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Date: 2006 The world’s first veterinary medical school was established in London in 1791. More than 200 years later, there are 32 flourishing veterinary colleges in North America, and the profession is a respected, integral part of today’s health, food production and social systems. The Association of Veterinary Medical Colleges, however, knew that the path forward was less than clear as they struggled to predict the right mix of curriculum, infrastructure and licensing that would meet the demands of changing science and technology, and expectations from government and citizens. The AAVMC, working with a team of Canadian consultants, selected foresight as a tool to broaden and deepen their conversation with the veterinary community around the changing landscape for the profession. Lynelle Spring worked with the Ottawa-based consulting group to customize a dialogue and deliberation foresight process that would bring together a diverse group of practitioners and stakeholders to explore a wide range of challenges facing the industry. More than a hundred stakeholders were recruited from across Canada and the United States to a series of four working meetings held in Georgia, Tennessee, Colorado and California. The participants – academics, practitioners, students, business leaders, ethicists and futurists – worked together to explore 21 challenge questions designed to push the boundaries of conventional thinking about the future. Workshop participants collectively built on the challenge questions to imagine and describe a range of eight plausible futures for the profession – fleshing out their discussions by viewing each future through a series of carefully selected lenses. The foresight team then helped participants use a backcasting technique to pull out the critical issues and tipping points that created a pathway between the future and the present. Over the course of the year, the dialogue process yielded a rich data set of observations, ideas and suggestions that the foresight team used to construct a report and recommendations dealing with curriculum, organization and licensing. Foresight does not provide a forecast or prediction for the future. It does, however, help organizations like the AAVMC bring communities together – from both inside and outside their own discipline – to think constructively about the future and how one might attain or avoid certain outcomes. You can view the report published in the American Journal of Veterinary Medical Education at http://www.jvmeonline.org/cgi/content/abstract/34/1/1?etoc
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