Edge School: A Speculative Design Fiction

Abstract

This short piece makes no major contentions, offers no proofs, presents no evidence and advances no arguments. There is no ‘learning outcome’ for the reader who is simply invited to read with no strings attached. What follows is a short story of a teacher (who is also a student) in an imagined higher education future. Whilst this future alludes to education at scale, unbundled and unchecked, there are also hatches opened onto deschooling, rewilding and personal growth. The approach employed is design fiction, a form of speculative inquiry that has been the focus of increasing attention of late in educational research and scholarship (Houlden and Veletsianos 2022; Ross 2022; Suoranta et al. 2022). Such approaches are useful to explore not just new ideas but indeed the forms in which we express them. They may allow us to stray a little further than we normally would. We may end up on the edge of something, transitioning between one thing and another, feeling confused about what our true purpose was. Or, as we wander out to the cusp, we may suddenly come across something growing there, something deeply connective, rising up as it always does, from the very ground of our being.