The online Agoras are an opportunity for practitioners to share knowledge and insights, and for all who are interested to discover and exchange with amazing initiatives from all over the world. The first Agora of the WTFutures project took place on the 24th of April 2025.
WTFutures wished to explore what young people have to say about climate futures. For this first Agora, we wanted to begin by highlighting the role of education in introducing reflective practices to younger generations. We therefore invited four guest speakers, whose practices and research complemented each other: Umar Sheraz is a futurist based in Islamabad and he is part of Teach the Future, a non-profit organization dedicated to improving future thinking skills of young people and teachers. Hanna Røkenes recently completed her PhD in pedagogy at the University of Oslo with a doctoral thesis on hope, collective action, and narratives of change in sustainability education. Alfredo Jornet is a researcher and professor of pedagogy promoting and investigating open-schooling pedagogical innovations as a vector for social and climate justice in times of crisis. Alena Tomanová is the co-founder and project coordinator of YouthWatch, a not-for-profit based in Slovakia that aims to provide youth with non-formal education, experiential democracy education and engagement programmes.
Here are the main take-aways from this discussion.
1. How do young people from different parts of the world see the subject of climate change?
For Alena, while working on a project about the future of education in Slovakia, where education reforms have long lacked innovation, young Slovakians imagined and shared visions of outdoor classrooms, survival skills, and learning to live in harmony with nature as key priorities for the future.. Nevertheless, in this project, ecology was woven with other concerns like digital disconnection, mental health, the topic of human relationships and especially, the topic of war:
“And the second thing is, Ukraine is our neighbor, and climate change, it's not a hot topic any longer because it's covered by the geopolitical situation in some way. They are really afraid of what's going on in the world and what's going on about the geopolitical situation.”- Alena Tomanová
Alfredo, for his part, is currently working with teenagers living in precarious conditions and shared a different experience: “They (youth) were not really interested in sustainability at all.” However, he didn’t interpret this as a lack of concern for the future, but rather as a reflection of how climate issues are framed in schools. Sustainability topics often feel disconnected from the students’ daily lives, for instance, in a school where he worked in Spain, they are introduced through the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) without any contextual mediation. Having that in mind, he transformed the way of talking about future and sustainability, by starting from the very experience of these youngsters.
For the Pakistani and Afghan children Umar is working with, the relationship to climate change is quite different from that of youth in European countries, as its consequences are directly visible, such as air pollution or water contamination.
Depending on the context, students can be more or less aware of climate change, can have more or less scientific knowledge about it, and may have experienced its effects or not. But according to Alfredo, these characteristics, or the question of awareness, do not translate directly in the ability for these students to articulate the issues and to take action.
2. Talking about futures to deal with emotions
A key particularity for our speakers when working on climate futures with youngsters is being confronted with multiple and complex emotions. The topic of climate change and its media coverage carries lots of negative images. And it appeared in the discussion that there is no real space for young people to speak about these sensitive subjects. One of the participants of the Agora was quite concerned by these negative emotions and asked our speakers if there was a way to help young people shift their focus from the negative aspects towards envisioning better futures.
The second Agora will dive more deeply into this subject of eco-emotions but here is a key takeaway from this first discussion: Hanna particularly studied the tension between hope and hopelessness in the reflections of students on climate futures. They actually switch very fluently between these perspectives: they usually describe the current situation with hopelessness but, in another context, get back to hope while imagining possible ways of action.
3. Engaging youth in participation
Collective construction of shared motive
Hanna and Alfredo specifically studied the relationships between youngsters’ narratives of the future, the development of collective motives and their position towards action and change. “The specificity we noticed is that the young people have a tendency to position themselves as a group, not as an individual acting in the change.” This empirical study is part of a broader research around the concept of open schooling. Alfredo describes open schooling as a form of pedagogical experimentation that aims to break down the boundaries of school and connect the students with people in their communities, reflecting their own concerns.
“It's about learning in different ways, more relevant ways, but it's also about changing what it means to educate.”
Anchoring themes in young people’s realities, connecting with communities, and co-constructing climate-related issues in relation to youth experiences are key in engaging youth in active participation.
Listening and being aware of group’s energy and state of mind
Umar shares that as we are living in stressful times, there are moments where whole nations are in anxiety mode and everything seems much darker and negative. This, of course has direct repercussions on young people. In these situations, it’s not always a good idea to frame a workshop or a session around positive thinking about the future. Doing this can quickly disengage youth who are going through a lot and in a way, can result in invalidate strong emotions.
It is important to stay flexible and responsive to the energy in the room (hence, proof that the expression “read the room” doesn’t come from nowhere!). One way to do this is by using the situation to ask questions, for example: “You think you're in a bad situation now? What could be worse than this?” The exercise of imagining a worst-case scenario can be very powerful because it remains anchored in their reality. It also gives young people the opportunity to reflect on how to prevent such scenarios, ultimately engaging them in the same kinds of future-oriented thinking, but through a lens that acknowledges their current emotions and concerns.
The importance of creating a space for youth.
Whether metaphorical or physical, the idea of reserving specific moments and spaces for discussing important issues was mentioned several times. Alena spoke about creating dedicated spaces specifically for young people and actively engaging them in dialogue and discussion. From her experience, young people need to feel empowered, and this can be difficult when there’s no room in schools or within families to address sensitive topics.This need also surfaced in some of the content imagined by Slovakian youth, who expressed the importance of having spaces reserved for young people, spaces where they can self-organize and address issues in ways that feel most meaningful and coherent to them.
The idea of having such spaces was also connected to the challenge of processing difficult emotions (mentioned earlier). Talking about these emotions with others can help make sense of them and create a shared understanding.
4. Teaching Futures Literacy to guide youngsters to action
Alena shared her experience with us: as an educator she couldn’t find a way to approach complex topics with youngsters. She searched for innovative methods around non-formal education and this is what led her to futures literacy. Particularly on the topic of climate change, futuring methods enable youth to look at the larger picture and delve deeper in the causes, consequences and solutions of climate change than, for example, the first mental images of ecological issues such as smoke coming out of a chimney or the idea to plant trees, as Umar noted. These methods are real tools of education to give them a better awareness and to empower youth to discover or reflect on possible actions to take and where it is possible for them to make a difference, at their scale.
Beyond this challenge of conveying complex ideas to the students, our speakers agreed that futures literacy is a great first step for them to get involved in concrete transformation of their environment and society. Alena, for example, used futuring methods to help young people in a co-creation process of decision making in the Slovakian city of Nitra.
Hanna and Alfredo specifically studied the relationships between youngsters’ narratives of the future, the development of collective motives and their position towards action and change. For Alfredo and Hanna, guiding young people towards action also requires changing the discourse presented to them. Climate change is often framed as an individual battle, suggesting that young people need to change their personal consumption habits or recycle more in order to make a difference. The goal of their work is to begin shifting this narrative by helping young people see themselves as political agents, capable of acting collectively and exercising power with others.
Finally, for the shift to happen between creating a future narrative and acting on them, young people also need to see strong, credible models of people actively working for climate action. If you tell youth they need to act while you yourself are not engaged, your message loses all credibility: young people won’t believe what you’re saying. And while we continuously repeat that youth are the ones who will have to lead the way towards ecological transition – which is a pretty heavy task to carry - as practitioners, we also need to provide real, visible examples of active examples of engagements on climate related issues in order to walk the talk and for youth to trust the leadership presented to them.