Educational Fabulations: Teaching and Learning for a World Yet to Come ed. by Diane Conrad and Sean Wiebe (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Educational Fabulations: Teaching and Learning for a World Yet to Come ed. by Diane Conrad and Sean Wiebe Brittany Tomin Pursuing Education Yet to Come. Diane Conrad and Sean Wiebe, eds. Educational Fabulations: Teaching and Learning for a World Yet to Come. Palgrave Macmillan, 2022. xxi+399 pp. $169.99 hc, $129.99 ebk. Diane Conrad and Sean Wiebe’s edited volume Educational Fabulations: Teaching and Learning for a World Yet to Come (2022) is at once a collection of speculative pedagogical imaginings by scholar-educators as they envision educational possibility, and a methodological exploration of “speculative fiction as fiction-based research” (1). In their introduction, the editors frame this work within contemporary challenges such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the ever-expanding capacities of artificial intelligence, and the increasingly “wired” nature of interpersonal relations. They situate these challenges and others against the backdrop of a pervasive anthropocentric orientation toward climate change and offer a contrasting turn towards humanity’s more-than-human relations and responsibilities. Central to this framing is the view that education alone is not, as jan jagodzinksi notes in the Forward, “up to the task that awaits” (xi). Viewing speculative fiction and the act of speculative storytelling as a means through which education can be imagined otherwise, the editors effectively situate speculative modes as valuable catalysts for posing the types of questions necessary to critique, interrogate, and disrupt present normative educational practices, and accordingly carve out a convincing path toward new educational theorizing within the imaginative possibility of the “not yet” (7; emphasis in original). Building on research at the intersections of education and sf, the editors do not seek to argue for space within education for speculative genres; rather they argue that education should be thought anew through the act of speculation, to “intervene in the business-as-usual perspectives that currently shape our systems of education” (10) by envisioning the futures we hope to shape. The stories that comprise this volume accordingly come from the kinds of questions that characterize educators’ experiences, since educators often wonder about how education might shift and evolve in practice. Resistant to making distinctions among speculative genres, the editors instead consider “speculative social fiction” (3) as an umbrella term conceptualizing stories that use the turns of speculation to imagine the “elsewhere” of education as a kind of theory. Bringing together thirty-eight storytellers across twenty-eight stories, the rest of this text is divided into six thematic and conceptual sections containing imaginaries that explore different elements of educational possibility. In Part I, “The Future of Technology in Education,” authors examine some of the wide-ranging implications of technological change for education, from android teachers programmed to understand children, to time-travel education and relational responsibility to other times, to the timely topic of educator frustration in an era of artificial intelligence-enhanced learning and what might be impossible to automate—that is, what is fundamentally human—in learning. The stories in Part II, “Corporate Interventions in [End Page 482] Education,” similarly explore how corporatization of education threatens the fundamental essence of education as a human, relational enterprise by pushing current trends to new extremes, including access to basic in-school needs linked to academic achievement in for-profit educational contexts, privatization of public services, and epidemics of suicide. In Part III, “Speculations on Social Issues,” a myriad social issues such as the interwoven complexities of technology and the anthropocene, racial difference, feminism, and climate justice activism are examined at the intersections of social change, technological innovation, and educational response. Establishing new contexts in which one might imagine education fundamentally changed, some stories in Parts II and III access educational issues from the periphery, while others directly engage with how educational institutions might respond to possible futures. Part IV and Part V, “Visions for Curricular Futures” and “The Role of Spirit in Education,” examine educational change more directly. The former speculatively imagines specific curricular change, while the latter envisions the way story acts as a catalyst for deeper learning. In Part IV, stories are told across school subjects but also explore the pedagogical implications of various social, scientific, and technological changes as well as ways in which curricular...