by 2025-2027 Associate Member Jody Langan
(part 1 of this blog post can be found here)
Activating Imaginations Through Speculative Fiction: A Unit of Study Reflection
For the past two years in a row, I have invited eight and nine year old students to imagine future and alternative worlds to the one we are currently living in through a speculative fiction writing unit. This is work that I plan on continuing to do and develop in future years. For the third unit of our year, I do follow our school’s scripted curriculum plan that has students writing opinion pieces on how to improve their schools, communities, and worlds, and our fiction work follows this beautifully. By the end of the opinion writing unit, students have a strong sense of what they want, and don’t want, to see in their communities and world. From there, we start to build.
A Brief Scope of Our Speculative Fiction Writing Unit
For our final unit of the year, I follow our school’s scripted curriculum unit on writing series fiction… kind of. We are writing fiction, and we write in a series, but we also build in our own identities to the storylines and world-build in writing clubs to imagine better, brighter, futures.
To launch, we dug into what speculative fiction is, and why this might be important for us to be curious about and try out in our own writing. We studied a couple mentor texts, and did some initial drafting together after watching the first few minutes of Disney’s wordless short called Smash and Grab, writing our own endings to what we believed might happen next.
We followed the writing process and began with a heavy amount of planning and rehearsing, beginning with using genre-based thinking jobs to build a skeleton of a story, and then choosing an organizer to rehearse and plan out how the story might go. Last year, my class was super invested in Minecraft, so we veered towards writing fantasy worlds. This year, my class dove into learning about the Artemis II mission, so we veered towards writing sci-fi.
As students planned their first books, one of the challenges presented to them was tapping into their own identities to be a core part of the plot. We studied our identity maps that we kept and updated across the year, and they were tasked with choosing a part of their identity that could solve a problem in their fictional world.
During the next bend, or part, of our unit, students were grouped into writing clubs of 4-5 students. I did choose their clubs, and mixed them up in various ways to create unique heterogenous groups with the rationale that, when building new systems and worlds, it is important to have diverse perspectives and people who think differently than we do. Only then will we create something spectacular! Their first task as a club was to create a new world that worked towards solving some of our real-world problems and offered something that is better than our current world.
Navigating the planning in writing clubs provided opportunities to practice a multitude of skills including providing claims with supporting reasons, negotiating, voting on decisions, building upon each others’ ideas, and elaboration. Writing clubs were the meatiest part of this unit, requiring students to not only participate in vision work, but to negotiate this future world together collectively. That is hard work for grown-ups, too!
This is the part of the work, not only of this unit, but the at root of my ‘why’ I teach, that I will return to time and time again with students. We, collectively as a society, cannot shy away from the hard work of coming together to vision and world-build. I invite young students to do this work as well because (1) students creative capacities and powerful and need to be honored – they should already be at the table with leaders as we plan for the future, (2) visioning and building together are skills that take time and practice to develop and evolve, so we must invite young children to be a part of this work as they grow into future generations, and (3) students are developing as writers as well – this work can fit into a scripted curriculum and cover all state standards with just a bit of revision and creativity.
Collective world-building required a lot of background work and a heavy amount of conferring on my end. I intentionally kept some of our charts, conversation notes, and student writing pieces from both our previous opinion writing unit as well as some of the content from a civil rights unit they engaged in with my co-teacher. Student identity maps also helped clubs navigate how their characters might solve problems with the strengths of their identities, and what values their worlds would be built upon. We had a few shared agreements as writing clubs began to discuss and sketch out their worlds:
- All decisions require consensus, and if there is disagreement, rationale and further conversation need to happen, followed by a majority vote to push an idea through.
- All features of the new worlds need to be improvements to our current society/world.
- Worlds need to stay in the sci-fi realm and not meld into fantasy.
As clubs imagined together, they created mixed-media collages and posters to share their ideas visually.
Once students collectively built their new world, they planned the skeleton of the third book in their series together, using genre-based thinking jobs to plan out the characters, setting(s), problems, attempts to resolve, resolutions, and lessons learned. From there, students chose a way to plan their individual stories that worked best for them.
We had already covered how authors plan across a series to make it feel cohesive, but for their third books, we talked about ending and beginnings that tie stories together. For their third book, I offered a creative constraint: their characters would begin the story in their original worlds, but they would portal somehow to their new world that their writing club designed to meet up with their writing club’s characters – how that would all work was up to each individual author. I used Lift by Minh Lê and Dan Santat as a mentor text for this portal work. Students accepted the challenge of the creative constraint and generated some powerful beginnings! 
Our unit, and school year, soon came to a close and we wrapped up this sci-fi series fiction unit with a publishing invitation to create a series box to hold their books in! We covered cereal boxes with paper, and studied boxes from some of our favorite series to see what we might add to our own!
I’ll be working to continue to develop this speculative fiction work with my students… there is more to be said and done. Their world-building deserves an audience far beyond the walls of our classroom, and I can’t wait to see how this grows. And so, I consider the political acts of invitations such as these, and understand the weight that stories hold in our development and ways of thinking and being. Society must embrace that the imagination is the only thing that allows us to develop empathy through the ability to see ourselves in someone else’s shoes. Imagination is the only thing that will liberate us from old ways of being.
References
Arthur, Krystal – What Is Literature? https://harpers.org/archive/2014/03/what-is-literature/
Reynolds, Jason – Fortifying Imagination https://onbeing.org/programs/jason-reynolds-fortifying-imagination/?fbclid=IwAR2dThHWtqhriVJe7cNwAuu6QpVPt_xjLdZnn_3pUg4VFOSn04fF5yNlIU0
Rundell, K. (2019). Why you should read childrens books, even though you are so old and wise. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
Thomas, E. E. (2016). Stories Still Matter: Rethinking the Role of Diverse Children’s Literature Today. Language Arts, 94(2), 112–119.
