Unearthing imaginaries: drama-based pedagogy for speculative futures of AI in higher education

Abstract

Education reproduces a poverty in social imaginaries regarding technological futures. Dominant discourses of AI in education remain narrowly framed around efficiency and techno-solutionism, limiting the critical and creative engagement needed to imagine and shape alternative futures, while these technologies increasingly shape educational practice and broader societal institutions. This article explores how drama-based pedagogy combined with speculative design can unearth and expand social imaginaries about AI in higher education. Using critical pedagogy, transformative learning theory and research on futures, fiction and speculative design, we developed a 45-min workshop with university teachers at a technical university in Sweden. Participants created and performed speculative scenes envisioning AI futures in education, generating three scenarios spanning techno-centric extrapolations of current anxieties to a post-climate-collapse reimagining of learning oriented around basic survival. We reflect on how speculative design, combined with embodied drama, enables the expression of emotions and critiques of AI futures. Our analysis suggests that this creates productive conditions for challenging dominant sociotechnical imaginaries and making visible the normative assumptions embedded in current trajectories of educational technology. We contribute to critical debates on AI in education by demonstrating how arts-informed pedagogical methods can open spaces for counter-hegemonic imagining within STEM, where such approaches remain uncommon.