This study aims to introduce curricular future-making as a framework for transformative professional development (PD).
Drawing on the 2024 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer Institute, Human/Nature: An Exploration of Place, Stories, and Climate Futurisms, the authors examine how immersive, place-based and speculative approaches can empower educators to imagine literacy not as content delivery, but as a regenerative, socioecological practice. This practice includes the use of cli-fi literature, literacy unbound and other approaches that foreground restorying, or the critical reinterpretation of narratives the authors take for granted (Thomas and Stornaiuolo, 2016).
Conceptual piece includes participant vignettes, anonymous surveys, and curricular action plans. The authors argue that speculative literacy practices such as climate futurism position teachers as curricular world-builders, imagining alternative futures with their students. Collective imagination is not escapism, but agency.
The NEH does not allow research as part of Summer Institutes.
What does participatory, embodied PD look like? The authors provide an example of an NEH Institute that invites teachers to see curriculum as world-building for hopeful futures.
Federally funded programs are essential to innovative, experimental work with teachers. This institute created the space for teachers to fully immerse in the content and ideas.
This study frames PD as a speculative practice, or “speculative PD.” The authors see curriculum design as similar to world-building, which is part of science fiction writing. The authors also push back on the term “empirical” and position teacher and educator voices as experience that counts as knowledge. This study presents a successful model for how to design transformative, immersive PD that opens up possibilities.
