Educational Fabulations

This highly original collection presents speculative fiction as fiction-based research to re-imagine education in the  future. Given the particular convergence of economic and governmental pressures in educational institutions today, schools represent imaginative sites especially well-suited to interrogation through an SF lens. The relevance for education of the exploration and interrogation of themes related to technology, human nature, and social organization is evident; yet the speculative fiction approach is unique in its harnessing of creative capacities to envision alternatives. The contributions in this collection are generated from educational experience and research, drawing on scholarship in curriculum studies and teacher education and on the authors' experiences and imaginations as teachers, teacher educators, educational scholars, and human beings. 

“This text is valuable for educational researchers learning about sf and speculative genres, those seeking new paths forward in their practice, and any scholars interested in using speculative theorizing to imagine education anew. Additionally, each story is accompanied by study questions and suggested readings located in the appendix, making this text particularly useful as a teaching tool for educators … .” (Brittany Tomin, Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 50, 2023)

“The writing is accessible, and the ideas are well supported with recent research, citing multiple texts from the past decade. … Language teachers who have the tools necessary to integrate the material into their classes might find the text useful, but SF can be used in all curriculum areas. Were more of the text dedicated to practical tips to using what is discussed within it would find a wider audience.” (Ryan Collis, Canadian Journal of Education, Vol. 45 (3), 2022)
“Diane Conrad and Sean Wiebe have gathered together a wonderful collection of speculative essays, plays, graphic short stories, and other creative projects to spark the imagination of educators at all levels. This timely collection comes when speculation has been reduced to economic utility and Wall Street, and fiction has been given the dismissive Scarlet letter M, for ‘merely.’ This is not merely useful speculation and fiction. It is mind-altering, consciousness-rattling, and transformative awakening work. We are in desperate need for creative speculative fiction and art because the ‘real world,’ the real danger to our well-being, as constructed by billionaires and Trumpian demagogues, seems too much like a dystopic novel we need to destroy and rebuild. With this collection, let the rebuilding begin! Each chapter is simultaneously a nightmarish scenario of what the current ‘real world’ neoliberal deformers have created for anyone associated with education at all levels of learning, and Edenic alternatives offered by imaginative, creative, humanities-based writers. Teachers, students, and professors need to read this book and break from their chains of economic and political determinism. Choose this blue pill of creativity for the sake of your own imagination. You have nothing to lose but the parasitic capitalists who have weighed you down and stunted your intellectual growth for centuries.”

— John A. Weaver, Georgia Southern University, USA, and author of Science, Democracy, and Curriculum Studies

 

“A remarkable collection of speculative fiction that is the answer to educator book clubs looking for pathways into dialogue on contemporary dilemmas, researchers and students of qualitative and arts-based inquiry in want of speculative writing samples, and students of the philosophy and cultural studies of education. All too often, students and theorists of educational policy and curriculum are stuck in the present, unable to imagine strategies of social and discursive change; the stories in this collection are the grist of retrodictive curriculum studies: they leap out of the present, into a vision of a future for which the present is a possible history; we can read these trajectories backwards into the activism that would need to happen in order to make the speculation a reality or an avoidable impending doom.”

— Peter Appelbaum, Professor of Education, Arcadia University, USA

“The phrase ‘magical realism’ can obscure the fact that reality is itself magical, a fact to which the editors of and contributors to this astonishing collection testify, and, in so doing, teach us to transcend what we see around and within us. Speculative fiction, it turns out, is not so speculative after all: it is utterly, resoundingly, inspiringly empirical knowledge kept from us no longer. Enter within – the world of education to come.”

— William F.Pinar, Tetsuo Aoki Professor in Curriculum Studies, University of British Columbia, Canada

“This book is a beautifully rendered collection of compelling and thought-provoking stories. This visionary text illustrates how speculative fiction can be used to help us reimagine education. Conrad and Wiebe have assembled an impressive range of contributors, with diverse writing styles, to showcase the power of speculative fiction to question, challenge, and reconstruct what the educational landscape is, how it functions, and what it may become. This is a valuable text for anyone interested in education or creative approaches to research.”

— Patricia Leavy, PhD, author of Method Meets Art: Arts-Based Research Practice

Diane Conrad is Professor of Drama and Theatre Education at the University of Alberta, Canada. 

Sean Weibe is Professor of Education at the University of Prince Edward Island, Canada. He teaches courses in multiliteracies, curriculum theory, and critical pedagogy.