The Audacity of Speculative Teaching

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Saturday 9:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Speculative Fiction, Expansive Literacies, and Futurities

Abstract

Grappling with the question of: What skills can be more useful in this moment than to be able to imagine otherwise? This paper grapples with the audacity of setting curriculum focused on envisioning future and practicing imagination through analysis of the curriculum/syllabus development process. In order to attend to this pedagogical responsibility to promote true future orientation and thinking otherwise, I conceptualized and crafted a course titled, Speculative Fiction as Education. In this autoethnography of my process generating this syllabus, I expose my own anxieties around facilitating students learning and practice of the critical skill of imagination and specifically imagining that which we have never known.

Author

• Hilary Naa-Afi Tackie, SUNY - College at New Paltz