Science Fiction, Radical Democracy, and World Building: A Pedagogy of Unknowable Futures

The unknowability of the future implicates everyone, yet the narratives of mastery which shape pedagogical approaches to the future do not allow students the opportunity to explore the uncertainty that comes from ultimately unknowable futures. This dissertation therefore foregrounds the exploration of uncertainty by envisioning science fictional, collaborative world building as a space in which students can imagine contested views of the future that move beyond predicting future problems. This study occurred in two stages: first, a reflexive ethnography framed within participatory action research in one secondary-level English classroom over three months, which involved exploring science fiction (SF) with students who then mobilized science fictional storytelling to collaboratively imagine the future of Toronto; and second, a world building assignment that was designed and informed by findings from stage one and used with pre-service teachers in order to facilitate speculative pedagogical explorations as they imagined myriad potential futures of society and schooling through SF. In stage one, various qualitative methods were used to explore students engagement with SF, the future, and storytelling, including observations and fieldnotes, a questionnaire on students thoughts on the future, semi-structured group interviews, in-class discussions, and contributions to the collaborative world building project. Data is analyzed through thematic analysis, discourse analysis, and critical theories to gain a deeper understanding of issues of representation, power, and intersectionality in students engagement with one another throughout the project, in pursuit of understanding how students envisioned a collective, contested future together. In stage two, pre-service teachers world building work is analyzed through thematic analysis, with particular attention to the development of speculative pedagogies which centre futures that are open and uncertain. Informed by thinking on radically democratic pedagogy, poststructuralism, and critical theory, in addition to genre studies within SF scholarship, this study contributes to a reframing of the future within education by moving away from the goal of mastering unknowable futures, and instead towards engaging in a collectively constructed exploration of uncertainty, and further positions SF as a promising and largely untapped resource integral to narratively navigating challenge and change.