Speculative fiction is a powerful medium to explore possible futures, inviting literacy researchers and educators to consider the value of futures thinking as a tool for eliciting learners’ hopeful narratives about equitable, sustainable futures for their communities. Yet, when asked to imagine the future, adults and youth alike often envision dystopian stories and fail to consider the interdependencies between technological innovations and the social, economic, and environmental contexts they shape. Moreover, current pedagogic strategies for thinking about the future encourage globalized perspectives rather than stories localized in learners’ lived contexts. Using design-based research methods and informed by ecological theories that assume learners exercise agency through their actions that bring together past, present, and future, our team developed conjectures about how futures thinking might support learners’ agency in relation to sustainability activism and environmental justice. Data analyzed to test our conjectures were 18 solar futures narratives written by adult and youth participants in a solar energy research program. Findings show promise for writing practices that foster sustainability and climate change learning.
Designing games from the ground up is a popular activity for helping students think in designerly ways. Despite their benefits, such game design activities may place higher-than-anticipated demands on cognitive and institutional resources. In an effort to alleviate these demands, this study explored how playing and fixing partially completed games may elicit engagement with designerly thinking. This paper reports on the results of examining participants' talk during a playfixing activity in which, rather than designing wholesale, participants mended incomplete or “broken” tabletop games. Results suggest participants focused on problem identification, demonstrated quick and sustained engagement with thinking like designers, and drew from designerly modes non-linearly. These results illustrate that broken games may hold potential as accessible alternatives for helping learners think in designerly ways.
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