Sometimes you do a project and think it’s done. You archive it, link to it from your blog, and move on. And then, years later, it finds a second life you never anticipated.

A few years ago, during the pandemic, I was part of one of the most enjoyable projects I’ve been involved with. Working with the Center for Science and the Imagination (CSI) at ASU, Slate magazine, and New America (with support from the Principled Innovation initiative), we commissioned three acclaimed speculative fiction writers to imagine the future of learning. Simon Brown wrote “Speaker,” a story about nonhuman communication and what it means to truly listen. Leigh Alexander wrote “The Void,” exploring information scarcity in a world of information overload. And Shiv Ramdas wrote “The Trolley Solution,” about a professor competing with an AI to see who is the better teacher. (If that last one sounds eerily prescient… well, speculative fiction does that sometimes.)

Each story was paired with a scholarly response essay—Iveta Silova responded to Simon’s story, Andrea Thomer to Leigh’s, and Katina Michael to Shiv’s. I got to moderate four webinars: one for each story-and-response pair, and a culminating conversation with all three authors. It was a genuine pleasure. I got to hang out (virtually, of course) with these wonderful writers. You can read all the stories, and watch the archived videos at Speculative Fiction & The Future of Learning.

This was also my first project with CSI, a group I have come to love collaborating with over the years. (For instance, this project on the future of orchestras, which was both the most frustrating and fulfilling projects I have ever been part of). Anyway, I digress.

As must be clear, this Learning Futures and Speculative Fiction project holds a special place for me on multiple levels.

And then… there it sat. Some YouTube videos, three published stories, the response essays, a blog post. Done, I thought.

Till a special issue of Learning, Media and Technology came along. It was too good a chance to pass up. I reached out to Nicole Oster, whose research interests are squarely in speculative fiction and futures thinking. It seemed like the perfect fit for her to take the lead. And she did. We went back to this “data” (I use the term loosely, since none of this had been planned as a research project) and found there was something genuinely worth saying about how creative fiction, scholarly analysis, and public dialogue can work together as a form of public scholarship.

The result is a paper that uses terms like “heteroglossia” and “internally persuasive discourse” (thank you, Bakhtin) to examine how these three very different communities—fiction writers, academics, and webinar audiences—engaged in productive dialogue about learning futures. We developed (with Nicole doing much of the heavy lifting) a three-stage analytical framework to make sense of it all. It’s a fun read, if I say so myself.

None of this would have happened without the many people who made the original project possible. I’ve written about the project in more detail in an earlier blog post. My thanks to all of them.

Here is the full reference and abstract:

Oster, N., & Mishra, P. (2026). Reimagining learning futures through lenses of speculative fiction, scholarly analysis, and public dialogue. Learning, Media and Technology. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2026.2657355

Abstract: This paper explores an innovative approach to understanding educational futures through the Future Tense Fiction: Learning Futures project. The project paired three science fiction stories exploring technology’s role in education with scholarly response essays and public webinars, creating spaces for generative dialogue across creative, academic, and public communities. Using a three-stage analytical approach (descriptive characterization, thematic analysis, and Bakhtinian interpretation) we examine how fiction writers, academics, and audiences engaged in productive dialogue about educational transformation. The study reveals dynamic interplay where fiction writers challenge dominant narratives, academics provide theoretical frameworks, and audiences contribute lived experiences and catalyze unexpected dialogue directions. Thematic analysis identifies interaction patterns (reinforcing, enriching, complicating) and contextual engagement themes, while Bakhtinian analysis reveals how productive tensions between authoritative and internally persuasive discourses generate deeper insights. The three-step framework, combining creative fiction, scholarly response, and public dialogue, offers one case for structuring conversations that honor multiple forms of knowledge. This approach demonstrates potential for bridging creative, academic, and public discourse about complex societal challenges, suggesting a replicable method adaptable to other domains beyond education.