Envisioning Educational Futures Through a Speculative Fiction Children’s Story

• In Event: Generative Difference and More-Than-Human Educational Worldings

Abstract

Attempts to transform education often fall short when they emphasize new tools and learning models without deeply attending to the ways in which education shapes and constrains possible ways of being human in a more-than-human world. This proposal articulates the authors’ ongoing process of constructing a children’s book as posthumanist inquiry. We ask, how can diffractive, speculative, and artful inquiry help us imagine and materialize realities in which education is not confined to something that belongs to individual humans as if they are separate from place, from time, and from more-than-human agencies? While this project is unfinished, our guiding framework and initial renderings may promote the radically hopeful worldbuilding that is sorely needed in our current moment.

Authors

• Emma Minke McMain, University of Arkansas

• Kaleb Bass, Independent Scholar