Educational Fabulations

This highly original collection presents speculative fiction as fiction-based research to re-imagine education in the future. Given the particular convergence of economic and governmental pressures in educational institutions today, schools represent imaginative sites especially well-suited to interrogation through an SF lens. The relevance for education of the exploration and interrogation of themes related to technology, human nature, and social organization is evident; yet the speculative fiction approach is unique in its harnessing of creative capacities to envision alternatives. The contributions in this collection are generated from educational experience and research, drawing on scholarship in curriculum studies and teacher education and on the authors' experiences and imaginations as teachers, teacher educators, educational scholars, and human beings.

A proposal to redefine design in a way that not only challenges the field's dominant paradigms but also changes the practice of design itself. In Critical Fabulations, Daniela Rosner proposes redefining design as investigative and activist, personal and culturally situated, responsive and responsible. Challenging the field's dominant paradigms and reinterpreting its history, Rosner wants to change the way we historicize the practice, reworking it from the inside. Focusing on the development of computational systems, she takes on powerful narratives of innovation and technology shaped by the professional expertise that has become integral to the field's mounting status within the new industrial economy. To do so, she intervenes in legacies of design, expanding what is considered "design" to include long-silenced narratives of practice, and enhancing existing design methodologies based on these rediscovered inheritances. Drawing on discourses of feminist technoscience, she examines craftwork's contributions to computing innovation--how craftwork becomes hardware manufacturing, and how hardware manufacturing becomes craftwork.

This book presents diverse processes of crafting that bring humans, more than-humans and the environment closer to one another and, by doing so, addresses personal and educational developments towards ecological awareness. It discusses the human-material relationship, introduces posthuman theoretical entry points and reflects on the implementation of such theoretical perspectives in education. The practical examples of crafting-with the environment, the material practices and reflections posed in the book, provide insights into possible ways of levelling out human and material hierarchies. The chapters of this book give examples of artists' and crafts people's processes of thinking through materials and with materials, but also their reflections on how more-than-humans (animals and plants) craft from available materials, and how the environment and landscapes re-craft themselves through tedious processes of transformation. These case examples are founded on the authors' own experiences with phenomena they are trying to understand and critically explore. This book is of interest to professional creative practitioners, art and craft educators, art teacher educators or researchers in the field of creative practices. It has power to inspire rethinking of present educational practices, to ignite critical reflections about materials and more-than humans, and, hopefully, motivate transformations toward more ecologically sustainable ways of life. Chapters "Crafting in Dialogue with the Material Environment" and "Soil Laboratory: Crafting Experiments in an Exhibition Setting" are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.se via link.springer.com.

Inspired by those who mothered before and through the COVID-19 pandemic, this is a book about, for, and with those who live different embodiments of academic mothering—mothers, othermothers, academic mothers, and mothering academics. In this book, mothering is defined broadly, encompassing those who are biologically or legally mothers with children; those who are “not-mother” but who nonetheless understand and practice mothering; those who do identify as mothers but not as women; and all those who take on mothering roles in academia and beyond. Through poetry and prose, fiction and nonfiction, image and text, the authors in this edited book creatively explore academic mothering through their unique lived experiences, illuminating three ideas that comprise the three sections of this book: mothering as practice, mothering in precarity, and mothering as relational. Through considering—and in many cases, writing about and through—their own mothering practices, this diverse collection of authors critique the systemic failures of academia in the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond, fabulating new possibilities that envision a future in which mothering is valued and supported in (and by) higher education.

Despite pervading all aspects of educational practice and theory, little scholarship focuses on time in education. This book addresses that lacuna questioning our assumptions about time and their ramifications on theories of learning, issues of equity and diversity, and on the purposes of education itself. The authors examine ideas about time in a wide variety of contexts, from ancient Greek fiction to 19th century theories of evolution and from 20th century indigenous stories to 20th century afro-futurist fiction. They show how pervasive the image of 'time as an arrow' has become, an image of time that is one-way, singular and teleological. Through exploring other theories of time, the authors propose alternatives for time in education. They argue that time is one of the key biopolitical tools we think and operate with, but rarely address as a historical, cultural and pedagogical category with which schools reproduce oppressive structures around race, class, and gender in society. The book draws on ideas from the arts and the sciences to illustrate and trouble assumptions of time drawing on artistic and theoretic work from Édouard Glissant, Henri Lefebvre, Giordano Nanni, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Bonnie Honig and others.

“This comprehensive and thoughtful volume is the first book to investigate, assess and apply a philosophy of education drawn from the great French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. It contains powerful and beautiful essays by some of the most influential Deleuze and Guattari commentators (the chapters by Bogue, Colebrook, May and Semetsky, and Genosko are particularly rewarding). The book provides very useful situations within the philosophy of education and some interesting experimental developments of Deleuze’s work, notably in terms of new technologies and original methods. This is then an indispensable work on Deleuze and education. It covers the historical background and begins shaping debates for future research in this exciting and growing area.” —Professor James Williams, Professor of European Philosophy, School of Humanities, University of Dundee, author of Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition: A Critical Introduction and Guide and The Transversal Thought of Gilles Deleuze: Encounters and Influences