Invisible Cities: Reading and Writing Speculative Fictions in High Schools

• In Event: 25.056 - Reconfiguring the Imagined and Real Futures of Educational Research: The Importance of Being Speculative

Abstract

Objectives:
This paper examines an in-school study on speculative fiction as a tool for inspiring technological ideation and social critique for youth. In the study, grade nine students read chapters in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities in conjunction with walking in their own city as a way of reconsidering how they move through space and how everyday experiences can be imaginatively transformed through speculative writing. The students then wrote speculative narratives, in the style of Calvino’s book, about their own city. The outcome was provocative: the students composed imaginative critiques and re-conceptualizations of their experiences in the city that included creative discussions on the intersections of technology, gender-fluidity, and the organic sciences. The students also experimented with language forms.

After discussing the study, this paper will speculate on what speculative fiction offers both educational research, and research methodologies.

Theoretical Framework:
Speculative pieces have championed and critiqued advances in social justice, technology, and animal rights long before they occurred, marked the ‘more-than-human turn’ across the disciplines, and heralded the ‘post-human’ in its varied manifestations – cultural, biological, and technological. Hayles (2012) uses the term ‘technogenesis’ to support the notion that humans and technics have evolved together. Technics, in this account, can be anything from stone tools to modern computing. Within the notion of technogenesis, I include certain technologies of thought and writing: for example, the ability to conceptualize a different future (or past, or present) and write about it creatively. Speculative writing can be conceptualized as a kind of ‘technology,’ a ‘worlding’ that should not be left to only certain members of a society. In this regard, teaching and practicing speculative writing could be conceived as a radical pedagogical act wherein students practice world-building through identifying absent but potential presents and futures.

Methods/Methodology:
My research is informed by new materialist, affective, and ‘intra-textual’ approaches to educational research that view pedagogy and literacy as emergent. New materialism is informed by recent developments in animal studies (Massumi, 2014), Indigenous studies (Tuck, Mackenzie, & McCoy, 2013), sensory studies and neuro-diversity (Manning, 2013), science studies (Barad, 2007), and feminist studies (Ahmed, 2010; Braidotti, 2013; van der Tuin & Dolphijn, 2013), where scholars are reconceiving agency in materialist and post-human terms, studying the way agency flows through relational networks and is mobilized through non-human artifacts, including speculative stories.

Significance:
The study imparts new knowledge of how reading and writing speculative fictions can inspire technological innovation and creativity; and demonstrates how students are producers of knowledge through their creation of texts. The findings of the study will benefit English teachers and STEM teachers interested in the transformative dimensions of reading and writing, and the intersections of speculative thought and literacy.

Author

• Sarah E. Truman, University of Toronto - OISE