Pedagogies of Hope in the Shadow of The Empire: Reimagining Learning through Speculative Fiction

• In Event: Margins, Gutters, and Futures: Comics as Sites of Critical Literacy and Speculative Cultural Resistance

Abstract

In an era marked by educational inequity, ideological backlash, and intensified calls for culturally sustaining pedagogy, examining popular and public representations of teaching and learning in speculative fiction (including wildly popular forms such as superhero and science fiction films among others) becomes an urgent task for educational researchers.
Popular cultural narratives not only reflect dominant pedagogical imaginaries but also shape how youth and educators envision the purposes and possibilities of schooling. This paper examines the depiction of teaching and learning in speculative and science fiction, with particular attention to the reproduction of colonial schooling practices, such as rigid classroom hierarchies, standardized knowledge, and disciplinary authority, even in radically altered futures.
Drawing on speculative text examples from The Mandalorian, The Girl with All the Gifts, Starship Troopers, Parable of the Sower, and Comic books (Daredevil, Batman, Spider-Man, etc.), this paper investigates how traditional educational structures persist and are reinscribed in the public imagination through tropes like the teacher-centered classroom, rows of desks, and the marginalization of non-normative learners (Carey, 2014; Butler, 1993; Lucasfilm, 2019). For instance, Grogu’s placement in a droid-led classroom in The Mandalorian (Season 2, Episode 4) exposes the limitations of static pedagogies that fail to engage embodied, affective, and adaptive learners.
Through this analysis, the paper asks:
How do speculative texts critique and/or reproduce dominant pedagogical ideologies?
What models of liberatory education emerge through speculative worldbuilding?
In what ways can these narratives disrupt Fanon’s (1963) theory of colonial epistemology and respond to Kelley’s (2002, 2020) call to reconstruct education as a site of radical imagination?
Using a critical framework informed by Freire’s dialogic pedagogy, Ladson-Billings’s (1995) culturally relevant pedagogy, Paris and Alim’s (2017) culturally sustaining pedagogy, Noddings’ (1984, 2005) ethics of care, and Butler’s (1998) vision of survival and adaptation, and Wynter’s (2003) theorization of epistemic rupture, this paper highlights alternative learning paradigms found in Afrofuturist and speculative characters such as Lauren Olamina (Parable of the Sower), Shuri (Black Panther), and Miles Morales (Spider-Man).
These speculative futures challenge deficit-based models of schooling and enact what Freire (1994) calls “an ontological need” for hope, a necessary condition for transformation. In Butler’s terms, such futures seek “other suns”: generative and liberatory spaces of becoming rooted in the reimagining of how we teach, learn, and live together. Ultimately, the paper argues that these counter-pedagogies engage and dare to envision educational futures rooted in adaptability, collective survival, and the radical redefinition of what it means to know, teach, and learn.

Author

• Michael B. Dando, St. Cloud State University