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Short abstract

This contribution proposes speculative fabulation and design thinking "AI in Education" workshops as interventions where participants can resist the frame of inevitability and strengthen critical AI and futures literacies by reclaiming agency in shaping otherwise-possible educational futures.

Long abstract

Tech-driven solutionist imaginaries reverberating across EdTech and, increasingly, AI-higher education discourses consolidate a frame of inevitability through which technologies are experienced as shaping the horizons of educational futures. Within this frame, the hegemonic force of Big Tech casts the future as singular and foregone, foreclosing spaces in which plural futures might be imagined and brought into collective deliberation. Under such conditions, education is narrowed to quick-fix adaptation, as pedagogies and institutions are reshaped to accommodate a supposedly fait accompli future.

This contribution presents the “AI in Education” Workshop A+B series, developed and facilitated by Prof. Dr. Annette Markham, as an intervention through which educators might resist such inevitability. Workshop A is a speculative fabulation workshop organized around four “what if?” scenarios of possible future universities. Workshop B extends this through a design-thinking process in which participants develop assignment and assessment pilots for testing within existing programmes.

Drawing on 10 iterations of these workshops, I trace how they cultivate the conditions through which educators reclaim agency in imagining and working toward the enactment of otherwise-possible educational futures, while also revealing the sticking points that make imagining beyond current affective, institutional, and technological frames difficult. I further argue that these workshops can strengthen critical AI and futures literacies by cultivating a more resilient orientation – one that sustains iterative pedagogical experimentation amid shifting technological conditions while keeping educators engaged with the fundamentals and inviting them to radically re-imagine teaching and learning with the values and purposes of higher education at the forefront.