on the emerging future. In these new systems, learners have the opportunity to explore how they can become a part of the story of the future, rather than embodying the story of the past. www.flipitforward.org