Keywords

Introduction

Tom Moylan (2021) begins BecomingUtopian: TheCulture and Politics of Radical Transformation with a survey of the current moment: “It’s not yet the worst of times, but things are worse every day. It’s far from the best of times. Harm abounds everywhere” (p. 1). Expanding on this by mapping interrelated webs of ecological destruction, the boundless reach of capitalism, ongoing wars and human suffering, and political division further deepening discrimination and injustice, Moylan convincingly lays the groundwork for a critical realization: we have, perhaps more so than ever before, a desperate need for new stories, different orientations, and alternative ways of being in the world that can catalyze transformation through critical hope. With similar sentiment, Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer (2019) in Theory for the World to Come: Speculative Fiction and Apocalyptic Anthropology suggests that speculative storytelling can be an integral tool in envisioning possibility beyond—and perhaps through, or within—calamity. This is an especially important offering in the times in which we live: times characterized by a kind of uncertainty wherein we are prone to turn inward and focus on our own individual futures because the prospect of collective continuance feels too tenuous (Rubin, 2013); times in which eco-anxiety runs rampant (Ojala, 2016; Pihkala, 2020) and ecological grief abounds (Cunsolo & Ellis, 2018), often unaddressed and disregarded; times where narratives of climate change in particular are decidedly and perpetually negative (Kelsey, 2016) and hope teeters on the edge of impossibility; and in times where the very institutional systems and structures of the Anthropocene/Capitalocene seem to encourage—and demand—that all humans stay the course in spite of the unfaltering truth that the “kind of thinking that created today’s global turbulence is unlikely to help us solve it” (Moore, 2016, p. 1).

Accordingly, in this chapter, by centering science fiction (hereafter SF) and speculative storytelling toward a broader speculative pedagogy, we take seriously a couple of key assertions: first, as Donna Haraway argues, it “matters what thoughts think thoughts. It matters what knowledges know knowledges. It matters what relations relate relations. It matters what worlds world worlds. It matters what stories tell stories” (2016, p. 35). As we expand upon below, a pedagogical orientation rooted in complex understandings of interwoven pasts, presents, and futures grounded in storytelling must be attentive to the power of stories, and how the speculative stories we tell in the present help us tell new stories of the future while simultaneously reorienting us to ever more complex understandings of our interrelatedness in the present beyond such binaries as utopia/dystopia, progress/stagnation, hope/fear. The past, present, and future operate reciprocally, past and present informing future and future informing present action and rearticulations of the past. In this, speculative stories about the future can help us transform the present. Building on this capacity of stories to bring us into new relations with the world across time, wherein stories help us trace how “ways of life are to a large extent, manifestations of concepts—of ideas they foster and the possibilities of action they afford, delimit, and rule out” (Crist in Moore, 2016, p. 24), speculative, future-oriented storytelling and speculative pedagogy can offer us new modes of thinking and new paths forward beyond paradigms of capitalist continuance and/or totalizing destruction.

Further, given that “fictional worlds are not just figments of a person’s imagination” but rather, “circulate and exist independently of us and can be called up, accessed, and explored when needed” (Dunne & Raby, 2013, p. 71), this chapter considers storytelling—through engagement and creation—as a critical tool that is vital in thinking and acting differently in the world. Moving beyond feelings of inevitability with regard to the future through the concept of future-making (Montfort, 2017, p. 4), how might we imagine new possible, probable, and preferable futures (Bell, 1998; Kelsey, 2016) through which we can uncouple ourselves from the seemingly inevitable, forced imaginary of ceaseless, anthropocentric, capital-driven destruction of all life? If future-making—an orientation toward the future imbued with a sense of agency through pairing action with imagined future possibility—can help expand the anti-utopian limits we impose upon ourselves (Olin Wright, 2010, p. 23), can speculative pedagogical approaches rooted in stories help us imagine beyond neoliberal notions of progress, change, innovation, and productivity? Can they expand the limits of our utopian consciousness and ability, while we remain within the realm of uncertainty? Inspired by Haraway’s Camille Stories from Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016), which exemplify what it might mean for “science fiction and science fact [to] cohabit happily” (p. 7), in this chapter we therefore consider the interdisciplinary potential of science fictional and speculative stories to aid us in inhabiting this cohabitation in environmental and science education contexts: what might a centering of SF and speculative storytelling as a speculative, pedagogical orientation offer us as a means of rethinking science education? How might we carve out space for fiction and fact to meet? Drawing also from a collaborative, speculative world-building project conducted by one of the authors, this chapter provides a conceptual overview of SF and its uses in and beyond education as a mode of thought, examines potential roles the concept of the future might play in reshaping how we approach environmental and science education speculatively, and concludes by mapping out the parameters of a speculative pedagogy; an orientation toward teaching and learning grounded in an openness to “what if?” questions that can support collective disruption, critical hope, and the creation of counternarratives of and for the future.

Science Fiction and Critical Hope

Stories of future destruction are now enshrined in our collective consciousness: the inevitable extinction of non-human species, the tireless and unstoppable expansion of corporate power and consumption, and the irreversible warming of the earth, to name a few. The prevalence of this genre has normalized the assumption that humanity is on an unalterable collision course and that there are no alternatives. Sarah S. Amsler (2015) in The Education of Radical Democracy describes this as a crisis of hope, a foreclosure of possibility wherein change feels impossible and, even if it were, “people are not even sure that making change would make a difference” (p. 21). This sense of helplessness has significant implications for education, and like Amsler, many working on eco-anxiety and ecological grief turn to complicated expressions and possibilities of hope in our contemporary moment of existential turmoil in search of paths forward. For example, in considering the affective experience of climate education on youth, Maria Ojala (2016) advocates for a pedagogical approach “that focuses on a critical hope that is based in an acknowledgement of the negative, a positive view of preferable futures, the possibility of societal change, and that is related to concrete pathways toward this preferable future” (p. 42). Resisting the neoliberal impulse to “privatize hope” (p. 46), Ojala emphasizes the importance of teaching toward the undecided nature of the future and argues that “to face the negative is a starting point for constructive hope” (p. 51). A critical hope, positioned in this way, does not lead youth away from the truth of our current moment but, rather, carves out space for new stories of possibility to emerge from darkness. This is echoed by Kelsey (2016), who, in the context of environmental education, asserts that “we need to recognize the power of narratives, and help the children and communities we engage with to recognize them too” (p. 32). She goes on to argue that the “stories we tell ourselves shape how we live and what we believe to be possible,” positioning narratives of inevitable destruction as profound obstacles thwarting meaningful change. There is a need for the kind of radical hope that Rebecca Solnit declared “is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is the axe you break down doors with in an emergency” (Solnit in Gannon, 2020, p. 19). If clinging “to a narrative of doom and gloom that leaves its most vulnerable constituents frightened and disempowered clearly needs to change,” and “the narrative needs to be changed in a way that does not create ethical tensions around the issue of raising false hope” (Kelsey, 2016, p. 28), how might SF and speculative storytelling—as a space of intermingling fiction and fact—offer space for this renarrativization?

In this chapter we therefore offer speculative storytelling—and SF in particular—as a path toward meaningfully addressing the pervasive and paralyzing nature of dystopic worldviews and as a pedagogical orientation through which we can imagine otherwise in science education (and elsewhere) alongside our students without abandoning the world as it is. Critical to placing speculation at the fore of a pedagogical orientation of openness toward the future is navigating the parameters of speculative fictions as distinct genres with specific narrative capabilities. Importantly, while the umbrella of speculative fiction encompasses myriad genres—SF, fantasy, horror, weird fiction, etc.—here we focus on SF because, as Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr. suggests, “sf has come to be seen as an essential mode of imaging the horizons of possibility” (2008, p. 1). SF, as a largely future-oriented genre, has a long history of reaching toward otherness as it fictionally grasps at the contours of change (Campbell, 2019). Although commonly associated with its tropes—robots gaining sentience and threatening the end of humanity, an isolated scientist overwhelmed by their own ambition and driven to destructive innovation, or a crew of misfits on a long-haul interstellar voyage to galaxies unknown—SF is particularly unique in its capacity as a genre of difference wherein the future in treated as a “locus of radical alterity to the mundane status quo” (Freedman, 2000, p. 55). By catalyzing comparisons between unfamiliar futures and our own seemingly familiar present, SF has routinely been mobilized toward envisioning myriad possibilities and used as a means through which we might answer critical questions about how to live meaningfully together in the present.

In her critical look at SF for children and teens titled The Intergalactic Playground (2009), Farah Mendlesohn begins with a structural articulation of what makes a text SF: “dissonance, rupture, resolution, consequence” (p. 10). This framework is helpful in beginning to map out how a generic structure might be translated into a pedagogical orientation and a means through which we might work with young people to think science fictionally or speculatively about future possibilities using fiction. In SF, drawing from Darko Suvin’s (1979) The Metamorphosis of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre, Mendlesohn explains how science fictional stories create dissonance and rupture through the introduction of a novum—a “new” catalyst of change around which a story revolves—and the experience of the reader as they begin, through comparison and cognitive estrangement, to see their own present as fundamentally strange. In their ground-breaking anthropological examination of scientific laboratories, Latour and Woolgar (1986) used this approach of making “strange those aspects of scientific activity which are readily taken for granted … to dissolve rather than reaffirm the exoticism with which science is sometimes associated” (p. 29). This “strange making” provides a new vantage point from which to observe and understand that which otherwise might be automatically taken as accepted. As Joseph W. Campbell (2019) further describes, SF has the potential to help us see our empirical environment from a critical perspective because, immersed in a fictional world that might look like ours but is clearly not our world, all our assumptions about the fictional future (and, by extension, our empirical present) must be called into question. Returning to Mendlesohn’s framework, “in the ‘full SF story,’ the resolution is not the end of the story, it is the beginning, for sf stories are about change and consequence” (Mendlesohn, 2009, p. 12). Taken together and following this structural grammar of SF, we can see how SF functions as an opportunity to engage with difference by destabilizing what is familiar. In SF stories, we see a world alike but different from ours and, in turn, see our own world differently. In the process of coming to understand the new world we’ve been presented with, we are then led to see the possible consequences of change. If, as Campbell asserts, the “social critical work of science fiction is to bring the reader to the encounter with the other” (Campbell, 2019, p. 67), how might we mobilize SF toward pedagogical encounters with myriad others and with alternatives beyond the widely accepted narratives that perpetuate overwhelming ecological grief and enforce helplessness? How might SF facilitate our ability to “transgress, or disrupt, deeply held and taken-for-granted norms, norms that are at the roots of oppression and unsustainability,” and imaginatively chart paths toward “acting in surprising, creative, and boundary-crossing ways”? (Ojala, 2016, p. 43).

Science (Fiction) Education

Although underutilized and often dismissed as unserious (Westfahl & Slusser, 2002), the use of SF in science education specifically is not a new or novel phenomenon. The 1978 Modern Language Association special session panel titled “Teaching Science Fiction: Unique Challenges” between Gregory Benford, Samuel Delaney, Robert Scholes, and Alan J. Friedman, published in 1979, serves as an early example of discussions on the use of SF to motivate students to pursue science, echoed in later work on how SF can be used in science education to deepen student engagement (Oravetz, 2005; Singh, 2014; Smith, 2009; Subramaniam et al., 2012) and teach students about the nature of science and scientific innovation (Hasse, 2015; Reis & Galvão, 2007). Taking an interdisciplinary approach further expands on the promise of SF, not just as a generator of scientific interest but as a tool through which change—scientific, technological, political, or social in nature—can be thought of differently. From Noel Gough’s (1993) early work exploring the intersection of science fictional literary form and science and environmental educative storytelling, to more recent work using science fictional and speculative storytelling with youth to reimagine community, education, and the world (Mirra & Garcia, 2020; Toliver, 2021; Truman, 2019) and engage in futures talk (Priyadharshini, 2019), SF and the act of speculation can be a powerful tool that can help young people articulate their hopes and fears, resist dominant epistemological and ontological narratives, and see themselves in the construction of the future. Building on this latter application of SF, not just to generate interest in science or on any other subject but rather to use SF and speculative storytelling to reorient how youth conceptualize their relationship with the present, the future, and the potential for change in increasingly turbulent times, the remainder of this chapter focuses on approaches to science fictional storytelling and how we might use science fictional and speculative storytelling to construct counternarratives of possibility.

Collective Speculation and the Collaborative Building of Worlds

Exemplifying the construction of speculative counternarratives of the future, in the spring of 2019, one of the co-authors of this chapter engaged in a speculative world-building project with a group of high school students in a secondary English class (Tomin, 2020), using SF and collaborative world building (Hergenrader, 2019; Tuttle, 2005) to envision future possibilities focused on the city in which the research occurred. Over the course of two months students explored examples of SF and elements of science fictional storytelling, concurrently engaging in conversations about their hopes and fears for the future and expanding on connections they were beginning to make between their understanding of the present moment and how that understanding informs what futures they envision as being preferred, probable, and possible (Bell, 1998). This work emerged as students began to consider how SF authors construct the worlds in which their stories take place, focusing on the extrapolative process through which authors critically expand upon their present to imagine radically different futures. Alongside extrapolative storytelling, students examined self-selected and collaboratively-engaged SF texts in the context of world building—the process SF authors and creators follow when creating the worlds in which their speculative stories occur. Building off this exploration, in the latter half of the study students embarked on the Toronto 2049 project: a project that used science fictional storytelling and world building to imagine the future of the city they lived in and the world in which it might exist.

Toronto 2049 took the form of a collaborative wiki-style catalog of the future, and students were asked to build the world from broad to specific, identifying enduring problems of concern to them alongside their understanding of the present and using extrapolative processes to envision possible futures together: based on the present, what did they think the city would likely look like? What did they want it to look like, and how did they want it to feel to live in that future? What did they fear? Over the remaining four weeks of the study students used in-class time to discuss contemporary issues spanning reproductive and sexual health for teens, climate change, poverty and food security, medical care, education, religious freedom, automation, and myriad other topics. As the world they built became more populated—co-editing each other’s wiki entries, researching topics central to their imagined future, balancing dystopian and utopian imaginaries alongside their hopes and fears—they were asked, as their final entry to the project, to write from within the world they had built. Would this be the preferred future for everyone? Would people experience the future they had imagined in the same way? If this represented their personal preferred future, what do they imagine might have had to happen between their present and 2049? How might that future-history map onto a lived life? As the culminating contributions these students would make to the project, the entries reflected multiple formal planning discussions wherein students drew from their own personal experiences and intersectional insights on contemporary issues but also from informal collaborations through which students were able to learn from others who held often different hopes and fears for the future than they did. The diversity of first-person perspectives reflected this variety of perspectives, spanning the narratives of a young university student in an illegal, “internatural” relationship with a robot peer, to a teenage girl who attends school entirely online and has never met any of her peers in person, to a fashion designer hosting a showcase of a biodegradable clothing line on a flooded city street, to a child asking her father what it was like to live in single-family homes in a society that has long since abandoned them.

Tracing a future-history involving a world in which climate change is taken seriously far too late, all these stories take place in a shared world the students built based on research and experiences rooted in students’ present moment, in a fictional future context where students sought to imagine what it might look like to rebuild, repair, and preserve what is left of the natural world. While a problematic narrative thread of technology rescuing society from the worst of climate change ran throughout much of the world-building project, as part of the planning process students also had to envision what, based on research, they believed would happen and, accordingly, how both daily life and the structures governing society would have to change to make life—for any living being—possible at all. Using science fictional storytelling as a form of present critique (Sullivan III, 1999; Thomas, 2013) and as a way of engaging with difference, the world-building project gave students imaginative space to play with possible radical changes in their future-oriented storywork while simultaneously basing their fictional projections on issues concerning them in the present. Through this work, some students explored broader issues (e.g., climate change, political systems), while others used extrapolative storytelling to consider personal challenges, working through both preferred and probable futures rooted in their own perspectives and experiences. Balancing preferred and probable futures was a significant element of the project, even as they brushed up against each other’s differing views on what preferred, probable, and possible futures might look like. Having the freedom to explore different possibilities while using extrapolative storytelling to ensure their contributions to the world-building project could actually happen also empowered students as they imagined viable alternative futures to dominant discourses. At the end of the study, students expressed how important it was to them that the future they envisioned was feasible and rooted in reality, even more so because the futures they imagined were not the grim, dystopic futures they thought they would create.

Given the collaborative process through which students navigated the liminal space between fact and fiction in their future world construction, the Toronto 2049 project represented an articulation of critical hope. Working together to research, discuss, share, revise, and create, students’ imagined future did not abandon the present but rather was, importantly, informed by renewed understandings about what is at stake and how the facts that underpin our present reality can lead to many different outcomes depending on present action. As much as possible, this project was facilitated to allow space for open inquiry, wherein participants directed which elements of society to focus on as they imagined the future; a sharp turn away from the predetermined narratives of future possibility largely advocated for in conventional schooling practices. As one student noted:

[The project] was a new way for me to view the future, especially in an academic setting, where the future is often a very self-centered thing. My experience in talking about the future in school was always nerve-wracking, all about choosing a lifelong career at age 18 and going into post-secondary education, burdened with debt. (Zad W.)

Through a project that engaged openly with myriad possibilities still rooted in the “real,” students were able to carve out space within which they could combat hopelessness and helplessness and envision alternatives even as present reality crashed down upon them. As the student quoted below articulated, closed narratives of the future foreclose on the potential for youth to see the point of any action at all.

I think people often have a lot of hopelessness for the future and I don’t blame them. I used to think like that all the time. I used to think like, ‘oh my god, what is the point? Where are we going?’ And I kind of got sick of that. I got so sick of just hearing myself talk down on everything, thinking everything was going to hell. And I just like to think that maybe, just maybe, something good is going to happen. It [this project] was a breath of fresh air because I used to hate thinking about it [the future]. (Ivy B.)

The kind of narrative, speculative storywork at the heart of a speculative pedagogy, and exemplified in the Toronto 2049 project, is critical in times like these. Through collective imagining like this, we might once again able to see the future as truly undecided.

Constructing Counternarratives: What If/If, Then

In mapping a cyclical structural grammar of SF, Mendlesohn centers the question “what if?” as a distinct speculative move at the heart of the genre: “Identification of novum and cognitive dissonance usually leads to the idea of causality and consequence; that ‘what if?’ needs to be followed by the concept of ‘if, then’ ” (2009, p. 13). The interplay between “what if?” and “if, then,” as exemplified in the previous section, invites endless speculative possibilities. This is an especially important realization now, when we are inundated by news of our impending doom and events that feel routinely unprecedented and always “out of our control.” In this context, SF and speculative narratives offer us a path forward through which we can collectively imagine messy, uncertain, but nevertheless radically different futures in community with others. A speculative pedagogy, posing the question “what if?” in a ceaseless pursuit of myriad possibilities, centers this imagining in all aspects of learning; every pedagogical act becomes a potential moment in which the present can be reanimated and the future reimagined. In contrast with approaches to teaching that only make space for teaching toward what is, speculative pedagogy involves privileging “what if?” questions—a mode of inquiry at the core of SF and speculative fiction—within dynamic relations of teaching and learning.

Of course, as Haraway warns, it is paramount that we “[stay] with the trouble” in the present (2016, p. 4), to not allow dreams and fears of the future inspire us to abandon the present. But what speculative pedagogy offers, particularly through science fictional and speculative storytelling, is a means through which “what if?” questions can be answered with many, plural “if, then” responses. As is illustrated by the brief example provided, if we can ask “what if?” questions, and we can map out myriad “if, then” possibilities, we might be able to act within the present toward those possibilities—even when the outcome cannot be guaranteed. As Moylan (2021) asserts, “those who consciously desire that better world have to find ways to tease out the tendencies and latencies that will enable all of humanity to build it, here and now, in the shell of the old” (p. 15). A speculative pedagogical orientation offers a redefined relationship toward the future, involving not just teaching how things are, but also making space for how things could be, in partnership with students whose plural perspectives, fears, hopes, and ideas about possibility offer many, inevitably uncertain, paths forward toward that better world.

While the Toronto 2049 project occurred in an English Language Arts context, this restorying is no less needed and no less possible within the context of science and environmental education. Addressing climate education specifically, Maria Ojala (2016) calls for this kind of work and its importance:

climate change educators should allow time and space to consider probable, preferable, and possible futures. For instance, when imagining the personal, the local, and the global futures X years from now, what are the probable scenarios in relation to climate change? It is also important to work with visions of preferable futures […] to promote constructive hope there is also a need to compare the “probable” with the “preferable” and come up with materially grounded and realistic “possible” futures. (pp. 51–52)

Echoing Gough’s (1993) call to dismantle the false disciplinary divisions between literary work and scientific learning and inquiry through the use of SF as a window into innovation and science “in the world,” a speculative pedagogical orientation fulfills Ojala’s call to explicitly engage with future possibility in climate education by not just reading SF but using SF as a way of thinking about change. The tools of literary SF are not incommensurate with fact-based learning but, rather, help encourage new ways of processing what is. Following Mendlesohn’s formula—what if?/if, then—speculative pedagogy in science and environmental education can help teachers explore alongside their students a pair of critically important questions: What now? What next?

Practical Implications: Toward a Speculative Pedagogy

These are dark times, seemingly darker with each passing day. With recent reports outlining the urgent nature of climate change while simultaneously affirming once again the profound, devastating impact humanity has had on all living creatures and on our own potential capacity for future continuance (IPCC, 2022), it is clear how susceptible to hopelessness we might become; how prone we might be to believing that overwhelming anxiety and grief might be the only path forward as we watch the truths of our complicit violence unfold. However, as Sarah S. Amsler (2015) argues, this is also exactly the kind of context in which we require “radically new readings of the present and the future and new methods for learning to read the world differently; readings that not only encourage ‘re-thinking’ or ‘re-imagining’ but re-doing the world” (p. 21). Accordingly, by way of conclusion, we end with central features of a speculative pedagogy that might help us address the feelings of helplessness and hopelessness in science and environmental education within the Anthropocene/Capitalocene that can help us process alongside our students’ feelings of anxiety and grief without being immobilized by those fixtures of contemporary life. With a speculative orientation in hand, bolstered by science fictional storytelling, we might illuminate alternative paths and ways of being beyond narratives of the inevitable death and destruction that lay before us.

First, a speculative pedagogical orientation supports an exploration of the future that is inherently collective and socially constructed in community with myriad others. As seen in the brief example shared in this chapter, imagined futures are more powerful when imbued with the complexity of shared life. This collectivity is imperative to building paths forward that do not recreate the violence of the anthropocentric, capitalist paradigm laid out before us. Echoing Moylan (2021),

this utopian project must necessarily be collective; for it involves the totalizing transformation of social reality, by all of us, for all of us. Settling for utopia in one person results in nothing but a tantalizing indulgence that is all too easily available for the capitalist disciplinary imagination. (p. 5)

As we envision future possibility in and beyond our classrooms, it is paramount that we embrace the subversive potential of SF to imagine “a future that opens out, rather than forecloses, possibilities for becoming real, for mattering in the world” (Pearson et al., 2008, p. 5) alongside those who have not been included in the dominant (and dominating) construction of the world. Building off of William Gibson’s assertion that the “future is already here, it just isn’t evenly distributed” (Gibson in Lothian, 2018, p. 4), Alex Lothian in Old Futures: Speculative Fiction and Queer Possibility emphasizes attending to “what imagined futures mean for those away from whom futurity is distributed: oppressed populations and deviant individuals, who are denied access to the future by dominant imaginaries, but who work against oppression by dreaming of new possibility” (pp. 4–5). Similarly, Harding (2009) notes, “feminism and postcolonialism both argue in effect that how we live together both enables and limits what we can know, and vice versa” (p. 403). Taking all of these perspectives into account, how might a speculative pedagogy open up space for new, collective, messy stories of the future to be told? The kinds of stories we need to build new paths toward those futures in the present? Accordingly, a speculative pedagogy is also one driven by students’ own present experiences and their hopes for the future—visions of possibility that are too often denied space to be heard and taken seriously. In “an overdetermined world” where individuals are left feeling powerless to change the trajectory of society (Levinson, 1997, p. 439), a pedagogical orientation rooted in openness to possible futures makes space for student perspectives to disrupt learning what “is” with explorations of what “could be.” Future-oriented, speculative pedagogy is necessarily less prescriptive and more community oriented than pedagogies rooted in pragmatic skills and mastery. The necessary work of dismantling the broader narratives of singular, controllable futures hinges on making space for diverse voices to be brought to the fore.

Speculative pedagogy also involves acknowledging the interdisciplinary nature of what it means to know and be in the world and embraces the complexity of the present and future as something that cannot be captured by siloed subjects but, rather, the dynamic interplay of myriad elements of human existence. In the Toronto 2049 project, a deep understanding of literary SF form brushed up against information students learned in their science, civics, and history classes, an intermingling of disciplinary knowledges that helped capture the nuances of envisioned lives. Personal perspectives and experiences, and discussions of contemporary events and lived concerns, coexisted alongside research and an examination of climate reports, urban planning for increasing water levels, and potential technological innovations. In this world-building project, science did not exist in a vacuum but, rather, was woven into the narrative of our possible futures. Mirroring Lisa Tuttle’s (2005) view of world building as an ecology of infinitely interrelated features and phenomena wherein even “in an imaginary world, actions ripple out and have an impact on everything else” (pp. 38), envisioning possible futures breaks down the barriers between discrete scientific strands and disciplines. It is within this openness to complexity that we might find opportunities to move beyond totalizing narratives of mastery and control toward difference, to imagine beyond the Anthropocene as a form of critical hope wherein we might not only learn “to live (and die) on a damaged planet” but work toward “imagining and creating spaces of refuge for a future we cannot predict” (Lakind & Adsit-Morris, 2018, p. 32).

Finally, a speculative pedagogy is one that is open to uncertainty and to the ultimately unknowable nature of the future. This is not a chapter promoting SF prototyping (Johnson, 2011) or overt prediction, wherein we predict and thereby insulate ourselves from future possibility. Rather, we echo Sardar and Sweeneys’ (2016) assertion that “our command-and-control impulse will only serve to heighten our ignorance and entrench uncertainty” and that our effort should not be to “manage risk but rather our perceptions of risk” (p. 10). Accordingly, a speculative pedagogical orientation toward environmental and science education, and education more broadly, encapsulates a “move away from attempts to reduce uncertainty, and instead embrace it through diverse, contrasting futures: and the need to approach not only the future but also the present in a constructivist and pluralistic fashion” (Vervoort et al., 2015, p. 63). As Michael Pinsky (2003) asserts, “The gift is the very possibility of a future that can be anticipated, but will always contain the unexpected” (Pinsky, 2003, p. 189, italics in original). Given that so much of our current moment is encapsulated by efforts to contain, predict, and control, this chapter contributes to the call for “a new kind of thinking coupled with creativity and imagination,” which requires that “we must be able to deal with complexity and incomplete knowledge, link what is compartmentalized, and tackle interconnections and interdependence” in order to adapt to our new position in relation to the future (Sardar & Sweeney, 2016, p. 12). In privileging SF and speculative storytelling as narrative pedagogical spaces that can expand the limits of what we see as possible, we advocate for abandoning static processes of knowing in favor of dynamic, unknown alternatives that lay before us and spaces for those narratives in schools and elsewhere: how can classrooms become spaces where uncertainty can be grappled with?

What we propose here is the use of SF and accompanying pedagogical orientations toward storytelling and possible futures as a means of expanding our capacity to imagine better futures and clear paths toward those futures, and as a way to uncouple ourselves from the dominant narratives that leave us resigned to the belief that things must always remain as they are. Amsler (2015) outlines myriad barriers to change and critical hope, noting that: “Within existing horizons of possibility, it is difficult to first conceptualize and then imagine being able or willing to do the kinds of material, intellectual, social and affective work that are needed to give counter-capitalist and democratic ways of life a fighting chance of becoming realities” (p. 19). Science fictional and speculative storytelling, intermediaries between fact and fiction, open up space to conceptualize and subsequently navigate and catalyze change, and to see and work toward possible futures. In times like these, it is critical that we tell stories of the future alongside our students as we explore the horizons of possibility together.