This volume outlines powerful theoretical and methodological approaches for expanding the possibilities of educational research. By illuminating speculative education as an emerging scholarly practice, this collection offers pragmatic guidance for scholarly world-building.

It introduces “speculative education” as a critical and hopeful approach to educational research. Through empirical scholarship, the book describes paradigms of collective thriving beyond the existing horizons guiding research, policy, and practice in educational research. The collection of scholarship here offers visionary and future-oriented approaches to teaching and learning that operate beyond the bounds of current social, economic, and cultural arrangements that perpetuate various forms of oppression. Through specific examples and a collection of thematic interludes, this collection details a framework through which educational researchers and practitioners can enact speculative dreaming. This speculative framework seeks to 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. Ultimately, this volume highlights how researchers, designers, educators, and individuals linked in community with each other must question the intended outcomes of educational scholarship writ large and if the priors of academic scholarship actually lead toward destinations of freedom. In recognizing the pluralistic nature of speculative worlds that might be built, the possibilities for new educational models and experiences are boundless.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of the Learning Sciences.

Antero Garcia is Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University. His research explores the possibilities of speculative imagination and healing in educational research. He has authored or edited more than 20 books about the possibilities of literacies, play, and civics in transforming schooling in America.

Nicole Mirra is Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers University. Her research utilizes participatory design methods in classroom, community, and digital spaces to collaboratively create civic learning environments with youth and educators that disrupt structures of racial injustice and creatively compose liberatory social futures.