BC TEAL is proud to present our 2025 Annual Conference: Disruptive Educational Practices: Strategies for Transformation.
Educators shine in times of change to face unexpected challenges. This is when creativity flourishes by combining proven practices with fresh and innovative ideas. These times call for transformation which can be rooted in tradition or experience, or it can arise through unexplored approaches. The synthesis of old and new ideas drives meaningful progress. Join other insightful and creative educators as we flourish within the power of our community.
We are no doubt at a crossroads within the field of EAL. With rapidly changing social policy, technological advances, and political tides turning, how do we manage the hopes and anxieties of our students as well as ourselves in the classroom? Is there a way to harness education to enact true change given these tumultuous times? How do we disrupt the present from the past to create a more socially just future? The Black poet and activist Langston Hughes tells us “to hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken winged bird that cannot fly.” As educators, we cannot let go of our dreams of a better future. More importantly, we can collectively dream with our students as a powerful way to resist oppression. As Garcia & Mirra (2023) write, educators and students can “engage in joyful social dreaming to confront injustice.” This workshop will introduce two learning theories to practically bring the dreams of our students into our teaching: futures literacy and speculative pedagogy. Miller (2018) defines futures literacy as the “acquired…skills needed to decide why and how to use… imagination to introduce the non-existent future into the present.” Futures literacy is used globally across disciplines, contexts, andpopulations to enact social change. We will discuss the three tenants of futures literacy and how they fit practically into our instruction: 1) Using the Future to Rethink the Present 2) Fostering Diverse Futures 3) Agency and Empowerment (UNESCO, n.d.). Bringing ideas of futures literacy into education specifically, we will discuss the techniques of speculative pedagogy, which entails students imagine the yet-to-come—a different present that what currently exists (Garcia & Mirra, 2023). Speculative pedagogy enacts futures literacy in the classroom through three techniques (Garcia & Mirra, 2023): a)Decentering the global and (re)emphasizing local, historical, and culturally relevant relationships b)“Iterative, practice-based” learning (Garcia & Mirra, 2023) c)Use of the imagination to enact social change We will look at relevant examples of how speculative pedagogy can be brought into the EAL classroom and what educators need to consider when introducing futures literacy and speculative pedagogy into their practice. Plenty of time will be given to participants to engage in creative discussion and lesson planning. Through exploration of both speculative pedagogy and futures literacy, workshop participants will walk away with inspirational techniques to explore and enact collective dreams for a better future for our students, ourselves, the Land, and community. References Garcia, A. & Mirra, N. (2023). “Always a war story”: Speculative pedagogies and breaking the narrative of multicultural education possibilities. In A. Garcia & N. Mirra (Eds.) Speculative Pedagogy: Designing equitable educational futures (pp. 1-8). Teachers College Press. Hughes, L. (1995). The voice of Langston Huges [Album]. Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. Miller, R. (2018). Futures literacy: transforming the future. In R. Miller (Ed.) Transforming the Future: Anticipation in the 21st Century (pp. 1-12). Taylor & Francis. UNESCO. (n.d.) Futures literacy & Foresight. https://www.unesco.org/en/futures-literacy
Instructor / Student, Simon Fraser University / Vancouver Community College
Jennifer Cummins is an EAL educator with almost two decades of experience. She is a doctoral student at SFU in the Languages, Cultures, and Literacies department.
