The educational value of the projects studied in the WTFutures corpus goes well beyond Futures Literacy and Climate Change Literacy. In this category we will paint a broad picture of the plurality of skills passed on to youths that may be creative, technical, entrepreneurial, organisational, reflexive, social, etc.
“[In] an era defined by complexity, individuals need capabilities that help them engage with uncertainty, make sense of emergent issues and opportunities, and work together –creatively, skilfully and ethically – to bring about positive societal transformations.”
Kligyte et al., Educating for sustainable and equitable futures: A transdisciplinary future-making capability framework, 2025.
Learning transdisciplinarity and dealing with complexity
In analyzing what the projects had to say about education, we found that there was a strong convergence towards connecting academic disciplines to take complexity into account, and towards learning “life skills” such as collaboration.
Numerous initiatives studied in WTFutures advocate for a transdisciplinary education approach where different domains come together to make sense of a complex world. Young people will need to learn how to combine learnings from different disciplines in order to achieve their goals, whatever they may be.
Such is the case for ClimateWorks Lab, whose mission is to support young activists in developing personal projects related to the fight against climate change. To help them in this development, they orient them towards system mapping methods to identify issues they want to work on (complexity-related skills) or towards visioning exercises to identify personal motivations (which we could describe as self-awareness, emotional or reflexive skills).
Learning to investigate (and learn) on the field
Participatory research methods combine practice, context-awareness and knowledge-building in an iterative process. Learners co-produce their own knowledge, discuss it with actors on the ground, and reflect on it so as to become able to use it elsewhere. In Climate Action Photovoice, youngsters are given tools (a camera and some principles of photographic investigation) to then go out and capture images that reflect the issues that they feel are important to discuss.
Climate Futures in Brussels 2030 also proposes to its participants to do field research in the form of street interviews, then helps them process the information by teaching them how to do thematic mapping. The students in the Imagining the Future for Transformation course work with actual projects in Europe and Africa, trying to find the right “distance” in order to be both appreciative and critical, particularly towards projects that come from a culture that they know little about.
“Young Ambassadors” are also deeply invested on the ground in Kijiji Chi Amani. They are responsible for community-based fact-checking and rumor verification. Tracking down reliable as well as fake news at the local level is both a valuable skill, and a responsibility.
More broadly, many projects intend to teach the youths how to debate in a sane manner, work in teams and listen to others (Défis Résilience, Museum of the Not-Yet-Possible, Centre for Reworlding).
Learning professional and technical skills
Some projects sought to develop technical skills in, for example, agroecology or renewable energy production, aimed not at future professionals, but at helping communities prepare for a future where the local availability of these skills might come in handy (Enter Nusantara, Eduponics).
Aside from introducing pupils and students to aquaponics, Eduponics is also about developing project management and entrepreneurship skills and experience, by concretely running small, sustainable agricultural projects from and around their school.
Other initiatives involve young people in workshops directly connected to real professional practice. Urbanités Numériques en jeu for example enables children in a class to be involved in real-world urban planning and renovation projects. They even learn how to use some modelization tools and get precise knowledge on the use of building materials.
Learning to develop an activist project
Several initiatives target activists (or activists in the making), recognising that activism is both a knowledge-intensive and an emotionally demanding activity, and that both these characteristics need to be nurtured. It is the case for Campus de l’Engagement, whose goal is to develop what they describe as the “skills of the future”: civic engagement, critical thinking, collective leadership, and communication.
The young adults involved in this program become capable of (or better at) creating citizen mobilization campaigns, media content, organizing events, facilitating workshops, creating and running community spaces, etc.
In the Local Conferences of Youth, capacity building as activists is also at the program’s core. They learn how to navigate a very codified institutional world, to write and discuss policies, as well as advocacy writing.
These learnings are clearly valuable outside of activism; however, what these projects also tell us is that activism can be a significant part of young people’s life itineraries, well beyond their formative years – and that, to them, it counts as a professional endeavor, not a hobby.
→ See also Lifelong Activism in the WOW! section (our key learnings).
Learning to use creative tools and express oneself
It is also really important to mention the value for young people to learn creative and artistic practices, like scriptwriting in Climate Futures in Brussels 2030 or theatre in Générations F. These experiments are not one-offs. The young people involved in it might discover a great way to continue to express themselves and it could even inspire vocations.
Creative and artistic techniques can also introduce new ways to think about an issue and help young people deepen their understanding of the world on a daily basis.
→ We explored this issue further in Embodiment.
Learning about crafts and heritage
Across many strands of climate activism, practitioners, mostly situated on colonised land, are increasingly turning toward Indigenous forms of knowledge sharing- rituals, traditional practices, and storytelling. Young people, in particular, are showing a growing interest in these approaches, which are gaining traction worldwide (Fridays for Future MAPA – Most Affected People and Areas – movement, Indigenous Climate Action, Possible Futures, Youth for Climate Movement (Argentina), etc).
In Crafting Change through Natural Dye-making, a particular form of craftsmanship is taught to the participants: “natural dyeing and textile-making, activities chosen for their ritual, relational, and land-based qualities.” This activity takes on an additional dimension through its links with indigenous traditions, ceremonies and knowledge.
Here, discussing the future also means learning about the past, about the roots, and learning to reconnect to the land and the ecosystems.
Another project, Centre for Reworlding, also draws on indigenous knowledge, Aboriginal knowledge in particular, which is passed on to the young participants.
The Centre for Reworlding positions itself explicitly against colonial imaginaries. Reworlding, in this context, relies on intergenerational and cross-cultural learning. Their approach emphasizes unlearning and relearning. Canadian scholar Vanessa Andreotti, co-founder of Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures, describes this idea as follows:
“[D]isarming and de-centering, dethroning and de-arrogantizing, detoxifying and decluttering, mourning, grieving and healing, digesting and metabolizing, seeing ourselves as cute and pathetic, so that the wider metabolism can breathe and move more easily within and around us”
Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures
Moving away from education focused solely on technical solutions and instead helping people, both young and old, to face complexity is an integral part of decolonising1 practices. This approach invites us to question how we do things- the time we take, the ways we engage in dialogue, and how we inhabit learning processes.
The status of knowledge itself is shifting, being considered an heritage: “Being responsible for the knowledge shared. This is one of the reasons Indigenous people have sustained culture since time immemorial: through intergenerational learning and storytelling.” (Centre for Reworlding)
Decoloniality refers to all the currents of thought, approaches and actions that challenge the colonial legacies embedded in the very structures of our society (in economic, political, cultural, and knowledge systems) and seek to restore the oppressed, marginalized and silenced voices. Thus, decoloniality aims at a structural and epistemic transformation of our ways of living. We recommend this Oxfam document to learn more about this topic.