Day2 of #SpeculativeEd colloquium starts! @Nicole_Mirra & @anterobot welcome the audience, point to the different resources and break-out groups they've set up, and remind us about the colloquium's roots in speculative writing & the 1964 Mississippi Freedom School #BroadenAccess

Our first speakers are Dr. @shirinblue and Dr. Angela Booker, thinking about "A dialogue on Historicities, Futurities and Educational Imagination in These Times." They build on Bang's questions from Day 1 about what stories we want to tell. #SpeculativeEd #BroadenAccess

The goal is to continue unpacking what "imagination" looks like, riffing on Roy's way of listening and Kelly's way of seeing. Booker wonders about how our methodologies and practices support/constrain imaginative capacities. #SpeculativeEd #BroadenAccess

Vossoughi recognizes the importance of both social critique AND imagination, but also sees the dialectical tension that arises when social critique is stronger than imagination - revolutionary histories show how new systems can reinstate oppression #SpeculativeEd #BroadenAccess

Vossoughi reminds us of Freire's concern about (pseudo-)liberatory schools that aimed to give the oppressed power, but did so through curricula and pedagogies that reified the same oppressive structures they were meant to dismantle. #SpeculativeEd #BroadenAccess

Vossoughi encourages us to get better and better about seeing and hearing the seeds of possibilities - the poetic knowledge of what the world can become should be central to our research methodologies and scholarly practices #SpeculativeEd #BroadenAccess

Building on her experience in music, Booker sees the tension between social critique and imagination as a guitar string - we can pluck it in different places to create different sounds and melodies; there is no one way to navigate the tension! #SpeculativeEd #BroadenAccess

Drawing on Ella Baker's work, Booker reminds us that a commitment to historicity and futurity creates a space to recognize the resources that everyone brings to the table, crucial for navigating the tension between the critique and imagination #SpeculativeEd #BroadenAccess

Vossoughi riffs on @SR_Toliver's contribution and the importance of NOT imagining from a blank slate because doing so perpetuates the kind of erasure that undergirds the structural oppressions we're trying to eschew. #SpeculativeEd #BroadenAccess

The second question our first presenters are wrestling with is: how do we reimagine learning towards just futures, not to give access the the broken forms of learning we have had, but to reimagine what teaching and learning can look like? #SpeculativeEd #BroadenAccess

Booker draws on her family history when looking for old tools that can be repurposed - "take what you have and make what you want out of it;" a pedagogy that transcends spaces and times and reminds us that what we have what we need to reach our goals #SpeculativeEd #BroadenAccess

Booker worries about how "just futures" may be narrowly defined in ways that can be conscripting & constricting. Going back to the guitar string analogy, Booker is committed to a vision of the future that can accommodate multiple ways of being in it #SpeculativeEd #BroadenAccess

Booker proposes "in-stage" approach to learning: overemphasized in the present, demonstration, social-pattern maintenance activity, explaining, pointing out, showing our achievements along a path that has been set out for us. #SpeculativeEd #BroadenAccess

Booker also shares "on-stage" approaches to learning as a way to think about a reciprocity that can exist between two (or more) people. Thinking about learning as an invitation of imagination and dialogue and collaboratively crafting a path forward #SpeculativeEd #BroadenAccess

Vossoughi encourages us to move away from economic discourses of learning, which emphasize workforce development, and instead embrace and reimagine an ethical discourse of learning, especially one that orients towards raising healthy generations #SpeculativeEd #BroadenAccess

Vossoughi cites examples from public media that push deficit messaging of families and family-based learning. What are the resources that we can offer as educators that can support families develop loving family and learning relationships? #SpeculativeEd #BroadenAccess

Vossoughi encourages to take up seriously the question of what the youth needs & let those answers shape our trajectories and definitions of learning. With regards to disciplinary learning, esp STEM, we should reconsider education for ethical ends #SpeculativeEd #BroadenAccess

This pandemic has made clear that a country that positions itself at the forefront of STEM research & innovation has also made its populace vulnerable by focusing STEM teaching & learning on economic and imperialistic goals, rather than ethical ones #SpeculativeEd #BroadenAccess

Vossoughi also highlights how this pandemic has exposed the ways in which learning environments have focused on teaching students on how to do school, rather than engage deeply with the questions that drive them and they find interesting. #SpeculativeEd #BroadenAccess

Booker and Vossoughi share the last question they've been wrestling with: "What have you learned about generative processes of co-design with youth, families, and communities that can help ground and cultivate imagination?" #SpeculativeEd #BroadenAccess

Booker encourages all of us to reconsider how our presence, absences, work, & practices are loci for developing and/or strengthening healthy relationships with each other and more-than-human relatives. Learning should help us develop these networks #SpeculativeEd #BroadenAccess

The conversation between Booker and Vossoughi ends, and the chat box is alit with messages of love and gratitude for Angela and Shirin. #SpeculativeEd #BroadenAccess

Q&A gets going and the first question is about how to support parents. Vossoughi offers subject-subject relations as the goal of learning and cornerstone of family-based learning relations. Rogoff's work on involving children in home practices is key #SpeculativeEd #BroadenAccess

Booker adds that "permission" to speak, express, & consider what priorities is an invaluable construct. Think about what is the priority for your children and family, & from there decide what to do. Avert the pull of ritualistic practice (eg school) #SpeculativeEd #BroadenAccess

This is an opportunity to communicate and reconsider what teaching and learning could look like in- and out-of-school settings, especially in ways that highlight and hold families' priorities and goals #SpeculativeEd #BroadenAccess

Another question comes in about ethically partnering with families for research purposes. Vossoughi and Booker ask us to consider how we can be researchers and educational partners, and even reimagining the academy and the activities that are valued #SpeculativeEd #BroadenAccess

Drawing on Baker, Kimmerer, and Boal's work, it's important to remind ourselves that people are scholars of their own lives and communities. Maybe it's about supporting families recognize the teaching/learning resources that are already around them #SpeculativeEd #BroadenAccess

How do we support families locate teaching and learning resources in their geographical spaces? From institutional partners, to community partners, to green spaces for developing healthy nature-culture relations. AND GETTING MONEY TO FAMILIES! #SpeculativeEd #BroadenAccess

[We're in the breakout rooms considering the different questions that came up during the presentation] #SpeculativeEd #BroadenAccess

We're back to the main room, ready to learn with @DrJonathanRosa about how "Schools were never normal/Learning happens everywhere: From return & recuperation to reckoning & reimagination in education" #SpeculativeEd #BroadenAccess

Rosa shares his concern with the general call to "return to normal" because it highlights the ways in which "any historical narrative is a bundle of silences" (Troulliot, 1995). Rosa focuses on the violence that comes with silencing discourses. #SpeculativeEd #BroadenAccess

While some are willing and capable of engaging in discourses about histories of violence and silences, most are not ready to think about how these histories of violence still shape presents and futures here/worldwide. Colonization = Thingification #SpeculativeEd #BroadenAccess

Rosa thinks of boundaries between curriculum areas, prescription about curricular goals, and even organizing futures through schooling as deeply connected to Césaire's *thingification* and narrow definitions of humanity (S. Wynter 2003) #SpeculativeEd #BroadenAccess

Rosa invites us to consider the Speculative in terms of "from human beings to being humans as praxis", rooted in Wynter and McKittrick's work about reimagining what it means to be human, as well as the consequences for current definitions of learning #SpeculativeEd #BroadenAccess

Rosa reflects on how crises are often heralded as new moments of renewal and opportunities to become something else, as if they were novel situations that minoritized communities and families don't already live in #SpeculativeEd #BroadenAccess

Rosa describes a situation where the public education system was the site and perpetrator of violence - a school pushing out a young person, all the labels this person was given, and the debilitating and noxious ramifications of those labels #SpeculativeEd #BroadenAccess

Rosa riffs on Povinelli's work on Economies of Abandonment and Geontologies, and how it relates to current discourses about sacrificing people's lives for the sake of economic goals and the well-being of dominant groups. #SpeculativeEd #BroadenAccess

Rosa highlights how the abandonment of minoritized communities is baked into societal institutions, and how future reformist approaches need to be rooted in abolition, eschewing historical antiblackness, settler-colonialism, heteropatariachy, et al. #SpeculativeEd #BroadenAccess

Rosa builds on the work from @anterobot and @lifeasstory on trauma and healing, to move away from social-emotional learning as ancillary and center the need for healing pedagogies that address constant violence from oppressive structures #SpeculativeEd #BroadenAccess

Drawing on @lipatel's work, Rosa encourages us to reject a purist political stance towards creating possible worlds; we *can* create something new in this moment. We need to look at Marronage: sustaining lifeways while brokering with forms of power #SpeculativeEd #BroadenAccess

Rosa reminds us that there are societies that have been shut down for years, decades, and centuries. And yet, in the wake of societal abandonment, people have come together to figure out economic, ecological, and sociological sustainability #SpeculativeEd #BroadenAccess

Rosa urges us to think deeply about how we can bring our scholarly gifts to real and meaningful community-building, especially in communities that have created spaces and movements of healing and sustainability in the wake of societal abandonment #SpeculativeEd #BroadenAccess

To end, Rosa invites us to responsibly engage with the histories and movements of communities who have had to reimagine and reinvent their lifeways, while continuing to broker with the powers that intentionally inflict violence and suffering on them #SpeculativeEd #BroadenAccess