As part of a collaboration around education futures, a group of colleagues led by George Veletsianos are co-editing a special collection for the fully open access  International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education. The theme of the collection is “Higher Education Futures at the intersection of justice, hope, and educational technology”. The journal works with a rolling submission framework, so papers are reviewed and (potentially) published as they come in rather than all at once. This is interesting from an editorial point of view!

The final deadline for submissions for this collection is 31 October 2023, but please submit any time before then.

The collection invites prospective authors to turn towards reimagining the futures of education, and to contribute scholarship that speculates what higher education at the intersection of justice, hope, and educational technology could look like. Read all the details of the call on George’s blog.

For me, this way of tackling digital education futures – connecting justice and hope – is potentially really rich, because it suggests the complexity of exploring the idea of ‘responsibility to the future’ (Adam and Groves, 2007, Facer 2021). My recent work around speculative methods has shown me how tricky this is – I’ve tended to think about this in terms of the balance of play and responsbility, for example:

Insisting on responsibility is not to overstate our ability to predict, but instead to recognise that what we do and say about the future matters. Regardless of the complexity involved, teachers and researchers, students and participants can be part of producing new things in the world, including beliefs, practices and technologies (Urry, 2016). In addition, it has implications for how we understand caring… [reframing] care of the future to take account of open-endedness. (Ross 2023, p.50)

I’m really looking forward to seeing the range of different approaches and responses to this call.

Editors for the special collection:

George Veletsianos: Royal Roads University, Canada
Shandell Houlden: Royal Roads University, Canada
Jen Ross: University of Edinburgh, UK
Sakinah Alhadad: Griffith University, Australia
Camille Dickson-Deane: University of Technology Sydney, Australia

References:

Adam, B. and Groves, C. (2007) Future Matters: Action, Knowledge, Ethics. Boston, the Netherlands: Brill.

Facer, K. (2021) Futures in education: Towards an ethical practice. UNESCO. Available at: https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000375792 .

Ross, J. (2023) Digital Futures for Learning: Speculative Methods and Pedagogies. Routledge.

Urry, J. (2016) What is the Future? John Wiley & Sons.

Over the past six months or so, I’ve been working with my great colleagues Siân Bayne and Michael Gallagher on a new set of resources for working with higher education futures.

Speculative Futures for Higher Education includes 8 scenarios, 8 tarot cards and 8 short stories builds on the 2017–19 Near Future Teaching project, which used design-based methodologies to co-create
a vision for the future of digital education at the University of Edinburgh. Two short trend-mapping reviews were done as part of that project, and we returned to these reviews in 2022 to update them, identifying the 8 scenarios presented in this new resource.

In addition to the 8 scenarios, the resource also includes 8 very short stories, written to evoke one form of the future proposed in each scenario.

The eight scenarios are:

1. Extinction-era universities 
2. AI academy
3. The universal university
4. Extreme unbundling
5. Justice-driven innovation
6. Return to the ivory tower
7. The university of ennui
8. Enhanced enhancement

All the materials and the scenario and story texts are available on the Centre web site, free to download and reuse with attribution.

My new book will be published on 8 November 2022. Here’s what it looks like!

It has been a really positive experience – it’s given me space and time to step back and consider how the variety of work I’ve been doing on education and digital learning futures over the past decade or so comes together around a methodological and pedagogical position on complexity, responsibility, creativity and uncertainty. In the book, I define speculative approaches as working with the future as a space of uncertainty, and using that uncertainty creatively in the present. It’s been a real pleasure to revisit projects and ideas, and to develop arguments about the role speculative methods can play in the landscape of digital education and critical education futures.

One of the things I got the most from was working through the ways that education futures (particularly digital education futures) are made and how they come to be seen as legitimate (or otherwise). This took me on a journey through work on critical education futures, anticipation, imaginaries and different kinds of predictions. That exploration was extremely useful for the development of the new MSc in Education Futures that has launched this month! I hope it will be helpful for other people too (I wrote about it in chapter 2).

I see the theoretical foundation for speculative methods as emerging in education from work on complexity (which chapter 3 of the book is all about). However, a speculative approach to research can in turn be suitable for exploring a lot of different kinds of ideas – the second section of the book discusses speculative projects that developed around theories of posthumanism, mobilities and surveillance, for example. 

When I first started writing about speculative approaches to educational research and teaching back in 2016, there weren’t that many examples of their use, but happily the situation has changed a lot in the years since, and chapter 4 of the book explores this literature and draws attention to some of the big questions and ideas that have emerged from it (here are just a few examples). It’s also been good to see the range of methods people actually use – for example, an approach that has been developing quite rapidly is the use of speculative fiction writing as a way of working with education futures, and there is a lot of energy around examining current visions of the future and telling stories about new ones.

There are four case studies in the book – each of which discusses speculative approaches in practice, including speculative objects, audiences and ways of knowing produced through research and teaching projects. In Chapter 5, a speculative Twitter bot makes a surprising entrance into the social space of a Massive Open Online Course and proceeds to engage with participants about the nature of teaching. The chapter explores debates about automation and massification of higher education, and investigates the glitch as a speculative object. Chapter 6 focuses on the speculative pedagogy of the Digital Futures for Learning postgraduate course, in which the course itself is partly made up of Open Educational Resources produced by students. It examines openness and co-creation as educational qualities and as challenges for higher education. Chapter 7 turns to engagement in museums and galleries, and to the Artcasting project, which explored alternatives to problematic forms of evaluation that cultural heritage organisations were grappling with. Chapter 8 is about the Data Stories Creator, developed as part of work to imagine surveillance futures in higher education at a time of radical shifts in modes and visibility of education, partly driven by the Covid- 19 pandemic. 

The final section of the book tries to capture elements of speculative research, and teaching, in ways that others will be able to use and build on. I had already written about this a bit in a research context, but the chapter on speculative pedagogies is completely new, and it was good to think about issues of ethics and participation in the context of assessment, course design and lifelong learning (for example).

Overall, I want the book to provide encouragement for others who are working – or want to work – on digital education futures in their own contexts. Speculative work is located in a complex web of uncertainty, playfulness and responsibility (a theme that I found myself returning to a lot), and this has implications for how we work as well as what we do: 

The relationships created and revealed within speculative practices, however playful they may sometimes be, are also serious about the future, responsible to the present and thoughtful about the history of our field. This means that the tensions and contradictions and complexities of our work are not there to be resolved – they are the work.

(Ross 2023, p.205)

Many of us can gain something from understanding our work in a more spacious, generous way than the customs of research and teaching, and the visions of the future that are  currently in play give us room for. A lot of innovative and interesting stuff is going on in the social sciences, arts and humanities right now to make this kind of space, and I see speculative approaches as part of that. It’s a little bit daunting to see the book head out into the world, but I hope it finds the people who will find it useful!

I’m in the process of writing a book about speculative methods and pedagogies (due from Routledge in 2022). As part of the writing process I’ve been enjoying engaging with recent literature that builds on ideas I wrote about in my 2017 paper on speculative method in digital education research (Ross, 2017). This post is a little taster of the diverse contexts of use of speculation and not-yetness (Ross and Collier, 2016), and how these concepts are being developed by others.

Speculative methods for research and teaching are aimed at envisioning or crafting futures or conditions which may not yet currently exist, to provoke new ways of thinking and to bring particular ideas or issues into focus. Michael (2012) describes them as “’inventive problem making’ in which the parameters of the issue are reconfigured” (p.536). In their canonical speculative design text, Dunne and Raby (2013) identify speculative design as a way to use futures as “a medium to aid imaginative thought… [to] loosen, even just a bit, reality’s grip on our imagination” (p.3). Enactments of speculative methods are found in critical design, speculative design, inventive method and design fiction, and across the social sciences and art and design disciplines. Speculative methods are often described as research methods, but they are equally suited to teaching contexts in a range of different disciplines, with recent published work highlighting their use in social anthropology, law, education and art. Plus there is some great work being done on speculative engagements in informal learning contexts like museum and galleries. 

I’m seeing a lot of richness and diversity in the literature around speculative approaches, and increasing interest in these. I think this is because their close couplings of provocation, engagement and inquiry are a good fit with the complex knowledge-production spaces of learning and education and the wicked problems we are facing. As George Veletsianos (2020) notes:

the current state of education, at all levels, is situated within a context of ever-evolving social, cultural, political, and technological shifts, [so] we face an urgent need to engage with uncertainty on multiple levels. The use of speculative methods, therefore, may enable us to offer guidance when making current decisions related to the future of higher education, and to explore what may or may not be possible in different contexts. (p.605)

Of the many excellent things I’ve been reading, I want to highlight four papers that have developed my previous work on speculative method in generative ways. 

Osborn, J.R., Barba, E., Henderson, G.E., Strong, L.M. and Kadish, L.H. (2019) ‘The Pilgrimage Project: Speculative design for engaged interdisciplinary education’, Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 18(4), pp. 349–371. Osborn et al (2019) describe their pedagogical approach to engaging with historical materials in a speculative manner as “retrofuturology”. They embarked on a year-long “experiment in interdisciplinary pedagogy” with a focus on Georgetown University’s Old North Building. The Pilgrimage project brought together students and teachers from six courses on topics including creative writing, media production and museum studies, and “applied the not-yetness of speculative method [to explore] how technological, artistic, and creative projects can inspire and maintain student engagement when directed toward a topic of shared concern” (p.351). Using approaches such as mediated collaboration (where student work from one course was used as prompts for another), students ultimately produced a public exhibition. 

Gallagher, M. and Breines, M. (2021) ‘Surfacing knowledge mobilities in higher education: reconfiguring the teacher function through automation’, Learning, Media and Technology, 46(1), pp. 78–90. 

and

Breines, M.R. and Gallagher, M. (2020) ‘A return to Teacherbot: rethinking the development of educational technology at the University of Edinburgh’, Teaching in Higher Education, 0(0), pp. 1–15. 

Working with university students, faculty and staff to investigate the notion of automation and the ‘teacher function’, this project used speculative co-design methods to understand perspectives of teachers, staff and students and to produce use cases for teacherbots at the University of Edinburgh.  The researchers facilitated prototype-building workshops which, combined with interview data (Gallagher and Breines, 2021), generated 85 discrete use-cases for instances of automation in a future university. The project developed a framework for evaluating teacherbot designs, moving away from efficiency as a core value, and criteria were the extent to which the designs were pedagogically generative, expressed university values, had potential to positively influencing the student and teaching experience, were ethical, were supportive of teacher professionalism, and were technologically feasible (Breines and Gallagher, 2020, p. 8). Examples of teacherbot designs produced through participatory design sessions included bots for helping students identify their knowledge of a subject before a course began, creating peer groupings based on sophisticated criteria, generating discussion, preparing students for tutorials, and collecting resources from students to help co-create knowledge (pp.9-10). 

Smythe, S., Pelan, D. and Breshears, S. (2018) ‘The LinkVan Project: Participatory Technology Design in Vancouver’, Language and Literacy, 20(3), pp. 9–25. The authors found speculative analysis essential to grapple with the “’wicked’ and entangled issues” (p.21) that emerged from their project examining a mobile van for supporting digital literacies amongst Vancouver, Canada’s low-income and homeless population. These issues included problems of scarcity, the slippage of digital inclusion to a more radical demand for more equitable digital landscapes, and the tensions between anonymity and relationality in providing community services. For them, the ‘not-yetness’ of the socio-technical landscape they were working in required reaching beyond the technological to a more experimental way of thinking about learning and resource sharing (p.22). 

Ehret, C. and Čiklovan, L. (2020) ‘How speculative designs produce new potentials for education research in digital culture’, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 41(5), pp. 708–722. doi:10.1080/01596306.2020.1774713. Ehret and Čiklovan (2020) built on a traditional multimodal discourse analysis of toxic digital discourse on the Twitch.tv livestreamed gaming platform to produce a ‘critical remix video’ to synthesise toxic content and then “repurpose[] and reconfigure[] those media in order to communicate messages that expose pernicious ideologies and behaviors”. They add to speculative methods in education a focus on emerging technocultures, arguing that pedagogical development should flow from “emerging experiences of digital, social life” (p.721). For them, speculative design experiments need to develop “new pedagogic potentials that themselves may inform social change through youths’ expanded and nuanced repertoire of digital practices in the future” (ibid).

From these authors, I’m taking some key points forward into development of a speculative framework for digital learning futures in the book. I’m really grateful to them for their work and for these great papers. 

• The value of considering what kinds of futures are productive to speculate with (for example, Breines and Gallagher disentangled a particular form of ‘dumb’ automation from the wider AI futures discourse to explore how it could be used to engage teachers and students as designers).
• A broad view of what ‘counts’ as education futures and how these are shaped by practices and technologies beyond formal settings – like gaming-related digital spaces.
• The role of speculative methods in analysing complex issues around inclusion and relationality – and with tensions that arise through this complexity.
• Ways of structuring and scaffolding speculative teaching methods – this is going to be an important part of the book, and seeing how other teachers and researchers have grappled with pedagogical dimensions of speculation (especially around interdisciplinarity and collaboration) is really valuable. 

References

Breines, M.R. and Gallagher, M. (2020) ‘A return to Teacherbot: rethinking the development of educational technology at the University of Edinburgh’, Teaching in Higher Education, 0(0), pp. 1–15.

Dunne, A. and Raby, F. (2013) Speculative everything: design, fiction, and social dreaming. Cambridge, Massachusetts; The MIT Press.

Ehret, C. and Čiklovan, L. (2020) ‘How speculative designs produce new potentials for education research in digital culture’, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 41(5), pp. 708–722.

Gallagher, M. and Breines, M. (2021) ‘Surfacing knowledge mobilities in higher education: reconfiguring the teacher function through automation’, Learning, Media and Technology, 46(1), pp. 78–90.

Michael, M. (2012) ‘“What Are We Busy Doing?” Engaging the Idiot’, Science, Technology & Human Values, 37(5), pp. 528–554.

Osborn, J.R. et al. (2019) ‘The Pilgrimage Project: Speculative design for engaged interdisciplinary education’, Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 18(4), pp. 349–371.

Ross, J. (2017) ‘Speculative method in digital education research’, Learning, Media and Technology, 42(2), pp. 214–229.

Ross, J. and Collier, A. (2016) ‘Complexity, mess, and not-yetness: Teaching online with emerging technologies’, Emergence and Innovation in Digital Learning: Foundations and Applications, pp. 17–33.

Veletsianos, G. (2020) ‘How should we respond to the life-altering crises that education is facing?’, Distance Education, 41(4), pp. 604–607. doi:10.1080/01587919.2020.1825066.