Bookings are now open for next session of the Futures Forum series which will be held from 5:30pm until 7:00pm on Thursday 30 April 2015 in the offices of Randstad Australia, 7th Floor, North Tower, Rialto Building Collins Street Melbourne.

The theme is : Teaching Futures

Most people acknowledge that an important objective of any education system is to prepare young people for the future they will one day inherit.  Exactly how this might be achieved inside our existing curriculum and within our current classrooms is the theme of this presentation.

Deb Bateman has experience of introducing futures thinking at many levels within schools as well as into the overall curriculum.

Associate Professor Deb Bateman has a rich and varied background. After the compulsory years of schooling, with little aspiration or thought, she became a hairdresser. This has contributed to her outstanding communications skills, and her appreciation for technical knowledge and education. After an accident and vocational counselling, Deb became a Primary School teacher. It is in this transition that she developed her love and appreciation of learning, and her commitment to diversity within learning.

Through an initiation in the Futures Studies field, Deb embarked on her PhD studies which looked at the interconnections between futures thinking, the rhetoric of curriculum documents and the importance of temporal mobility and balance as an essential human capacity. Her transition from the Primary School to Teacher Education seemed like an effective way of contributing more broadly to the practice/field/discipline of education.   After an outstanding career at Deakin University, Deb recently moved to RMIT where she is ‎Deputy Dean – Learning & Teaching – Global, Urban and Social Studies.

(Note:  the title of Deb’s presentation is taken from an initiative created by Peter Bishop in the USA and reported in the April 2014 edition of Future News)