Other suns: Designing for racial equity through speculative education

Prologue: Horizons

The concepts of time and place are often described in specific and concrete detail in scholarly analyses focused on the dire material consequences of systemic racism in formal education systems. As educational researchers, we are trained to pinpoint exactly where and when youth and communities are experiencing harm and to painstakingly document the particular mechanisms through which such harm accumulates (or lessens). Conversely, when it comes to both conceptualizing and achieving racially equitable outcomes in education, time and place areas much more blurrier and deferred. Discussion and implication sections of study write-ups that seek to challenge or describe disruptions to structural inequity vaguely gesture toward the necessity of massive transformation in education systems but acknowledge the limited vista within which current findings are framed. “There,” our field points, “Solutions to equity lie over there” - ever further, perhaps just out of reach. Considerations of where and when beckon us toward an aspirational mirage of just and liberatory futures on our horizon. But what if our research demanded just futures now? What if we focused our theoretical and methodological lenses squarely on articulating and designing these desired horizons as a precondition for laboring within the incremental constraints of present conditions? This special issue seeks to begin answering this question by introducing and empirically exploring a paradigm of speculative education.

As will become clear, speculative education is an exhortation to educational theory, research, and practice to think urgently and creatively about the worlds in which we currently find ourselves and the worlds we can learn to create. Thus, we invite you to join us in some initial musings about the origins of this framework (and special issue) as a prelude to the research itself.

First, a return to horizons. In astronomy, the horizon is defined as the boundary where the sky seems to meet the ground or sea. “Seems” is a key word here; the horizon is an apparent rather than absolute line because its location changes based on the position of the observer. The higher one’s elevation above sea level, the farther away the horizon appears. The shifting and transitory nature of the horizon contributes to its use as a common metaphor for imminence (e.g. on the horizon), perception (e.g. broadening our horizons) and (im)possibility (e.g. beyond our horizons).

Let us consider some of these metaphors as they relate to learning and the learning sciences within today’s sociopolitical context. First, what is on the horizon for those positioned as youth? Put another way, for what imminent horizons must our systems of teaching and learning prepare students? Such horizons include the onset of irreversible climate disaster. The loss of life and health at unimaginable scale as the ongoing pandemic is subsumed by the imperatives of racial capitalism. The accelerating prevalence of fascist and white supremacist ideology in political discourse. The accompanying unraveling of democracy, as it has been practiced in settler colonial nation states.

On a daily basis, authoritarian and racial harm have continued to chip away at human dignity and freedom. It is easy for our horizons to feel too narrowed by the hardships facing the world. We might take shelter from a storm of harm rather than harness the wind billowing in social turmoil around us. Ongoing inattention to global climate devastation or a divestment in more-than-human life around us means we have become disconnected from the breathing, struggling world, even as we humans continue to suck its bounty dry. Mass shootings, denial of bodily autonomy, capitalist legislation that further bolsters the coffers of billionaires. These are slings and arrows piercing our learning systems from all angles. The length of the list of atrocities we collectively face is unfathomable. But fathom we must. With a focus on systems, on design, and on the needs of learners of all ages, the learning sciences could be uniquely suited for wayfaringhorizons and time scales. Instead, our horizons are often dictated and confined by existing policies and practices. In working from within this system to dismantle it, we cannot idly drift in the present waters, leaving promising horizons unexplored.

These are just some of the heavy burdens that constitute today’s context for learning. This context in turn begs the question: how are those in positions of power in educational research, policy, and practice perceiving this horizon? And, given the landscape of violence, loss, and disequilibrium at local and global scales, how are these horizons negotiated in these present and future moments? Because, to put it both mildly and bluntly, times have been hard. And they have been harder on some more than others for a very long time. The hardships of human cruelty, greed, and negligence are not indiscriminate in how they collect amidst those in our society marginalized according to race, class, gender, and other identities. Pick the time frame that lets you accept ongoing trauma, violence, and tactical survivance and strategy of the present day as the result of weeks or years or generations of (e.g. brown, 2017; Patel, 2016).

For instance, we might ask what are the normative horizons and timescales of learning and teaching? One recent and telling example in the U.S. involves the 2022 administration of the National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP) exams in Mathematics & Reading (National Assessment of Educational Progress [NAEP], 2022). The results of this particular administration were eagerly anticipated by policymakers and practitioners alike as a referendum on how the pandemic has impacted youth learning. When the results were released, which demonstrated multi-point score drops from pre-pandemic levels, reports abounded about the need to address the crisis of “learning loss” that will influence the organizational, curricular, and funding priorities of K-12 instruction for years to come (e.g. Hunt Institute, 2022).

The framing of the NAEP assessment tells us a great deal about the paradigms guiding our field today. One element of the sociopolitical context—in this case, the pandemic—is acknowledged but constructed as a bounded, finite event throwing students off a previously charted course of achievement and improvement that needs to be restored; we have been waylaid on our journey toward progress and must take austere measures to correct the course. The pandemic is not recognized within a wider constellation of ongoing and world-altering factors that demand a fundamental re-organization of learning but rather something to be absorbed into the existing paradigm.

Yet the deeper logic reveals an even more intractable problem. Even if we take for granted that everyone working within educational institutions desires teaching and learning for students that will support them to build a better society than the one in which we currently live (a sentiment expressed in countless mission and vision statements), there seems to be an assumption that grinding toward success as conceptualized on existing assessments is a key gateway to that better society. That if the scores rose several points instead of dropping, we would somehow be on our way.

We interrogate this logic—what exactly is the theory of change supporting the idea that if we invest more resources and produce stronger “results” in the normative education system of today it will aid students in navigating the challenges of tomorrow? Will increases in mathematical reasoning, reading comprehension, or any other academic indicator as defined by existing curricula and assessments help students resist the perpetuation of white supremacy and work toward racial equity? Far from purely rhetorical questions, we suggest that it is crucially important for educational researchers to rigorously demonstrate the relationship between our study designs and the designs of the social futures that our work is in conversation with and helping to bring into being. We must consider the significance and impact on a scale defined by justice and equity.

Reaching toward the speculative

Sociocultural research within the learning sciences and in the field of education writ large have demonstrated the deep connections between learning and culture (e.g. Lee et al., 2020). However, simply recognizing that a curriculum is situated within legacies of settler colonial harm or declaring that the cultural values of a historically marginalized community must be affirmed and centered within a school curriculum are not the ultimate ends we are working toward. Rather, in the spirit of broadening the horizons of learning environments globally, the foundations of our pedagogical models and educational research must be guided by justice. We offer speculative education as a catalyst for our field to name fantastic paradigms of collective thriving beyond the existing horizons guiding research, policy, and practice in our field and then to create work that lives more in the world of those desired paradigms than in the world of today. Inspired by speculative art movements, particularly Afro-, Indigenous, and queer futurisms (Brown, 2017; Dillon, 2012; Douglass & Wilderson, 2013; Muñoz, 2009; Otieno, 2018), we use the term “speculative education” to refer to an expansive set of ideas related to visionary and future-oriented approaches to teaching and learning that operate beyond the bounds of current social, economic, and cultural arrangements that perpetuate white supremacy, capitalism, patriarchy, heteronormativity, and related forms of oppression (Dunne & Raby, 2013).

This emphasis on speculative education demands recognition that not only are there so many more destinations beyond existing horizons, but that the promise of these horizons is bound only by imagination in the present moment. We take the dreaming—in academic scholarship, in novels, poetry, and various popular media—of greater horizons as the clarion call to set our sights on what might be in our field. This conceptual framework is specifically indebted the work of generations of critical scholars of color who have long-lived and thought and dreamed beyond the horizons defined by normative educational research. Our humble contribution to this intellectual lineage is a framework through which educational researchers and practitioners can enact speculative dreaming within our field; this framework of speculative civic literacies seeks to decenter the state and foreground ethical relations as the basis of civic trust; foster an ethos of collaborative practice as the work of world-building; and engage in joyful struggle toward just futures (Mirra & Garcia, 2022).

In the remainder of this introduction to this issue, we detail the specific traditions that shape our call for speculative education—in learning environments and in the ways we conduct research about them; we speak to the pragmatic directions for methodological and empirical approaches of speculative education; and we offer the contexts for the five articles and multimodal interludes that comprise this collective gesture of speculative scholarship.

Often, when we talk about the speculative in this introduction and in scholarship written as a field, necessary words like “dreaming,” “elsewhere,” “otherwise,” and “imaginary” imply that the speculative grasps at tufts of ideas haphazardly and without an orientation or shared values. For many of us within fields of educational research, such language might come across as idealistic, as dreamy, as unbecoming for the stalwart nature of our scholarly journals. But dreaming is where we must dive in. It is through collective dreaming and sustained emphasis on dreaming that this present endeavor emerged.

An origin story

By no means are we the first to seek solutions reflected in imagination. As we detail below, this call for speculative education is part of a long tradition. Further, when the global coronavirus pandemic disrupted nearly every aspect of human life in 2020, we witnessed and experienced this moment as one marked by possibility and anticipated a speculative rise in how researchers and educators might transform the archaic institutions of state-driven education and reform. Finally, we imagined, we might be unshackled from systems of schooling that intentionally cleave and exploit individuals by race, class, and gender (e.g. Ladson-Billings, 2006; Oakes, 2005). In the months following the initial response to the global pandemic, we did not yet know how quickly and eagerly the elasticity of schooling would snaps back to its normative, harmful origin. Instead, we incubated in this stasis our potential to dream. As academics, we shared broadly Arundhati Roy’s (2020) description of the pandemic as a “portal” that “forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew.” We knew that the after time on our horizons would be different. Like a quetzal willing itself to sleep in times of capture, we seeded spaces for new thinking, intentionally.

This incubation period was one that we, Nicole and Antero, utilized to focus on how we might learn and design alongside our colleagues. Alongside you. When the 2020 American Educational Research Association’s annual meeting was canceled, for example, we held an impromptu Speculative Education Colloquium in the spirit of convening interested scholars in a virtual setting, during a period that was now vacant on many of our calendars. While we intentionally invited a half dozen of the scholars that we wanted to learn from, more than 400 individuals registered and joined us for this event. The appetite for speculative learning exceeded our expectations. We followed this colloquium with another, 12 months later, to a similar, enthusiastic response and built from the ideas shared our developing rationale for the principles of speculative education we describe throughout this issue, related scholarship we were writing, and in our forthcoming edited volume (Garcia et al., 2021; Garcia & Mirra, in press; Mirra & Garcia, 2022). These are not ideas owned by any of us. They are temporal vestiges of the resources we might cultivate for future purposes. They are, to center the knowledge of many of our cultural-historical mentors, proleptic (Gutierrez & Jurow, 2016).

Seeking to further situate the ideas of speculative education within the spaces of academia, we convened an additional, four-day virtual conference with support from the Spencer Foundation that focused on the pragmatic and on the dream-like. As the interludes in this issue emphasize, that conference included spaces for storytelling alongside the Afrofuturist writer, Walidah Imarisha, and analog game designer, Jeeyon Shim. This issue’s poetic ranga, offered by Amanda Tachine and Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, and reflective description of game design, offered by Leigh Patel, elucidate how the speculative role of these activities reflects on our work in academia.

In this introduction, we share this description of how we came to an understanding of speculative education to underscore that this has been a collaborative and evolving journey. Our dialogues and scholarship have been horizon-broadening. By definition, speculative education cannot be fixed in time or place. Our own, multi-year journey editing and learning with the scholarship in this journal speaks to the ways we resist the return to “normal” that narrows the mandate of liberatory education. Now, several years removed from the nascent days of uncertain pandemic living, we can see the abbreviated hiccup of school disruption as a fleeting moment of optimism. It was, in aquatic terms, a rogue wave: a sudden and unpredictable wave that emerges on the ocean’s surface. A rogue wave can be deadly. We might imagine the pandemic as a sudden wave in otherwise normal waters. However, we must attempt to seek further horizons, riding the crest of this rogue wave, surfing beyond the break.

Legacies of the speculative in times of rupture

As mentioned previously, the onset of the COVID-19 crisis initially prompted calls to leverage massive social disruption as a “portal” to new visions of education (Roy, 2020). However, as early as the start of the 2020–2021 school year, just a few months into an ongoing global pandemic largely manifested a retreat to normative systems of schooling accompanied by expanded digital surveillance (DeGuerin, 2020). Efforts to pursue incremental change within these systems often eclipse radical thought and action, which is characterized as unrealistic or naive. However, as speculative fiction author Octavia Butler reminds us, “There is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.” it is clear that there is a growing worldwide interest in developing and sustaining speculative approaches to education that build alternative futures beyond taken-for-granted notions of progress shackled to neoliberalism, capitalism, and ongoing dispossession. Systems of coloniality shape many (but not all) of the ways schools operate at national and state-sanctioned levels. There are global concerns around justice, of course, but our concerns will need to zoom into localized notions of scale and change. So, for example, within the context of contemporary U.S. society, speculative approaches will need to respond meaningfully to antiblackness and anti-Indigeneity as necessary pillars to raise up our educational practice. At the same time, individual states, school communities, and online networks might need to also focus on issues related to bodily autonomy, on issues of climate justice, on housing insecurity, etc. In each of these myriad and overlapping concerns, empirical scrutiny and methodological innovation are overdue within the field of education.

And this is where the speculative might thrive. As researchers, designers, educators, and individuals linked in community with each other and the world around us, we must question the priors of academic scholarship and if they have been leading us toward destinations of freedom. Our understanding of speculative education cannot be singular. As imagination looms on a horizon of individual and collective thought, the possibilities for new educational models and experiences are boundless. We must merge the mundane to the wild and seemingly impossible from multiple disciplinary perspectives (including anthropology, communication, psychology, literacy, ethnic studies, and teacher education) and methodological approaches (including participatory, ethnographic, interpretive, multimodal, and design-based) together to engage in reflection and action to advance theory, practice, and research related to speculative education.

Returning to the arts movements that inform our framing of speculative education, we want to be clear that this is intentionally a definition that is laden with moral values. We are all too aware that imagination does not have to veer toward horizons of goodness. Acts of autocracy, new uses of technologies for surveillance and control, insurrectionary alt-right organizing that sweep individuals to perpetually threaten freedoms: these all stem from imaginative thinking. While this could be interpreted as speculative, this is not the educational description we include here. As no pedagogy or research design is neutral, we are naming our values and the lands beyond this horizon directly.

In calling for intentional design for new futures, we build on the legacies of critical and social-designed forms of scholarship. The speculative path is by no means an aimless one. We are aiming toward freedom and we have preliminary scholarship—such as the articles featured in this issue—that act as a harbinger for new ways of engaging in our work. Further, methodological concepts like social design-based experiments (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016; Gutiérrez & Jurow, 2016; Gutiérrez et al., 2020) offer the necessary footholds for our work to tether legacies of inequality with empirical designs for an otherwise.

Speculative thought and theory from popular culture and art have been inspiring a quickly growing number of learning scientists and classroom educators as the deepening challenges of the present encourage dreams about the future. At recent educational conferences that we frequent, including those sponsored by the American Educational Research Association and the International Society of the Learning Sciences, the role of speculative thought continues to grow. Despite this increasing interest in speculative theories, few resources to guide speculative educational research exist. Instead, these studies build on foundational humanities-driven scholarship to support their myriad diverse ends. This gap presents an opportunity for educators and learning scientists to embrace the abundance of ideas that speculative theory offers while also creating discipline-specific footholds for efforts to be ventured in our field. As a set of theories that cast human thought toward imagining new possibilities, the speculative has—to some extent–always been present in the framing of the learning sciences. And yet, the need to embrace speculative methodological approaches for designing through and for justice could not be more urgent. Multiple temporalities intersect in the contexts of inequities: the speculative is a call for future-facing approaches to learning and design and addressing inequities of the past that continually haunt this present moment. This is not a new recognition and it resonates with multiple lines of educational and sociological scholarship about the sociopolitical needs for design and learning (e.g. Gordon, 2008; Lee et al., 2020; Rhee, 2021; The Politics of Learning Writing Collective, 2017).

There are myriad threads in our scholarship that overlap. It might feel overwhelming to try to thread the needs of various critical practices that shape the speculative. For example, to name just five domains that shaped our present work, our dialogues about the speculative have centered expansive views of language use (Flores & Rosa, 2015); abolitionist and restorative approaches to teaching and learning (Love, 2019; Winn, 2018); decolonial and Indigenous assemblages of land, institutions, and societies (la Paperson, 2017; Smith et al., 2018); abolitionist challenges to public schooling amidst neoliberal grammars (Shange, 2019); and the restorying of literate practice grounded in Afrofuturist popular culture (Thomas & Stornaiuolo, 2016; Toliver, 2019). These are all necessary tenets to consider for those of us sailing beyond normative horizons. And yet, such horizons remind us that better futures do not progress from a singular vantage or navigable course. Escobar (2018) builds from the work and activism of the Zapatistas in describing a pluriverse as “a world where many worlds fit” (p. xvi). In light of the current moment of restrictive approaches to standardization and identity formation in public schooling and an ongoing rise of far-right violence on the minds and bodies of individuals, we want to acknowledge that harm in schools comes from an enacted focus on standardization. Deviating toward different disciplinary and methodological journeys to freedom is not only prudent for the complex routes we must tread but is also a necessary move away from the standardized status quo that further disempowers historically marginalized students and teachers. Speculative educational research must reject universal methods of singular notions of progress. Linearity is in the service of white supremacy, patriarchy, and land theft. It may not be the intention for universal approaches to learning and assessment to harm, but they do. And, often, they harm those that are most vulnerable.

Just because everything could be possible does not mean that a speculative approach to education and educational research is an anything-goes, free for all. Rather, ours is an intentionally subjective understanding that we are united in a vision of bettering systems of learning and research based on two propositions:

• Might we agree on collective, liberatory freedom as a fundamental purpose of education?

• Might we agree that the current systems of formal schooling and empirical research are often predicated on legacies that harm, oppress, and disempower?

As bids on which we might embark on pathways toward addressing these premises, the purpose of speculative education is to forge toward the mandate of freedom vis-a-vis learning.

This calls for a focus on design principles that link the foundations of the learning sciences with the work of speculative design that “can act as a catalyst for collectively redefining your relationship to reality” (Dunne & Raby, 2013, p. 2). With a focus on the study of speculative learning and the design of speculative learning environments, expertise in sociocultural and political approaches to the learning sciences centers how these approaches are enacted in education. Emphasizing the role of participation in “participant observation,” for example builds toward the speculative by underscoring the relational underpinnings of all of our work. Likewise, we must consider the role of power and privilege in the organization of learning (Esmonde & Booker, 2016), youth as agentive civic agents (Gutiérrez, 2011), and the fugitive nature of liberatory education within inequitable social arrangements (Patel, 2016). These perspectives are crucial in helping to develop pedagogies and measures that push understandings of racial equity further beyond those grounded in capitalist conceptualizations.

Similarly, Escobar (2018) lays out several principles for an “ontologically oriented design” including that it “recognizes that all design creates a ‘world-within-the-world’ in which we are designed by what we design as subjects. We are all designers, and we are all designed” (p. 133). This “pluriversal” understanding of what design can be for broadens the recognition that in imagining speculative futures, we too are shaped by those possibilities in the present moment.

Not all speculative thinking lives within our definition here. The process of exploiting and appropriating the work and creativity of the historically marginalized is a global tradition. Distinctly American is the way that the innovations of Black genius—from the blues to rock to TikTok dances—are taken and stripped of the contexts and labor for innovation as white individuals and corporations have profited from them.

Recognizing that the cultural ideas and products that inspired our thinking are centered on the legacies of indigenous and Black feminist thought, we Intentionally situate the framing of speculative education, pedagogy, and research that follow in traditions and scholarships typically overlooked in educational research contexts. Too, Asian, Latinx, queer, (dis)abled, and multiply marginalized dreamers shaped how we seek to manifest different tomorrows.

Put more directly, the futures that this articulation of speculative education seeks to forward are Blacker, are browner, are more free, are more joyful. Toliver (2021) defines Afrofuturism as “a cultural aesthetic in which Black authors create speculative texts that center Black characters in an effort to reclaim and recover the past, counter negative and elevate positive realities that exist in the present, and create new possibilities for the future” (p. xxi). Afrofuturist work might offer lessons of pain, like in Octavia Butler’s Kindred or Parable of the Sower. Similarly, this work might focus on the sharp sting of ongoing grief like Angel Bat Dawid’s Hush Harbor Mixtape or adrienne maree brown’s Grievers. The artistic works of joy and freedom do not necessarily come from happy texts. Instead, we see Afrofuturism as helping to reorient and reimagine the present and past conditions of racialized life through the lens of futuristic design and storytelling. This work is not simply about finding inspiration in stories. Instead, we want to set the foundations of our work in the narratives we tell and the dreams we might imagine. We resonate with Toliver’s (2021) assertion that, “researchers are often restricted to gathering stories, not telling them. We are the collectors of tales, charged with the task of stockpiling narratives from our research partners” (p. xv). Based on this understanding, we offer a warning about inclusivity in our work: this is not a melting pot of speculative color blindness. This is not a universal articulation of the future. Rather, the speculative embraces a multiversal vision.

Watch any of the latest Hollywood blockbusters and you are likely to be acquainted with the multiverse; the idea that myriad worlds and realities all exist within a singular system allows for crossovers, character revivals, and world-hopping storylines. In the entertainment industry, profit can be excavated by colonizing the multiverse. The thing about the multiverse is that it is neither a new idea nor one that was created by Hollywood or comic book impresarios. Physicists have grappled with the notion of a “many worlds interpretation” for more than a century, though the phrase was first coined by Hugh Everett in the mid-1950s (Gribbin, 2019, p. 45). Extending from quantum physics, the contemporary notion of a multiverse likely captured the imagination of science fiction writers, comic book artists, and youthful dreamers alongside news headlines describing the frontiers explored by predominantly white, male, American, and European physicists. But we heed the reminder that scientific advances and the knowledges that shape our world are not bound solely to Eurocentric forms of categorized knowledge. As Prescod-Weinstein (2021) elaborates:

I believe science does not need to be inextricably tied to commodification and colonialism. Euro-American imperialism and colonialism has had its (often unfortunate) moment with science, and it’s time for the rest of us to reclaim our heritage for the sake of ourselves and all the generations after us. That doesn’t mean changing ourselves so we can be included in science—it means changing the institutionalized science, so that our presence is natural and our cultures are respected (pp. 230–231).

The utility of a multiverse is that it can hold all knowledge, and we can prioritize and deprioritize forms of knowledge based on the paradigms of our given worlds; speculative thought might lead to “the multiverse of worlds our world could be” (Dunne & Raby, 2013, p. 160).

Pragmatic footholds of speculative educational research

The learning sciences must not simply study present conditions of harm and nationalism roosting in the branches of learning environments across the globe (e.g. The Politics of Learning Writing Collective, 2017). Rather, ours are tools for deep interrogation, innovation, and collective action. As an issue focused on spotlighting new methodological approaches and theories from other disciplines that have captured the hearts and minds of many within our field, we seek to bridge myriad boundaries through the conversations the writing within will elicit. Beyond simply imagining what liberating social arrangements could exist in alternative worlds, we must cultivate methodological innovations to study the efforts to design them into existence in the here and now (Montfort, 2017). As discussed above, the speculative education paradigm lives in the blurry interstices of time and space. In some ways, it is not-yet and nowhere; hence, the focus on imagination, dreaming, and the otherwise. Yet it is crucial to remember that the speculative is also now and here (and before and elsewhere). The future is always in process, and there are substantive contributions to be made from moment to moment in our lives and in our work. In this special issue, we focus specifically on how speculative education can inform the design and implementation of educational research in pursuit of racial justice.

Broadly speaking, we argue that speculative education can serve pragmatic purposes in our field by providing a conceptual and ethical horizon for scholarly inquiry against which we can evaluate the components of our research: how we frame problems for study, how we design projects, how we interact with participants, how we collect, analyze, and represent data, and how we discuss implications. Take the 2022 NAEP example that opened this essay. Speculative education offers a set of questions to pose to all researchers (not just research that explicitly seeks to embrace the speculative) to draw out understandings of the measures a researcher is valuing and toward what vision of future worlds it is operating.

These questions will likely reveal that some research (and researchers) are explicitly uninterested in education as a project of building new worlds. In arguments before the Supreme Court regarding the fate of affirmative action in higher education, Justice Thomas exemplified this disinterest, insisting upon a narrow academic horizon for education and casting doubt upon “what exactly the educational benefits of diversity … would be.” This attempted de-coupling of racial diversity—to say nothing of racial equity or justice—from the purpose of education serves a particular sociopolitical aim of maintaining stratified institutions in public life. Speculative education offers a language to name this aim.

We know (partly from the various convenings we organized) that many other researchers are deeply interested in building just new worlds and are looking for avenues to move beyond the existing horizons of academic gatekeeping in terms of how they design and conduct research. The call for proposals for this special issue was dedicated to amplifying innovative work that leverages a speculative paradigm to envision new horizons for us to orient our sails toward.

The work showcased in the pages to come advances our understanding of speculative education both theoretically and methodologically. Before outlining some of the unique contributions of each piece, we note a crucial thread running through the collection; namely, the leveraging of social design-based experimentation (SDBE) as a portal toward the speculative. As each of the authors note, SDBE represents a generative methodological complement to the theoretically speculative framework for two reasons. First, it combines traditions of design-based research (Based Research Collective, 2003), formative experiments (Engestrom, 2008), and participatory forms of inquiry to develop an approach that seeks to transform social institutions and their practices through mutual relations of exchange with constituents as valued stakeholders and partners in the explicit pursuit of equity. Second, and relatedly, its theory of social transformation shifts the analytic focus from changing people through a narrow focus on biological or cognitive determinants of learning to a focus on changing systems of activity in which participants can become designers of their own futures (Lee et al., 2020). SDBE gives license for iterative play with potential futures.

Each of this issue’s contributions takes this license to reveal new elements of speculative thought and practice that promise to spark continued growth in this conceptual field. Lizárraga analyzes how teacher education classes and after-school makerspaces can become sites of “speculative fabulation” in which learners from non-dominant communities leverage human and digital technologies to narrate and fabricate fabulous sociopolitical futures centering on their creativity, ingenuity, and hope. This piece extends the metaphor of the cyborg, moving from a vision of a physical human with enhanced technological capabilities toward an everyday “queering of the normative and bounded biological body in service of telling new speculative stories of ourselves, as individuals and collectives.”

The contributions from Shaw et al. and Arada et al. both invite us to “refuse and recode Black, Indigenous, and Youth of Color’s (BIYGMOC’s) predestined algorithms in sociotechnical systems and in social life itself” (Arada et al., this issue) by documenting learning in informal STEM learning environments designed with the sociopolitical consciousness, histories, and cultural ways of knowing of young people at the center. The articles take the concept of “code” from computer science and situate it within the inequitable social “codes” governing today’s public life; recoding serves as both an interrogation of the discipline and a speculative practice of building new futures. Shaw et al. analyze a workshop dedicated to computational quilting, a practice through which technologies are reimagined for use with soft materials associated with the labor and culture of women, and highlight the ways that Black girls leverage this practice to restory narratives about computing and their potential futures within it. Quilting becomes both a material practice and a metaphor for the building of new sociopolitical possibilities.

Arada et al. leverage-related metaphors of threading, weaving, and patternmaking to analyze the instructional practices of two eighth-grade science teachers as they engaged in participatory co-design with researchers to reimagine a physics unit about light waves. They interrogated the role of STEM in movements for racial justice and fostered the conditions for communal future dreaming. The authors detail “threading practices as learners engage in sociopolitical interpretation; weaving practices as they coordinate multiple ways of knowing and being in relation to their interpretation; and patternmaking practices as they conceive of more just patterns, practices, and politics through speculative design.”

To the metaphors capturing the nature of being and making in the realm of the speculative, Rajala et al. add a metaphor about time in the form of the firefly. In their retrospective analysis of three projects across different scales of location, space, and duration that sought to co-create utopian embodiments of learning for justice among communities of learners, the authors utilize the image of a firefly flickering and fading to explore the contingent and shifting nature of the speculative; as they argue, “When a utopian form of educational activity succeeds in stabilizing itself, its subsequent dissolution reveals the enduring features of the social ecology, which have the power to disassemble it and consume its resources.” The piece reminds us to avoid static or essentialist versions of liberation in the worlds we seek to create and to attend in our approaches to the life cycle of SDBEs.

Appropriately, the final piece by Mendelsohn et al. brings us back to the material and reminds us that the speculative is not (only) a metaphor; the future is built in and through pedagogies of community organizing led by communities of color. As the authors explain, “radicalism and organizing are inherently speculative, and the Black radical imagination is replete with prefigurative images of the justice and liberation that has not, but must, arrive.” The auto-ethnographic analysis of a campus abolitionist collective organizing to demand reparative justice for harms done by a local university details the process and progress of “radical futures-in-the-making” that does not use imagining the future as an excuse for inaction in the present but rather an engine of liberatory struggle.

The kind of research that we cultivate here reflects an intentional rupture of traditional scholarship in a call for work aiming toward speculative ends. While the five articles in this issue all adhere to the expected and rigorous expectations of the Journal of the Learning Sciences and of peer reviewed research in general, they all take speculative roots in social design-based approaches to research and blast into unexpected directions. Likewise, alongside these articles, we nestle two free-flowing interludes, intended to push on the boundaries of where and how scholarship is communicated and imagined. In lieu of traditional commentaries accompanying the work in this issue, these two interludes comment upon and expand the ideas in the lengthier articles in this issue. For example, the collaborative renga found winding its way through this issue is a poem drawn from the ideas and desires of a large collective. This interwoven form of speculative thought reflects both the themes of this issue and the ways humanities-driven work can (and should) find purchase in our academic summits to unknown locations. Likewise, Patel’s pragmatic description of game design and implementation suggest a loving utility for play and learning. These interludes, then, are palimpsests where the snowflake remnants of past thought and present possibility converge. They at once comment on the surrounding articles and shape new routes for which educational discourse can take place.

All told, this special issue finds a balance between empirical work centered around speculative approaches toward justice-driven educational research and theoretical scholarship that pushes our field forward. In tightrope walking this delicate line, we are—along with our contributors—attempting to demonstrate how speculative educational research might find three different routes toward expanding our collective horizons. First, one pathway focuses on research that pushes understandings of racial equity further beyond those grounded in capitalist conceptualizations. Current explorations of racial impacts on educational opportunity too frequently turn to perspectives of the “costs” accrued or taxed by race and intersecting factors. These are necessary constructs when basing such work within a capitalist paradigm. However, we know that such paradigms only feel permanent (e.g. Kuhn, 1996); if we can imagine worlds that explore race beyond taken-for-granted constructs, we can research such worlds. Second, we seek scholarship that articulates how activist stances in scholarship are carving future-facing footholds for research. Acknowledging that no research is neutral, speculative research is naturally post-positivist. It is, instead, embracing the political identities, wants, and desires that are at the origin of this work and pulling them into every aspect of our scholarship. Pragmatically, this means that if our scholarship is framed by activist-oriented principles in the literature review and conceptual frameworks (as found in traditional paper structures, at least), these principles should be enacted and reflected in every other part of a study as well. From our methods to our findings to our discussion and implications, we seek scholarship that deliberately sails on winds of action. The final route of speculative research that we suggest here involves work that studies and enacts creative and critical learning practices in preK-12, postsecondary, and teacher education across school, after-school, home, community, and public learning environments. Pedagogy must be grounded in this work, and such pedagogy cannot live simply in the domain of secondary classrooms or on post-secondary campuses. We must seek new horizons from the playrooms of early childhood centers, from family-centered spaces, and from contexts that are not typically treated as real sites of academic knowledge engagement.

There are not always clear boundaries in these areas. Scholarship should be encouraged to run productively across the different disciplinary domains we bring into our work. The fact that W.E.B. Du Bois wrote critically speculative science fiction (1919’s “The Comet”) alongside his still prescient nonfiction scholarship is a reminder of how we must dream and imagine not only beside the studious work of scholarly research but as an inherent part of this process. We must, in the words of Ytasha Womack (2013), utilize “speculative fiction and sci-fi to hash out ideas about race, re-create futures with black societies, and make poignant commentary about the times” (p. 120).

An Icy rupture of the present

For all of the well-intentioned reforms and the most cutting edge algorithmic approaches to measuring learning design, our central work—as educational researchers, as state-sanctioned educators, as learning scientists participating within the systems of colonial higher education—has not deviated from elementary measurements of progress and growth. We cloak these words in the constructs of “academic achievement,” “college readiness,” “gaps” (Ladson-Billings, 2006), and “21st Century Learning’’ (Mirra & Garcia, 2020). And, no matter how well we dress up these constructs, how well crafted their articulations of social consciousness, or how loudly they chest thump their allegiance to legacies of critical scholarships and pedagogies, the overwhelming majority of the work that we has contributed as a field have led us to innovate new approaches toward the same outcomes. We want to get individuals—often young individuals within K-12 settings—to achieve based on the same kinds of measurements that we have been working from for more than a century. Though the boundaries and nuances of knowledge systems expand, we are continually working toward a pragmatist acknowledgment that students must read, write, conform, and display particular forms of numeracy and content knowledge by the time they have completed their public schooling regimens. As go youth in the third decade of the twenty-first century, so went youth in the early 1900s.

It is not only difficult to develop new pedagogies for teaching that foment speculative action within a matrix of present assessment and measurement, it is essentially counterintuitive. Make no mistake, speculative pedagogies are not designed to increase test scores or up the number of youth voters in a given election or to create new, multimodally-complex approaches to textual production (though all these may be secondary outcomes). Rather, the speculative—by its definitional nature—must find and create a point of rupture in the current moment. Wound the present for the sake of tomorrow.

Creating other futures requires moving beyond the existing systems and what they wrap us up in. It is a pernicious conundrum: can we remain gainfully bound toward existing systems while actively seeking to dismantle them?

Fortunately, the global pandemic that has substantially affected four different academic school years (so far at the time that we write this) has made clear that there can be a will for large education-shifting of apparatus when systemic forces find it within their purview to rattle the chains appropriately. The existing system has proven incredibly elastic—even our vocabulary of “learning loss” and “achievement gaps” found proper updating in times of severe physical and emotional loss on a scale that our generation of learners and teachers has never experienced before.

Also, a remnant of the pandemic: a reminder that far too many of us—human beings first but also researchers, teachers, learners, parents, children—are hurting, are grieving, and are continually exhausted by the weight of what we have wrought. We ask, again, can we remain gainfully bound to the existing systems while actively seeking to dismantle them? We ask this question with the clear-eyed recognition that the existing systems are not working right now nor have they ever worked for too many of the individuals they are designed for. Silhouetted by the very bright dawn of a new time, we might stare at the horizons in front of us, bleary-eyed and overwhelmed. The world that lies both in front of and beyond our given horizons might feel overwhelming. We echo two questions that Prescod-Weinstein asks in The Disordered Cosmos (2021): “What is the point of science if I have suffered so much for it? What is the point if it makes others suffer unnecessarily too?” (p. 217). Though Prescod-Weinstein is principally concerned with the field of physics, we might do well, as a field to replace the word “science” in her questions and, instead, consider “the point” of education and educational scholarship if it “makes others suffer unnecessarily.”

We conclude this rumination on speculative education and the compiling of horizon-exceeding scholarship in this issue with Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s (2022) reflection that “We make history, but not under conditions of our own choosing” (p. 27). It is from this unchosen history of collective and suppressed knowledge that we posit that the recognition of other universes, on our imaginative horizon, have always been with us. In dreams, in the stories shared from our elders as we stared at stars, and in the inertia that compels us to continually question the status quo, we are constantly skating on ice that separates us from the icy depths of an always unknown and always so close elsewhere.

Let us sharpen our picks. Let us puncture the present, like a semicolon that breaks a singular moment and offers an unprecedented addendum; let us dive headlong into chilling, inky deviation. If we can imagine a world where medicine flows to those that need it in abundance, a world devoid of police, and a world bereft of climate devastation, for example, a multiversal approach suggests that these worlds can and do exist.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.