We Imagined Otherwise: Black Speculative Pedagogy as Futuring Praxis in STEM Education

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Saturday 9:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Past and future of (material not just symbolic) decoloniality in curriculum

Abstract

This paper explores how Black speculative fiction, particularly Afrofuturism and Africanfuturism, can transform exclusionary STEM education through a framework I term Black Speculative Pedagogy. Drawing on the works Binti, Dirty Computer, and Brown Girl in the Ring, I examine how imagination, resistance, aesthetic epistemologies, and community emerge as core curricular themes. Anchored in Black radical imagination, critical pedagogy, and decolonial theory, this study treats speculative fiction as both archive and method for rethinking what knowledge is and how it is taught. Through narrative analysis and classroom-based practices, I argue for a justice-centered curriculum that challenges mastery and objectivity in favor of relationality, emergence, and liberation. This work offers tools for radically reimagining education in the aftermath of systemic erasure.

Author

• Earl E Lee, Arizona State University