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About

Overview

An innovative program creator, she has designed, developed, and/or instructed, several innovative online courses in futures studies and foresight in Australia, Iran, and the USA. This included design and development of an online MSc in Strategic Foresight at Swinburne University, Melbourne, and an Executive Education level course “Introduction to the Art and Science of Futures Studies” for a scientific think tank and consultancy in Tehran, Iran. More recently she co-curated the European Commission “Future Forward” project in collaboration with TED-Ed.

Find out more about Jennifer’s climate crisis concerns, her motivation to create a climate futures education program, her inspiration for this work, and her hope that we can act on climate turnaround urgently with knowledge, integrity and speed.

She is a globally respected consultant, speaker, and educator. Her international engagements have included futures-focused projects in Europe (Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Luxembourg, Poland, Romania, Spain & Sweden), Asia (Malaysia, Shanghai & Taiwan), Latin America, the Middle East (Egypt, UAE and Iran), the UK and the USA. Inspired by the philosophy and pedagogy of Rudolf Steiner, she has been an innovative educator for over forty years, including running a Women’s Learning Centre in the ‘70s, and founding and leading an independent school in regional NSW in the ‘80s and ‘90s.

Jennifer is an Adjunct Professor, Institute for Sustainable Futures (UTS)  Sydney, and has held academic posts in four Australian universities. She is a Fellow at the Botin Centre, Santander, Spain, and a non-Resident Fellow of TRENDS Research & Advisory, Abu Dhabi, UAE. She has held a Visiting Professorship at Olomouc University, Czech Republic and a Visiting Research Fellowship at SciencesPo, Paris, France;

As the longest serving elected President (2009-2017) of the World Futures Studies Federation (founded in Paris in 1973 and a UNESCO and UN ECOSOC partner) her leadership transformed the organisation. Heading this global peak body for futures studies scholarship, she led a network of hundreds of the world’s leading Futures scholars and researchers from over 60 countries. In just eight years she rebuilt WFSF from a tired, legacy organisation into the most influential and respected Futures NGO in the world. She also presided over WFSF-UNESCO Participation Projects to develop future leaders in DR Congo, Egypt, Malaysia, Philippines, Mexico, and Haiti.

Jennifer is an advocate for human-centred, participatory futures approaches that foster human agency, empowerment and individual engagement in long-term thinking, sustainability, and regeneration. Many of her publications, research projects and consultancies offer insight into these vital futures domains.

Jennifer’s PhD dissertation on ‘Evolving Education’ was awarded the Chancellor’s Gold Medal for Academic Excellence. She has published over fifty academic papers and serves on the editorial boards of several international academic journals. She has also co-edited two academic books ‘The University in Transformation’ (2000), and ‘Youth Futures (2002)’.

Her recent academic books include:
‘Postformal Education: A Philosophy for Complex Futures’ (Springer, 2016)
‘The Future: A Very Short Introduction’ (Oxford University Press, 2017)
‘The Secret to Growing Brilliant Children’ (Bear Books, 2020)
– ‘The Future’ is the first Oxford University Press book on futures thinking. It is now used in futures studies programs in Universities around the world, and is translated into Arabic, Turkish, Italian and Greek, with several other translations now in progress.

Click here for Global Futures Education.
Click here for Climate Education Course.
Click here for Academic Research.
Click here for LinkedIn.
Click here for Videos.

Source: Website

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Global Futures Education

Global Futures Education is a platform that provides high-level online education for professionals and executives wanting to confront and manage the intensifying global challenges of the 21st Century and to find solutions that enable them to take leadership.

Global Futures Education was founded by Professor Jennifer Gidley, PhD as an extension of her international futures consultancy and almost decade-long leadership of the world’s foremost futures organisation, a UNESCO partner. Jennifer’s leading-edge insights that inform and enrich the programs were developed over decades of research and are introduced in her highly successful Oxford University Press book The Future: A Very Short Introduction, now in multiple translations and required reading in university futures studies courses worldwide.

Each online course draws together over 100 learning resources including videos, articles, reports and other digital assets from a vast trove of authoritative sources. The courses are curated into a coherent, accessible matrix within a highly professional, and easy-to-use LMS Learning Platform, which can be white-labelled for organisations wanting to use their own branding.

These Courses are regularly updated, and will allow anyone to gain key knowledge and understanding that fast-tracks career opportunities and personal relevance in a rapidly changing and risky world. What makes these Courses so valuable in a crowded marketplace is the high-level, yet practical, insights that uniquely provide a balance between known exponential challenges and existing solutions.

Those who complete these Courses will join others internationally at a similarly high level, who have advanced their futures-readiness through Jennifer’s co-curation of the European Commission’s “Future Forward” project, run in collaboration with TED-Ed.

The Global Futures Education program comprises three comprehensive online courses totalling 36 lessons to be rolled out over 6-12 months:
1. Global Futures of Climate. LAUNCHED.
2. Global Socio-Cultural Futures. LAUNCHED.
3. Global Geo-Political Futures. LAUNCHED.

Each course includes 12 lessons. To develop critical and integrated thinking, the paradox modality is used with 50% of the lessons demonstrating the challenges and 50% introducing the counter-trends and emerging innovative solutions. Most importantly these courses provide solutions to all of the challenges we face.

ENROL here.

Books

The Future: A Very Short Introduction

Source: Amazon

From the beginning of time, humans have been driven by both a fear of the unknown and a curiosity to know. We have always yearned to know what lies ahead, whether threat or safety, scarcity or abundance. Throughout human history, our forebears tried to create certainty in the unknown, by seeking to influence outcomes with sacrifices to gods, preparing for the unexpected with advice from oracles, and by reading the stars through astrology. As scientific methods improve and computer technology develops we become ever more confident of our capacity to predict and quantify the future by accumulating and interpreting patterns form the past, yet the truth is there is still no certainty to be had.

In this Very Short Introduction Jennifer Gidley considers some of our most burning questions: What is “the future “?; Is the future a time yet to come?; Or is it a utopian place?; Does the future have a history?; Is there only one future or are there many possible futures? She asks if the future can ever be truly predicted or if we create our own futures – both hoped for and feared – by our thoughts, feelings, and actions, and concludes by analysing how we can learn to study our futures.