Future Course Design
In the winter of 2021, I canceled the first two classes of my capstone seminar, “Ecocide and Utopia,” because a historic ice storm had led to weeks-long power outages in the area of Virginia where I lived. While I waited to meet with my students, some of whom were sleeping in classrooms, I added two images to the opening slides for the course: one, a ceiling fan bedecked with icicles in a home in Texas, which was suffering similar ice damage that month, and two, the smoke-and-brimstone-filled view from my brother’s apartment in San Francisco, which wildfires had turned into a scene out of Blade Runner 2049, a couple decades early. In 2025, as I write these reflections, it’s Los Angeles on fire and Louisville under ice. What was clear in 2021 is even clearer now: that in what’s left of my lifetime there will be nowhere on Earth untouched by climate disaster. So amid a bleak week, I’m thinking about how to teach in these times, and also about how to teach toward the times to come. How could a literature course prepare students for this future?
I should start by saying that in the full-time faculty positions I’ve held, I had both the responsibility and the freedom to cover far more ground than what would traditionally be considered “my area.” One of the affordances of such positions was that I could often lean into backward design on a larger scale – starting from the tools and questions I thought students might need to build a meaningful life in the world they would navigate in the years to come, rather than from any strict parameters generated by how fields are organized now. I talked about this orientation in my reflections on my Queer Literature course, where I attempted to offer students a historical framework for understanding our unfolding period of reactionary revanchism, as well as resources for flourishing in hostile political climates. Such efforts were also at the center of the first-year-seminar I taught at St. Norbert College, titled “Unlivable Worlds.”
In part because it was a first-year seminar and in part because by 2021 it was clear I was never not going to be teaching the class during times of crisis, I put a special emphasis on selecting texts that I hoped students would find both timely (providing opportunities to talk about what was going on around us) and absorbing (giving them the chance to get caught up in imaginative worlds that differed from their day-to-days). I also attempted to craft an arc that would ground fictional dystopias in the lived histories of extraction and abandonment that inform them. We started the semester with a group of texts recognizably “about” ecological disaster, too-late capitalism, and what survives the apocalypse. Short stories like Nnedi Okorafor’s “Spider the Artist” and Omar El-Akkad’s “Factory Air” allowed us to open up discussions about what we invest – both materially and imaginatively – in the current construct of “AI.” And Ling Ma’s Severance, a pandemic novel that has been a perennial favorite with my students, led to conversations about how one ends up in the center of the “world is ending” and “you have to go to work” Venn Diagram. As the semester progressed, Waubgeshig Rice’s Moon of the Crusted Snow, a novel about infrastructure collapse in a rural Anishinaabe community, served as a hinge for reframing the temporality of apocalypse. We ended the term with a mini-unit on art and activism during the AIDS pandemic, followed by a look at science fiction, the future, and figuration in Tracy K. Smith’s Life on Mars and Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival.
Again due both to the audience for the class and its content, I focused my assessments for the course on two primary goals: (1) building a sense of collective responsibility and care, and (2) enabling risks and experiments. I adapted a discussion leadership assignment developed by my brilliant colleague Mika Kennedy, which guides students in taking up the roles of preparing for, recording, and reflecting on discussion. As Mika notes in her explanation, this assignment not only allows for student questions to play a central role in shaping class conversations but also doubles as an archive students can consult if they’re not able to attend a particular session. I also used a weekly assignment I call “Critical Experiments”: short, low-stakes responses that encourage students to practice a variety of ways of paying attention to literary and visual texts. For each week, I provide a set of prompts from which students can choose, from more traditional close-reading tasks – like making the case that a seemingly insignificant detail is actually essential to overall meaning – to a range of multi-modal approaches – like designing a character alignment chart, casting a film adaptation of a text, or creating a character playlist with liner notes. At the end of the semester, students compile a portfolio of their favorite hits and misses and reflect on what they learned by trying new ways to crack open a text.
The neoliberal model of preparing students to join society revolves around training them in the skills deemed most useful to their employers. It’s a model that makes some surface sense in a political economy that passes so much of the cost of higher education onto students and their families. It’s also one that leaves the status quo of risk transfer in place. It imagines no future for students beyond employment by the very forces pillaging that future of its vital social goods. I think a pedagogical responsibility asks us to do better by our students than that: to look at the world ahead – at the violent disjunction between what people will need to survive (solidarity at an unprecedented scale) and what is being cultivated by those in power (nihilistic, authoritarian extraction by the wealthy) – and to risk something more helpful to the vulnerable, less useful to the operations of power.
Early in Mad Max: Fury Road, one of the films on the “Unlivable Worlds” syllabus, Immortan Joe finds that the characters called the Wives, whom he’d enslaved as part of his attempts to hoard scarce resources for himself, have fled the Citadel, leaving behind a message scratched into the walls of their former prison: “who killed the world?” As the effects of climate disaster spread and worsen – and as conspiracy-peddling grifters and spokespeople for authoritarian rule use the destruction to fuel culture wars – the need for a political education that helps students search for, refine, and test answers to that scrawled question is clear. So too is the degree to which students will need each other’s help to take action in response to what they learn. In comparison to the scope of those problems, one semester with one class is small; and there are hard limits (shaped by the arrangement of the institution, the sector, the society) to what any one instructor can do about the instrumentalization and monetization of learning that leads to so much student and faculty burnout. But faced with the violence of imperialism and its economy of perpetual growth and endless capture, smallness can be a tactical asset. Classrooms can be limited, local experiments in alternative arrangements: assessment structure as preparedness training, reading list as go-bag, class community as model for mutual aid. As facilitator of that experiment, what can I pack and bake in and seed that might nourish the community later, in a future we imagine can be changed?