In July, Skye Nguyen, a Teaching Assistant at Dublin City University’s Primary School of Language, Literacy and Early Childhood Education Role facilitated a Futures Workshop in Binh Dinh, Vietnam, bringing together 14-17-year-old students from 12 different countries as part of the short course ‘Building Our Future’. This workshop offered a great opportunity for young people to collaboratively imagine and design sustainable communities. The event was a vivid demonstration of how Futures Workshops can engage youth in creative problem-solving across cultural, linguistic, and geographic boundaries.
The Futures Workshop guided students through four interconnected phases: Preparation, Critique, Fantasy, and Planning. Students began by creating collages envisioning positive community changes, which sparked discussions and helped identify key themes such as Cultural and Heritage Preservation, Transportation and Infrastructure, Waste Management, and Youth Empowerment. In the Critique phase, they examined the challenges facing their communities, fostering reflection and dialogue. The Fantasy phase encouraged creative thinking, using natural and recycled materials to transform challenges into ‘what-if’ visions, resulting in innovative designs such as tramlines connecting urban and rural areas and schools preserving minority languages. Finally, in the Planning phase, students mapped actionable steps toward their imagined futures, sharing feedback and considering real-world implementation, highlighting differences in civic engagement across diverse political contexts.
For Skye Nguyen, facilitating the Futures Workshop highlighted the importance of future literacy in 21st-century education. By providing young people with a safe space to imagine, collaborate, and plan, educators can empower them to become agents of change. She emphasised the importance of adapting the workshop to participant diversity, using a mix of visual and auditory instructions, and ensuring sufficient facilitator support for small-group collaboration.
‘The Futures Workshop is not just a tool for civic engagement in democratic societies,’ Skye noted in the project report. It is also an invitation for young people in more restrictive environments to believe in their capacity to shape a better future, for themselves and others.
With international participation and creative outputs documented through photos and recordings, this workshop serves as a model for scaling Futures Workshops globally, engaging young people in the co-creation of sustainable futures, one of the key objectives of the ENHANCE project.
The full report of the workshop can be found here.
