Postscript from the Grave
The news of my untimely death, and the somewhat happier story ending on New Zoomland, are based on real people and actual events. Generally, they are historically accurate, except for my death!
Of course, if you didn’t make the connection, the journey to New Zoomland at the end of Fanny’s story, where they start a new life in a far away land, was intended to take the future back to a time when some people believed the Earth was flat. Our ideas of the future are limited by what we believe in the present. How will our conception of the future change when one day we discover the world is connected to other worlds and we are not alone? Is this fiction or nonfiction?
Having posed this question and clarified the historical framing of Fanny and Oliver’s story, this Postscript aims to help people make sense of the two entangled tales and critically reflect on some of the doublethink they contain or conceal. To recap from the first post in this series,
“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them”
(Orwell, 1961, p. 214).
The two stories of Fanny and Oliver are a form of doublethink. They provide a true historical account of the past (nonfiction), which then morphs into two entirely made up tales of the future (fiction). What this interpretative discussion hopes to do is illuminate some of the less obvious ideas and key messages contained in this exercise of doublethink. Authors, in all writing, have an onus to explain to readers what they are trying to say. This principle is particularly relevant to speculative fiction methods in education futures, as I must confess to coming to the end of several stories with no idea what the authors were trying to say.
What was the point?
Mindful of this experience, the first question to answer from the two stories is: what was the point? What question did they set out to answer? As mentioned above, the onus is on me to explain what the stories sought to achieve, not the reader, whether in theory, research or practice. This responsibility is the basic “so what?” question.
There are multiple layers and several different answers to these questions. After all, one of the guiding principles of speculative fiction methods is an appreciation of the world’s complexity. Of course, saying something is complex often gives you a bit of a licence to avoid a straight answer written in simple language. Simply put…
In my case, a personal belief that you have to experience something as an insider was an important motivator for writing Fanny and Oliver’s story.
In my experience, this rule applies to learning across a spectrum, from basic technology applications to those at the leading edge, such as ChatGPT-3. Only with firsthand experience can you truly figure out how something works and how you might use a new technology often for tasks never originally intended. This insider knowledge is also foundational to understanding when not to use technology.
Therefore, Fanny and Oliver’s story allowed me to gain firsthand experience with speculative fiction methods to self-test some of my biases, doubts and misgivings about the blurry line between fiction, nonfiction and pure fantasy. At this point, I should confess that I have never watched a single Star Wars movie, and Fantasy and Sci-fi are not my things, even though most colleagues know me to be quite creative and imaginative. Hence, I began these stories with a bias or belief that speculative fiction methods are not the only way to reimagine education futures.
Testing a hunch…
Another reason for taking the time to explore speculative fiction methods in the service of thinking about the big questions facing the future of education was to test a hunch. In this regard, the exercise sought to discover to what extent speculative fiction methods have contributed to a better and deeper understanding of our potential digital education futures from non-Western or Indigenous worldviews?
This question has its roots in the Māori language and culture that is part of my heritage. Notably, in the Māori language there is no word to distinguish between the separate constructs of ‘teaching’ and ‘learning’, as expressed in the English language. Māori is an example of how language is not a neutral tool for thinking, as it also shapes and constrains what we think. On a related note, Macgilchrist, Potter and Williamson (2022) illustrate how the journals we choose to read in English contain inherent biases and overlook a diversity of other research perspectives on digital education published in an array of languages.
In Māori, the concept of ‘Ako’ is grounded in the idea of reciprocity – hence, it makes no distinction between the teaching and learning process.
Accordingly, Ako fundamentally reframes how we see the relationship between teachers and learners. Suppose speculative fiction methods seek to bring stronger Indigenous perspectives to shaping thinking about possible digital education futures:
Is this type of reframing obvious in the education futures we are being asked to reimagine?
A related issue is the place of the past in the future. Fanny and Oliver’s stories respect and recognise a defining feature of many Indigenous cultures. While Indigenous people have their own unique cultures, they share many similarities. For example, typically the future and the present can only be understood by considering what happened in the past. The Māori culture is a case in point where time is cyclical and interwoven. The past, the present and the future are inseparably linked and sequenced in interconnectedness. The concept of ‘Elder wisdom’, common to many indigenous cultures, values the interconnectedness of all living beings. Similarly, the place of community, intergenerational learning and maintaining harmony is valued alongside living in the natural world.
What would Ranginui, The Sky Father, say?
Speculative fiction methods in education often claim to borrow the medium of storytelling from indigenous cultures to help decolonise our thinking, raise the voices of marginalised groups and reimagine different and more inclusive worlds. However, how many speculative fiction stories have you read related to digital education intentionally rooted in and intended to amplify Indigenous histories told by Indigenous people? This begs another question from a Māori worldview:
What would Ranginui, The Sky Father, Papatūānuku, the Earth Mother, and Rehua, The Star God, say about AI and its future in both education and society for shaping a more naturally balanced world?
Similarly, how many speculative fiction from the current hype and hope about ChatGPT-3 in education will offer stories that tell a future from this indigenous, historical, interconnected worldview, where doublethink is the norm? A glance through recent literature suggests more often than not, speculative fiction in education is characterised by a limited number of cultural roots, underrepresentation of Eastern traditions and suffers a lot of Western historical amnesia.
This potentially critical gap – culturally, geographically and methodologically – in the literature from my reading of it also raises the question to what extent do authors of speculative fiction in education truly live and walk their own talk? Words are cheap!
A story is just a story, especially when it verges on fantasy!
And, of course, no story is ever neutral. In my view, authors writing speculative fiction about education futures should not conceal their political viewpoints between the lines of stories. Hence why, my stories deliberately amplify my politics through their references to Putin and Trump. These references help to underscore the point that education is fundamentally political – pedagogy is political!
Putting aside my politics for a minute, the stories were also intended to help reframe our thinking about time. The key point is that “clock time” is a Western cultural construct. Again, from a glance through the literature, clock time appears to dominate the growing popularism of speculative fiction in education futures. Circling back to my first blog post and 1984, we all know from our daily work that clock time and tools like shared calendars can be a form of slavery!
Breaking free of clock time
If I’m brave enough, I hope this contribution and others planned will help other speculative fiction writers critically look at their own stories and recognise the need for more doublethink, with education futures reflecting non-linear event and cultural time from diverse Indigenous perspectives. Does it follow that we need to return to questions that Ross (2023) and others raise about who is speculating on the future? Let’s continue to ask…
Who is trying to impose their voice on the stories being told about the future of education? Whose voice is still missing?
A closer or secondary analysis of Houlden and Veletsianos‘ (2022) review of the literature might help to reveal more details about the cultural and educational backgrounds of those who produce education futures through speculative fiction to help spot the gaps. As Restoule and Snow (2023, p. 2) point out in a recent chapter on Indigenous approaches to open, distance, and digital education:
“How colonial systems are experienced as an Indigenous person is very different from that of a non-Indigenous person”.
If our past experiences and the language(s) we use shape what we think is possible, then what futures are we not reimagining? This question extends to the Eastern world and also applies to other marginalised and disadvantaged groups in our communities, including refugees, displaced persons and those in our societies with disabilities where future technologies have enormous potential to transform lives.
My own cultural heritage from living across both hemispheres is evident in the historical accounts contained in Fanny and Oliver’s stories. There is a deliberate doublethink consciousness infused in these stories as someone who owns a colonising heritage. Similarly, as someone committed to learning the lessons from history for the future, what can we do to encourage more dreamers and imaginative researchers with diverse heritages and interconnected Indigenous backgrounds to contribute speculative fiction? Does the answer to this question require us to confront our own histories and engage more directly with non-Western and Indigenous communities?
There is also a question of missing colleagues. While this effort is my first solo venture to reimagine futures through the art of storytelling and the lens of speculative fiction methods, what about colleagues who feel constrained or even gagged by what Western Scientific tradition defines as real research? Put bluntly, how do members of an Academic Promotions Committee at a traditional university rate the value and impact factor of a blog post or journal article written using speculative fiction methods?
Am I being too cynical or conservative by asking this question? As a case in point, this blog post has no academic standing in the world of publish or perish. That said, in my experience, the institutional reality is that the answer to the above question does not apply equally, as it depends on your discipline and academic status. Some of us by the nature of our titles may be able to get away with this type of research more than others can. If there is some truth to this suggestion are we guilty of doublethink by meeting the rules of the academic world whilst playing with our ideas in another world? Surely, changing the current reward and recognition models in the academic world needs to be high on the transformative change agenda when reimagining education futures with more inclusive understandings of the nature of knowledge.
Importantly, for those of us already exploring speculative fiction, borrowing from the concept of doublethink,
Is there a danger that “Elder wisdom” is being stolen, inappropriately borrowed or culturally reappropriated through linear Western academic lenses?
Complex is not the same as circular
Set against these genuine concerns, the two stories I tell through my own family and cultural background are intentionally circular. Importantly, my strong sense of Tangata Whenua, core to my identity and belonging to the land of the long white cloud, Aotearoa, is central to the stories. As already noted, my previous lived experiences from the Southern and, more recently, Northern hemispheres also shape them.
From the academic world, an ecological perspective, which positions ‘EdTech’ as complex, political and always part of wider social practice, frames my response to the hype and hope about AI in education. Thus, competing discourses of fearful and hopeful futures are not binary but entangled and must be inextricably woven into the present and the past.
Simply put, the future of AI in education lives in the past.
For this reason, the stories reflect a first attempt on my part to illustrate the crucial interplay across time that Ross (2023) identifies as an underlying quality of speculative approaches but which, from my limited reading, do not feature prominently enough in the genre. Indeed, my disquiet and discomfort about the prevalence in the literature of Western “clock time” futures remain. It may be a case of needing to read more widely or talk to more people, but it feels like “clock time” is one half of the doublethink or even hidden hegemony of speculative fiction methods and the stories being told of possible education futures.
The past defines the ‘now’
The other issue that remains unresolved from my reading and willingness to engage with the technique (or is it a method?) is that Sci-fi and Fantasy fiction do little to reimagine the ‘now’. This point is probably me talking as someone who spends much of their normal day job having to manage and respond to the now in an institutional context. If speculative fiction in education is preoccupied with projecting more hopeful (or fearful) education futures, and ignores the past from different and historical worldviews, my sense is we risk false clarity and may be limiting our ability to understand and act on the present.
This concern is central to Fanny and Oliver’s story. It appears in the language of control, striving for a better life and the fundamental human flaw of conquest and colonisation at the expense of others—not just humans. In Fanny’s story, history repeating and a degree of false clarity are intentional features of the better life. There is also a fundamental tension in both stories in their call for activism, courage and even subversion in the face of sinister and powerful controlling forces underpinned by technology.
Speaking out or stepping up as a change-maker does not always mesh with Indigenous values and collective ways of living and learning in harmony.
While teaching, for me, is fundamentally a subversive activity, inspired many years ago by Postman and Weingartner’s (1969) seminal book, not everyone shares this perspective.
This reality, and the above tension with Indigenous worldviews, illustrates yet another dimension of doublethink. But is doublethink really a problem? Is the major lesson to take from doublethink that we can and should be encouraged to open our minds to holding contradictory beliefs simultaneously?
In some Indigenous communities this question speaks to how we might create co-governance models for the future of education , where different and sometimes competing worldviews can co-exist as part of more connected learning ecologies. This is a line of thinking that brings to mind the ecological concept of “Ecotones“. Ryberg et al. (2021) describe this concept taken from the natural world as an example of valuing the importance of tensions, diversity and the richness emerging at the meeting point between two separate entities. In doublethink terms, the concept of Ecotones helps us to connect what might appear dichotomous worlds and appreciate the importance of the overlapping ground for maintaining balance, harmony and sustainability across living spaces.
To conclude, there were a lot of conscious and unconscious ideas hidden away in Fanny and Oliver’s story. Overall, the following quote from 1984 helps to encapsulate the big idea and underlying thesis that was intended to be woven across these two historical, entangled speculative fiction-nonfiction. The quote speaks to the question of ‘where next’ as we grapple with the future of AI in education:
“Who controls the past controls the future:
who controls the present controls the past.”
(George Orwell, 1984)
Disclosure Statement – ChatGPT-3 was not consulted in writing this series of four blog posts.
References
Houlden, S., & Veletsianos, V. (2022). Impossible dreaming: On speculative education fiction and hopeful learning futures. Postdigital Science and Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-022-00348-7
Macgilchrist, F., Potter, J., & Williamson, B. (2022). Reading internationally: If citing is a political practice, who are we reading and who are we citing? Learning, Media and Technology, 47(4), 407-412, https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2022.2140673
Orwell, G. (1961). 1984. New York: Signet Classic.
Postman, N., & Weingartner, C. (1969). Teaching as a subversive activity. New York: Delacorte Press.
Restoule, JP., & Snow, K. (2022). Conversations on Indigenous Centric ODDE Design. In: Handbook of Open, Distance and Digital Education. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-0351-9_92-1
Ross, J. (2023). Digital futures for learning: Speculative methods and pedagogies. London: Routledge.
Ryberg, T., Davidsen, J., Bernhard, J., & Charlotte Larsen, M. (2021). Ecotones: A conceptual contribution to postdigital thinking. Postdigital Science and Education 3, 407–424. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-020-00213-5
Decoding Digital Education 