The newest and most ambitious part of the initiative. Literacy helps children read the world as it is. Futures literacy helps them consider how it might change — and their own part in that.
Traditional literacy helps children understand the world around them. Futures literacy helps children explore how the world could change, and gives them the confidence to imagine, question and shape possible futures.
That sentence is the shortest description of where Pages of Joy is going.
Why this follows from books
It is not a departure from literacy work. It is what years of it kept pointing at.
Every storytelling session ends up in the same place. A volunteer finishes a book, and a child asks what happens next — and then answers the question themselves. Children do this instinctively. They take a world they have been given and start changing variables in it.
Futures literacy is that instinct, taken seriously and given structure. Reading builds the raw material: other lives, other places, other ways things could be arranged. Futures thinking gives children a way to use it deliberately.
What it actually involves
- Imagination with rules. Not "anything could happen", but "if this changed, what else would have to change?"
- Recognising that the present was once a choice. Most children assume the world arrived in its current shape. Realising it was decided is the beginning of agency.
- Multiple futures, not one. Practising the idea that several different outcomes are genuinely possible, rather than one fixed path.
- Critical thinking. Asking who benefits, what is assumed, and what is being left out.
- Agency. The move from this is how things will be to this is something I could affect.
Why it matters for the children we work with
Children in under-resourced communities are, more than anyone, handed a narrow script about what their future contains. Widening the range of futures a child believes is available to them is not a soft outcome. For many of them it is the outcome.
Where this is going
Futures literacy is the most active area of development at Pages of Joy. In progress:
- School workshops connecting reading and storytelling to futures thinking
- A Futures Club — a continuing group, in the spirit of a reading circle, working on imagination and foresight
- Student resources, including prompts and exercises usable by a teacher without training
- Facilitation material so a volunteer can run a session confidently
This section of the site is built to grow as those launch. If you are a school, a teacher or a student who wants to be part of the early cohorts, the registration form is open.