Hollar, Jim. Deciphering the Future in the High School Science Fiction

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Deciphering the Future in the High School Science Fiction Classroom: A Critical Multicultural & Critical Qualitative Approach

By Jim Hollar

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy (Curriculum & Instruction)

at the UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON 2013

Date of final oral examination: 5/15/13 The dissertation is approved by the following members of the Final Oral Committee: Gloria Ladson-Billings, Professor, Curriculum & Instruction Michael Apple, Professor, Curriculum & Instruction Mary Louise Gomez, Professor, Curriculum & Instruction Craig Werner, Professor, Afro-American Studies Tracy Curtis, Professor, Afro-American Studies

America is woven of many strands. I would recognise them and let it so remain. Our fate is to become one, and yet many. This is not prophecy, but description. -Ralph Ellison

The canon is…the name for that body of texts which best performs in the sphere of culture the work of legitimating the prevailing social order.... To understand their content is largely to accept the world-view of the socially dominant class. -Arnold Krupat

Racism is not historical. It’s futuristic. It is not going away. It is being refined. It is weaponized through deceit, secrecy, and violence, in that order. Its chief tools are not clubs, bullets, or nooses, but words. -Harry Allen

Table of Contents Chapter 1: Introduction 1 I. Entering the Space of the Problem 1 II. Statement of the Problem & Research Questions 5 III. Purpose of Study 7 V. Definition of Terms: Science Fiction, Fantasy, Speculative Fiction and Afrofuturism 8 Chapter 2: Theory & Methodology 13 I. (Un)Theoretical Frameworks: Cultural Deficit and Culture of Poverty 13 II. Critical Multiculturalism as Theoretical Framework 20 Chapter 3: Methodology & Data Analysis 34 I. Introduction: Qualitative Research & The “Other” 34 II. Critical Qualitative Research Methodology 36 III. Research Narrative 44 Chapter 4: Findings & Implications 88 I. Describing & Explaining System Relationships 88 II. Challenges & Limitations of Research 99 III. Implications for Practice & Replication 103 IV. So What(‘s Next)? 126 Epilogue: Reflection from Cooperating Teacher, Mr. Rain 135 References 143 Supplementary Materials 151 Research Observation Journal 151 Lesson Plans for Three-Day Unit on Ray Bradbury’s “The Pedestrian” (1951) 156 Lesson Plans for Multicultural Science Fiction Unit 161 Defining Terms 184 Interview Document 191 Interview Questions 192

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

I. ENTERING THE SPACE OF THE PROBLEM

True to the spirit of science fiction, I want to travel into the future of this dissertation and deal with the “So what?” question immediately. One might consider that an intervention into the curriculum of the science fiction high school elective does little to ameliorate the serious issues that face students and teachers, specifically within the contemporary context of high-stakes testing and shrinking numbers of electives offered in schools. One irony here though is the amount of literature that can be called “speculative” used in middle school Language Arts classrooms is on the rise in the last several years.

Regardless, to the question of what difference can my undertaking here make, I would say first that the curricula of secondary school electives are an important site for reform since they are often unhindered by district mandates and standardized assessments that strangle both teacher and student creativity. Although I must acknowledge the difficulty that this contemporary context today in schools represents, this opening in elective courses remains a space to take advantage of.

Once such change occurs in the small corners of our schools, like a computer virus perhaps, the affects have a chance of spreading and, perhaps, of becoming permanent. Thus, my hope is this particular kind of reform will serve as a model for other teacher-researchers who wish to make use of the curricular freedom that does still exist in our schools. Another irony we see is that even though the Science Fiction elective has this freedom, it has undergone very little change over the last three decades. A quick, yet

2 imperfect example of this stagnation is the anthology used for the specific course my research focuses on: it was published in 1983. We must ask ourselves why a course that to a great degree deals with the future, is still stuck in the past.

In many schools the science fiction curriculum looks as it did when these courses become more widespread in the 1970s. Teachers of science fiction still use anthologies that order science fiction in historical terms. Such a curricular construction supports a particular type of paradigm that is taken for granted as semester follows semester. This paradigm presents an ordering of the future as one envisioned by white male authors and too often received by adolescent white male students. Thus, what is left out of these spaces are both the “alien” writers and students of color. Whether or not this curricular stagnation and the class segregation that follows is the result of more covert controls or simply laziness on the part of too many teachers will be difficult to discover through these efforts here. However, I want to think about what this “normal” science fiction curriculum may tell us about larger concerns of how schools construct certain students in certain ways. More specifically, I want to use this space to consider what beliefs about students of color have made it possible for the science fiction curriculum to remain so unchanged.

If we believe that one of the functions of the school is to prepare students for the future, then science fiction literature and the specific elective takes on considerable importance as the only classroom where the future is explicitly discussed. So what does it mean then when it is these classrooms where we see very few students of color. The excuse given, although perhaps in more sanitized language, is usually that students of color aren’t interested in the future. And it is such thinking that offers my second counter

3 to the near future “So what?” question. Simply, my work here seeks to connect a stagnant curriculum to how culture of poverty and deficit thinking notions still exist in schools centering on students of color. Following this, we must consider such attitudes as part of the larger construction of adolescents in our schools and how these attitudes represent larger societal fears focused on the future and people of color.

Thus, what I recount here is my mission: a voyage into the strange world of the

American high school, specifically into the Science Fiction elective classroom. This current study puts into practice what has been for me largely theoretical. My mission is one of curricular intervention to transform how students, particularly those of color, envision their own futuristic missions. Although all students can benefit from the curricular transformation I seek, my study strives to serve the too often miseducated and undereducated students of color, particularly adolescent African-Americans and Latino/a students. My expectation is that including this material will be another way multicultural education can both empower teachers with effective curricula and reach out to students of color with material in which they see their futures. Presently, students of color are often cut off from envisioning a successful future by shortsighted assessment policies and ever- narrowing curricula. Instead, what my study seeks is a better way to communicate to students of color the potentiality of their future. To do this, teachers must work to transform the places where our curricula remain blind to the future as a place to not only address matters of science and technology, but also to interrupt and interrogate our

“knowledge” of gender, sexuality, class, and especially, race.

Although there are areas of concern for how authors of color are used (and misused) within English/Language Arts curricula across grade levels, the majority of high

4 school science fiction reading lists portray a clear exclusion of authors of color. Looking over various high school English course catalogs, one quickly notices the dominance of

“Science Fiction and Fantasy” as a course title. It is the preference for these terms, consciously or not, which helps to maintain this “imaginative” curriculum as a space still reserved for white male authors. For example, the science fiction elective offered at the high school I taught at for five years offers the following as a reading list: 1984, The

Andromeda Strain, Anthem, Brave New World, Dandelion Wine, Day of the Triffids, The

Hobbit, Journey to the Center of the Earth, The Martian Chronicles, The Terminal Man, and The Time Machine. Moreover, such syllabi seemingly have an aversion to anything resembling a racial and gendered theme. Although Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s

Tale has made it into some science fiction reading lists, the vast majority fails to contain books that examine gender and sexism, much less race and racism.

When envisioned in the standard science fiction curriculum, the future is a place of deepening class stratification, destructive technology, dwindling natural resources, and despotic governments. These are of course important concerns. However, when discussing the future within schools, we must include both explicit and implicit examinations of race and racism. Moreover, a majority of this discussion must originate from the narratives of people of color. Too often, the future is presented from the point of view of the white male. One problem with such an envisioning is how off-putting this might seem to students of color, as well as female students. This envisioning then creates another way students of color are implicitly excluded from imagining their own futures by limited curricula. The fact that this same white male future abounds within the larger

5 culture, depicted in films and television shows, makes the exclusions within schools all the more troublesome.

Science fiction is nothing if not a place for the imagination. But what we see too often in these courses is a narrowing of the imagination based on what many deem as canonical in terms of authors and themes. What follows is an enthusiastic effort to help convince teachers that such continued lack of imaginative vision merely repeats the mistakes of exclusion we have made in countless classrooms, textbooks, and curricula.

The effect of this intervention will offer teachers a reasoned and researched language to include more powerful material into their own classrooms.

II. STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM & RESEARCH QUESTIONS

This study builds upon the efforts to re-envision research within education by such scholars as Carol D. Lee and Gloria Ladson-Billings. For example, in a 2003 piece titled “Why We Need to Re-Think Race and Ethnicity in Education Research,” Lee says

“Some ethnic minority students are negatively situated by the structure of schools…This negative positioning can lead some to perceive tensions between their identities as members of a community and what they view as the demands of schools.” Responding to

Lee’s call here, my work here centers on the assumption that such positioning can be viewed within schools. More specifically, this project will focus on understanding how students of color are both excluded from the future in science fiction classrooms.

However, as Ladson-Billings points out, “We know that the categories we use to describe also delimit,” this project will be especially sensitive to concerns that such research does not reinscribe the differences we seek to interrupt and interrogate. In order to accomplish

6 this delicate balance, a careful consideration of how untheoretical frameworks still influence contemporary schooling beliefs and practices will be a part of my efforts.

Although reconfigured in contemporary educational discourse, notions of a culture of poverty and deficit thinking still function within our schools. The students (and families) who tend to embody these spaces are often of color and set against the dominant culture represented by an idealized white middle class student. These two groups are separated physically and figuratively through discourses that operate in a variety of different locations within schools. One such area of separation involves how schools think different students think differently about their future. For example, school employees will often have preconceived notions of how students (and their families) are orientated towards learning new skills, saving for financial security, and delaying immediate pleasure for a future happiness (Valenzuela 1999). And so often, it is students of color who are deemed as not interested in acquiring job skills for a future occupation, in saving money or investing for the future, and postponing enjoyment for a later, more substantial reward.

Behind these ways of seeing certain students as at-future-risk are many assumptions about how our society thinks about the future, and more specifically, how people of color will impact this future. We must question where this way of understanding the relationship between the present and the future comes from? How do such classifications affect students seen as outside this idealized way of thinking about the future? Does how we ask students to “think about your future” reinscribe the culture of poverty and deficit thinking notions that find students of color as lacking a future

7 orientation? To help me consider the above issues, I have formed two central questions that will guide my project:

1. How is the future constructed in Science Fiction curricula & classrooms and how can this representation exclude students of color as well as discussions surrounding race and racism?

2. To what extant can a “multiculturalized” speculative fiction course interrogate the structuring of both the race-erased classroom and the future it constructs by enabling the agency of students of color to envision their own futures within these spaces?

In order to investigate these notions of how students of color are encouraged (and discouraged) to think about their future, it makes sense to direct this study to where the future is discussed the most in schools: the Science Fiction elective classroom. Thus, my study takes place in Mr. Rain’s two Science Fiction classes during the spring semester of

2012 at North High School in a medium-sized city in Wisconsin.

III. PURPOSE OF STUDY

The general purpose of this research study is to observe how race and racism are discussed in both the future and present tense in the high school Science Fiction elective classroom. Such observations take place during an entire semester and involve two sections of the Science Fiction course offered by the English Department at North High.

Thus, the study involves approximately 55 high school students who have chosen to take this elective as a part of their graduation requirements.

In addition to observing, I also act as a guest lecturer to integrate a broader selection of multicultural science fiction literature, specifically, literature considered to be

Afrofuturist. Basically, Afrofuturist is speculative fiction by African and African-

American authors that tends to pay more attention to issues of race and racism than does the standard canon of science fiction. The aim of such integration is three fold. The first goal is to expand a curriculum of literature considered by many to be dominated by both male and white writers and readers. Secondly, such an expansion aims to welcome a broader student population into the Science Fiction classroom that otherwise may believe such "literature of the future" does not speak to them or perhaps, for them. Lastly, through this broadening of the curriculum, the study seeks to engage students in discussions around race and racism. Although perhaps difficult, such discussions are an essential part to living in an increasingly diverse world.

The study suggests that students will respond with some frustration to a science fiction class that moves away from concerns centering on technology. However, it is also my belief that given the quality of the Afrofuturist literature to be used, these same students will come to understand how important a number of other issues are to their future.

V. DEFINITION OF TERMS: SCIENCE FICTION, FANTASY, SPECULATIVE FICTION AND AFROFUTURISM

Before moving on to Chapter 2, an effort should be made to define science fiction and its relatives, fantasy and speculative fiction. Such attention is imperative since the way science fiction and fantasy are defined and then brought into curricula are part of the exclusion problem. The clearest way I have read to separate science fiction and fantasy is

Isaac Asimov’s explanation: which says that science fiction, by relying on science, is possible; fantasy, with no such requirement, is more often than not, impossible. This tension between the predictive futures for science fiction and the supernatural wonder of fantasy is one that continues however. Such conversations have led many to prefer the term speculative fiction, which allows for an element of social commentary that can often be underwhelming in science fiction and fantasy. This aspect of social commentary marks speculative fiction as soft science fiction for some. Regardless, speculative fiction is also considered an umbrella term to bring together, not only science fiction and fantasy, but also other sub-genres like supernatural, horror, and alternative history.

Clearly, this notion of social commentary strikes a chord for my work to remake what has long been the curricular construction of Science Fiction elective. The inclusion of social commentary can transform how such literature is often used within the schools.

Speculative fiction as a classifier has the potential to mean much more to students than either science fiction or fantasy. However, changing the name of the course will only take us so far. We must also avoid curricular constructions that privilege white male authors as the lens through which students are asked to envision the future. In order to do so, I will need to discuss the concept of Afrofuturism in detail.

Although its literary ancestry can be traced back for more than 150 years, the term

“Afrofuturism” was first used in 1993 by cultural critic Mark Dery. (Martin Delany’s

1857 novel Blake, or The Huts in America, is generally considered the first work by an

African-American which included science fiction elements.) Dery, in an introduction to a collection of interviews with the African-American science-fiction writer, Samuel R.

Delany, and cultural scholars Tricia Rose and Greg Tate, writes

speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African- American concerns in the context of 20th century technoculture--and more generally, African American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future –might, for want of a better term, be called Afrofuturism (Barr 8).

Since then, a number of cultural and literary scholars, including Alondra Nelson, Isiah

Lavender III, and Catherine S. Ramirez, have kept Dery’s term, yet sought a better definition.

Diaspora) is an essential theme for Afrofuturist authors in exploring our future. Although a thematic interrogation of technological advancement is significant within much science fiction, Afrofuturism allows a perspective, both historical and contemporary, which is often absent within the curriculum.

Still, other scholars have worked to reshape Dery’s initial Afrofuturism concept and have succeeded in including thematic elements beyond what Prof. Lavender III called the “intersections of black experience and technology” (Lavender 192). For example, Professor Catherine Ramirez (who teaches a class involving Afrofuturist literature and film at the University of California in Santa Cruz) writes that Afrofuturist

11 texts “use science fiction themes, such as abduction, slavery, displacement, and alienation, to renarrate the past, present, and the future of the African diaspora” (Ramirez

186). There are more contemporary voices engaging with Afrofuturism, but the ones above map how the term has grown into an awkward, yet purposeful, literary adolescence.

Thus, it is into a space of reconsideration and expansion I enter the Afrofuturism conversation. In the following section I will engage with the above scholars in order to better understand for myself how Afrofuturism can help teach actual adolescents. Dery’s technological focus was an obvious starting point. He aptly acknowledges the tradition of signification so deeply a part of the African American literary tradition. Also, as “cogs in the machine” of American industry, African-Americans have long been subjected to technology in a way that makes this first conception of Afrofuturism appallingly appropriate. However, Dery’s focus on technology is too restrictive; much the same way, divisions exist in the larger speculative fiction genre between advocates of “hard” and

“soft” science fiction. Just as the larger genre has more to say than how technology will impact our future, so does Afrofuturism. Surely, when we ponder our future it is of more than visions of jetpack backpacks brought to us by “Jansport.”

Undoubtedly, Afrofuturism has a “socially responsible role to play” (Ellison 581).

This role has clearly expanded since Dery, and I hope to continue such efforts by

“hacking” Afrofuturism into school curricula. Although Dery’s definition of

Afrofuturism has its limitations, the complex interplay between African-Americans and technology should remain in a more expansive definition. Specifically, a great deal of potential exists for this relationship to be examined as a part of an Afrofuturist

12 curriculum. Dery’s technologically centered considerations could be used to move

Afrofuturism into larger school-wide interdisciplinary subjects like Math and Science.

Such across the curriculum connections assist programs seeking to increase the success of students of color in these fields. This Afrofuturism can act as a counter to the imagined futures of science fiction literature and films where race is made invisible (or just simply corrected with “Wite-Out”)

CHAPTER 2: THEORY & METHODOLOGY

I. (UN)THEORETICAL FRAMEWORKS: CULTURAL DEFICIT AND CULTURE OF POVERTY

Although tremendously persuasive work has been done to show how notions of a culture of poverty and deficit thinking infect our schools, two crucial points still must be made (Valencia 1991). The first is that this kind of thinking remains pervasive, not only in long-standing school policies, but also in what some call reform. The second, yet certainly related point, is another central focus of this paper: there exists a space within the culture of poverty and deficit discourse that has yet to be critiqued sufficiently. This space involves how certain students are perceived as lacking the proper future-orientation as a result of their race and/or environment. In order to understand how such thinking has traveled into contemporary reform, I read through several of the primary documents that popularized cultural deficit notions and focused on where and how this future-orientation was considered. For example, this from Oscar Lewis’ foundational treatise, “The Culture of Poverty”:

…by the time slum children are aged six or seven, they have usually absorbed the basic values and attitudes of their subculture and are not psychologically geared to take full advantage of the changing conditions or increased opportunities that may occur in their lifetime (188).

Here, Lewis is blaming the ‘slum’ student for not being able to understand the future advancement inherently possible within our schools and larger society. We see this same discourse today, however in more coded language that describes low-income students and students of color as unmotivated and fatalistic.

Another step in considering the future as a site to place cultural deficits was

Edward Banfield’s The Unheavenly City in 1970. In these three passages, Banfield moves

14 us closer to understanding how certain students are marked in schools as not able to act correctly upon their future:

[An individual] is lower class if he is incapable of conceptualizing the future or controlling his impulses and is therefore obliged to live from moment to moment (p. 48).

Lower-class poverty, by contrast, is "inwardly" caused by psychological inability to provide for the future, and all that this inability implies (p. 126).

The lower class person cannot as a rule be given much training because he will not accept it. He lives for the moment, and learning to perform a task is a way of providing for the future. If the training process is accompanied by immediate rewards to the trainee-if it is "fun" or if he is paid while learning-the lower-class person may accept training (139).

Although the idealized (and dominant) culture is separated from the culture of poverty in many ways, the distinction Banfield makes above is essential in determining what kinds of social reforms are worthwhile and which are not. This notion of the future considers the ways in which one’s orientation towards work, investing in education and financial security, and even a view of pleasure, are all found to be absent in the ‘lower-classes.’

Thus, locked within a culture of poverty, these people supposedly aren’t interested in acquiring job skills for a future occupation, don’t save money or invest for the future, and can’t delay pleasure for a more substantive reward in the future.

These culture or community-wide deficiencies travel into our schools through policies and reforms, but also impact the day-to-day interactions between teachers and students. In Subtractive Schooling: U.S.-Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring,

Angela Valenzuela writes of U.S.-born Mexican students being subjected to the

“uncaring student prototype” (1999). Valenzuela’s work details teachers who find deficits in how their students undervalue education, but are unwilling to question how such

15 attitudes could be simply a defense mechanism. We see many instances where this deficit thinking is inscribed on both low-income students and students of color. What is even more insidious perhaps is that such thinking continues to be passed along generation after generation under the banner of educational reform.

It would be hard to argue with the proposition that a majority of education reform revolves around understandings of mandates and alternatives. Indeed, schools are transformed (or not) based on how we extend and retract choice as a kind of lever.

Whether it is in mandating high-stakes assessments that subtract funds away from other school programs or in offering school alternatives, such as charter schools that parents select, the matter of choice is central to how educational reform is implemented. And of course, choices always involve the future since tomorrow is impacted by the decisions we make today. Here, I am particularly interested in how families with students of color are forced to orbit around the constantly shifting gravitation of choice (and its opposite) in contemporary educational reform. Taking the examples above, we see that choice and how such decisions are seen to affect the future for students of color are operationalized within schools that serve (or pretend to serve) students of color.

It is my contention that much of current reform requires of families of color to make very different kinds of choices than other parents and that such differences exist because educators tend to see these families as having less of an ability to enact their future correctly. Instead of questioning the social policies that make certain futures less assured than others, we use this uncertainty as a reason to extend and retract choice for students of color differently than for other students who are deemed to somehow have more control over their future. Thus, we tend to see students of color as worthy of our

16 efforts to control them. In this sense then, the student of color is a student of our future, not their own. But it is through a closer look at the choices made available to students of color where we see some depressingly familiar ideas. Sadly, such distinctions surrounding which students are able to choose their future and which are not show that deficit thinking and culture of poverty notions are alive and well.

Much like a parent telling their child to “act their age,” teachers have particular behaviors in mind when we tell students to “think about their future.” In this sense, both statements seek to govern; however, in schools there is this quality of choice that seems unique. We ask students rhetorically, “Don’t you want to be successful?” and hope they will choose to do so and act accordingly. This particular social contract has been in place, although unwritten, for centuries. Essentially, it is that if you behave, you will get this education that will benefit the rest of your life. And if students don’t sign this contract in the ways we expect, we fear for their future. But if these are students of color, such a question of the future is perhaps much more complicated than the teacher understands. It is not simply a matter of imploring a student of color to work hard; it also implies that a just system of meritocracy exists for them (as it very well may have existed for the teacher). What I seek here is not to have teachers avoid the future as it relates to the present for students of color. However, teachers must be careful to assume that just because a student of color isn’t as “future-oriented” as we want them to be, that does not mean the student has made the choice to fail.

We must also examine what choices have already been made for students of color within a society that constructs inequity in the present and for the future. What we do far too of often in schools is set up a certain way students have to act and think. And then

17 any behaviors or thoughts that run against our image are deemed as evidence of some kind of cultural deficit. The history of this jump to exclusion thinking is one that would take far too long to recount here. Moreover, scholars far more capable than me have dismantled this history. But again, I would stress that this concept of how the “future” as a language of exclusion is used against students of color remains a space where reforms are simply cultural deficit and cultural of poverty theories repackaged.

One such example is the 2003 book, No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in

Learning. In this deeply troubled, yet sadly prescient reform text, Abigail and Stephan

Thernstrom seem to serve as two of the possible birthers to this particular contemporary repackaging. The Thernstroms contend that standards-based testing and charter schools are the way to solve our educational woes. Consider the following from No Excuses:

These schools also aim to transform the culture of their students…When it comes to academic success, members of some ethnic and racial groups are culturally luckier than others…Family messages don’t always mesh well with the objectives of schools…Schools can do much to close the racial gap; students, however, have to do their part: coming to school on time, attending every class, listening with their full attention, burning the midnight oil (4-7).

Here we see the veneer of common sense shattering on the floor. Sadly however, in the years since its publication, these ideas have gained even further purchase in the minds of politicians and so-called reformers. But again, what is disheartening is the book’s success in (re)introducing deficit thinking and culture of poverty notions to yet another generation. We are witnessing how our national failure is placed on the backs of people of color, most often living in low-income communities.

In terms of locating these repeating, only slightly modified historical trends regarding students of color, Professor Anthony Brown’s “Same Old Stories: The Black

Male in Social Science and Educational Literature, 1930s to Present,” is incredibly insightful. Although Brown focuses on how “social science and education literature has helped to produce a common sense narrative about all Black males,” his work can be applied to other students of color from what Brooks called above, ‘disorganized homes.’

Brown writes,

While much of the research from the mid-1980s through the present has given significant attention the social, psychological and educational issues of Black males, it was clear that the analyses used were far from new. Certainly, researchers have attempted to avoid using culturally deficit models for explaining Black male conditions, however, many of the theories about Black males were simply a rehashing of arguments made in previous decades.

Here, Brown seems to go a bit easy on ‘researchers.’ Deficit thinking is exactly what is being recycled in work like the Thernstroms’. However, Brown does contend that these

“new” models are the “same old stories.” To which the only thing I would add might be these recent reforms also represent the same old futures for students of color. Indeed, what I am attempting to do here is respond to Brown’s work to show that such recycling is enacted not just on the African American male. There is also a historical space Brown leaves available to examine how contemporary reform, even those directed by President

Obama and Secretary of Education Duncan, are perhaps the “same old stories” as well.

Expanding the number of charter schools as a method of educational reform really begins with the student choosing to buy into the program. The students and their parents can, in a sense, take it or leave it. Although perhaps a clumsy economic term, this notion of buying in evokes Professor Gloria Ladson-Billings’ argument of America’s “education debt” borrowed against low-income students and students of color for generations. Both terms reveal what such reform attempts tend to obscure: the responsibility for change is a

19 burden once again placed upon low-income communities of color. We must instead ask why do these reforms demand these communities of color to make such investments in order to get an education in return. Such demands are certainly not made of middle-class, predominately white communities. Instead, we already assume that these students are

“invested” in their schooling, in part because we as a society have already done it for them through the way we fund schools. On the other hand, those communities are the ones where property taxes fund schools that aren’t positioned as failing. And so in comes back to this debt we owe, that not only do we refuse to pay down, we refuse to even acknowledge its existence by structuring school reform around ideas that ask even more of poor communities of color.

I contend that one of the most powerful reasons charter schools are seen as a panacea by so many education reformers is that they reinscribe this notion that students of color must be forced to choose their future in the present moment. This future orientation is seen as essential to a good student. Yet this expectation also implicitly hides the inequalities that gave rise to such orientations in the first place. It is also my contention that such expectations are an ingenious reinscription of cultural deficit and cultural of poverty thinking.

It is these untheoretical frameworks that intervene again and again as reform in our schools around student of color. Against this backdrop then, my own intervention here hopes to take direct action. And it is by learning from scholars (and critics) of multicultural education that I arm myself with theoretical frameworks of my own.

II. CRITICAL MULTICULTURALISM AS THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

Although several essential scholars are discussed in this section, I must make clear at the outset my particular indebtedness to Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings, and more specifically, to how she theorizes a “new direction” for multicultural education by bringing together the work of Peter McLaren and Joyce King (2004). And so before discussing Critical Multiculturalism more specifically as the theoretical framework for this study, I will first briefly examine this particular influence. In “New Directions in

Multicultural Education: Complexities, Boundaries, and Critical Race Theory,” Ladson-

Billings contends the term multicultural has “made it to Main Street” and thus has

“forced scholars and activists to begin pushing the boundaries of multiculturalism and argue against the ways dominant ideologies are able to appropriate the multicultural discourse” (50, 52). To do this herself, Ladson-Billings first brings in McLaren’s work with “critical multiculturalism and/or revolutionary multiculturalism to interrupt the diversity discourse that emerged to supplant and subvert the original intentions of theorists who set out to create a pedagogy of liberation and social justice” (52).

Rather than seeing my own work as exclusively an intervention to diversify content, it is Ladson-Billing’s use of the term “interrupt” that appeals more directly to my particular envisioning. Simply, instead of intervening into science fiction curriculum, I seek to interrupt it, including the effort to diversify it by small degrees, with a more explicit discourse on race and racism. Thus on a parallel course, this focus on interruption begins to take both multicultural education and science fiction curricula into that “new direction” in our schools. However, in order to both examine the work of McLaren and

King more closely and begin my own conversation about critical multiculturalism with them, I now turn to their specific works.

For McLaren, “the work of critical multiculturalists attempts to unsettle both conservative assaults on multiculturalism and liberal paradigms of multiculturalism, the latter of which in my view simply repackage conservative and neo-liberal ideologies under a discursive mantle of diversity” (1998, 288-9). Although I do not wish to discount such assertive forms of multicultural education as the transformation and social justice approaches (Banks), McLaren’s emphasis on the “role that language and representation play in the construction of meaning and identity” situate critical multiculturalism as a framework that allows me to examine several familiar tropes of science fiction curricula in a new way (1995, 42). One of the most powerful of these is the interplay between representation and identity. According to McLaren, through a lens of critical multiculturalism “representations of race, class, and gender are understood as the result of larger social struggles over signs and meanings and in this way emphasize…the central task of transforming the social, cultural, and institutional relations in which meanings are generated” (Ibid). It is how such systems of meaning generation are used in schools that

McLaren seeks to call into question as “ideologically stitched into the fabric of Western imperialism and patriarchy” (Ibid).

Thus, my efforts here seek to interrupt how this particular science fiction curriculum generates both what science fiction can mean to students and how this generation is similarly problematic in the ways McLaren asserts. At the most basic level,

McLaren’s critical multiculturalism enables me to consider how the language(s) used to describe science fiction can often be constructed (or generated) around problematic

22 notions of representation and identity that can often exclude students of color. For example, it is not only the whiteness of a Science Fiction reading list, but also how teachers describe the course itself, that plays a significant role in creating the racial segregation in the classrooms so many of us end up taking for granted.

In addition to theses concerns of exclusion, critical multiculturalism informs teachers and students of how identities and thus differences are “stitched” into schools.

According to McLaren, we must move “beyond a monoculturalist multiculturalism that fails to address identity formation in a global context, and focuses instead on the idea that identities are shifting, changing, overlapping, and historically diverse” (1998, 289). Such a conceptualization of identity can be discussed at length within the world of science fiction. However, we must choose to do so. It is a critical multicultural perspective that makes this possible. McLaren states that the theoretical position of critical multiculturalism centers on how “differences are produced according to the ideological production and reception of cultural signs” (1995, 47). Thus, science fiction is viewed here as a cultural sign that has been produced in the high school space and is thus received by students in ways that exclude students of color.

McLaren envisions this work as “not about reforming capitalist democracy but rather transforming it by cutting it at its joints and then rebuilding the social order from the vantage point of the oppressed” (290). And so instead of simply adding in multicultural content, a more profound curricular and pedagogical shift must occur if we are to truly transform the Science Fiction elective from a space still reserved for predominantly white males. Towards this rebuilding, a critical multiculturalist perspective “threatens the social and economic interests of the privileged classes who

23 retain their status and power through ideologies that ensure their reproduction” (2005,

108-9). It is this reproduction of science fiction as a genre that need not be muddled by race, which keeps these classroom spaces segregated by race. Indeed, we must understand that this shift away from the standard way of conceptualizing science fiction as both a genre and an elective will be met with resistance from those students who have grown quite comfortable with defining science fiction this way. An apt analogy here might be the resistance a high school principal would expect if a policy was put in place to detrack the most highly qualified teachers away from the most advantaged students

(Darling-Hammond). But instead of the highly qualified teacher as the “scarce resource,” here in the Science Fiction elective, it is a classroom unburdened by discussions of race and racism, not to mention works by writers of color, that becomes a resource worth preserving (60).

The next step as McLaren & Farahmandpur suggest, can be to create “conditions in classrooms for minority groups to question the social, economic, and political relations in which they have been historically situated” (Ibid). Such a repositioning can be done with science fiction material as it often details the questioning of society. However, there is much to be done to expand what aspects within a society receive this questioning.

Towards this, a redefined science fiction can help to create “a politics of difference that is globally interdependent and raises questions about intercommunal alliances and coalitions” (1998, 289). Again, McLaren’s language of interdependence and alliances can speak to a “new direction” for both multicultural education and the science fiction curriculum. According to McLaren, we “need to build a politics of alliance building, of dreaming together” (1995, 47). It is in this act of dreaming together that all students can

24 envision a future for themselves and each other. McLaren’s critical multiculturalism insists that when we dream together, we not wake up only to choose to ignore perhaps the more difficult parts of our dreams.

The next scholar I would like to invite into this conversation is Dr. Joyce King. It is King’s work with “deciphering knowledge” that sits as the foundation of my efforts here (1995). In fact, my use of deciphering in this dissertation’s title is an effort to honor this impact. King’s work, as it is grounded in a “practical relevancy to the actual conditions and problems experienced by Black people,” as well as the use of what she calls “Black Studies” as a site for “a unity of theory and practical action,” is essential to how I have come to think of Afrofuturism as much more than yet another piece of additive content. However, I must again acknowledge it is in the footsteps of Ladson-

Billings’ “new directions” that I follow here. She writes of the connection between

McLaren and King’s work that a “critical multiculturalism that relies on a deciphering knowledge seeks to push past going through the motions of multiculturalism” (2005).

According to Ladson-Billings, King’s concept of “deciphering knowledge helps people see through the veneer of inclusion to the ways in which diversity or multiculturalism is being manipulated to maintain and justify the status quo” (Ibid). Such clarity offered by a

“deciphering culture-centered knowledge” leads to a “changed consciousness and cognitive autonomy [that] can be a foundation for curriculum transformation” (King

276).

Although King does not discuss deciphering knowledge as directly relating to critical multiculturalism, Ladson-Billings asserts that King offers this work as an

“emancipatory form of cultural knowledge” (54). Such emancipation walks alongside

McLaren’s commitment that critical multiculturalism must be about creating a “pedagogy of liberation and social justice” (Ibid). However, as I did with McLaren, I now engage with King’s work directly in order to examine its role in deciphering the present for this work.

In terms of curricular transformation, King describes deciphering knowledge as a system that allows for more autonomy from “socially constructed cognitive constraints

(beliefs) that suppress difference” (361). Thus, the construction of how teachers and students come to understand science fiction is a social process that intentionally leaves out discussions of race and racism. For King, the transformation must be about removing these constraints on what knowledge can mean inside classrooms. According to King, such autonomy “values cultural differences and recognizes diverse communities of social interests” (Ibid). It is appropriate to pause here on the use of “values” and “recognizes” and to consider if King’s work here is really all that transformative since these highlighted terms are often the language of the forms of multiculturalism that both King and McLaren speak out against.

However, we should also consider that such terms must be taken back from those who would strip them of the impact they can have on what represents knowledge within our schools. To do so, King’s efforts here seek to “penetrate social myths linked to objective and subjective problems of human existence” (367). Such “problems of human existence” are taken up again and again in the Science Fiction elective classroom.

However, along with the figurative lens, these discussions are often hampered by this crucial social myth: science and technology are objective fields of knowledge, as are the

26 problems they create for us, thus science fiction is objective and is certainly not impacted by something as subjective as racism.

In expanding of the analyses of scholars Sylvia Wynter and Toni Morrison, King asserts that we must “decipher the belief structure that legitimates the social framework and contributes to alienated and self-negating consciousness” (372). What I seek to do here then is to decipher, for myself as well as the students enrolled, the social framework that plans for the exclusion of both students and curricular content of color. Beyond that however, I hope to continue this work by helping students to decipher the frameworks of race and racism though the science fiction curricula. The goal of all this deciphering must be, as King asserts the connection social action to promote social change. Much like

McLaren, King’s envisioning of this work “gives priority to the most urgent needs of real-life citizens as a criterion of validity…explicitly accountable to and linked to the needs of real communities” (367). To honor such efforts, my work is focused on the transformation of the Science Fiction elective as one more step towards bringing “about the alternative social vision of Black studies: ‘a world that will hold all people’” (372).

The last scholar I wish to discuss briefly before entering into a more direct conversation with critical multiculturalism is Cameron McCarthy. As with Ladson-

Billings, McCarthy’s critique of multicultural education and his visioning of a way forward is essential to this present work. McCarthy asserts that multicultural education is too often infused with a faith regarding “the social and economic futures of minority students” (McCarthy 293). Thus, even multicultural educators may read science fiction texts as critiquing the inequities of contemporary society but actual alternatives to present day injustices are seldom considered as a central goal to such a critique. If the students

27 are left with the notion that the future will be better if we simply avoid these apocalyptic visions, the structures of power and control within a society remain unchallenged and stratified. Instead, McCarthy contends “any discussion of curriculum reform must address issues of representation as well as issues of unequal distribution of material resources and power outside the school door” (291). These “resources and power” are pushed into the forefront of a Science Fiction course where a more assertive framework is used as both a lens for curricula transformation as well as for pedagogical strategies.

Within the Science Fiction classroom (and when such materials are used in

English/Language Arts courses), we must question how the future is structured by and to the benefit, of a selected group of people. Such an approach will question the “power that resides in the specific arrangement and deployment of subjectivity in the artifacts of the formal and informal culture” (295). Thus, our cultural visions of the future, both formal and informal, as a time and space reserved for white people is specifically questioned and critiqued as historically constructed and presently entrenched. Our efforts in the Science

Fiction classroom must be to first interrupt how we take for granted such cultural artifacts like the Science Fiction anthology we use, as well as the latest in Science Fiction film, and then to envision a truly alternative and equitable future build on top of our current one.

Although the more assertive forms of Multicultural Education have invaluable lessons to offer teacher-scholars much as myself, Critical Multiculturalism (CM) will serve as the theoretical framework through which my current research is considered. Why

CM you ask? To answer, I will let Stephen May and Christine Sleeter offer a response:

“As with antiracist education and critical race theory, critical multiculturalism gives

28 priority to structural analysis of unequal power relationships…The implication of this kind of structural analysis is that challenging power relations requires understanding how power is used and institutionalized, and taking collective action to bring about change”

(10). The connection above between CM and both antiracist education and Critical Race

Theory grounds the perspectives I take with me into the classroom as observer and participant. Such a mixture of theory and praxis is essential to how I see CM serving my research. May and Sleeter’s focus on collective action towards change challenges me to see my cooperating teacher, Mr. Rain, as well as his students, as part of a collective that must seek to envision these alternative futures together. This CM framework will not be served if I am not always aware of the “power” I bring into the classroom and thus, must try to relinquish as the researcher.

But I will get to more about my role as a critical researcher later. First, I must detail how CM operates as my theoretical framework. Here again I lean on the envisioning by other scholars, specifically Terry Locke’s description of the four characteristics of CM that May identifies:

1. Acknowledging the role of ethnicity and culture in identity formation without essentializing them;

2. Recognizing unequal power relations as a part of life and that individual and collective choices are circumscribed by the ethnic categories available at any given time and place;

3. Recognizing the ways in which certain cultural knowledges can become marginalized in society;

4. Recognizing the social situatedness of and provisionality of one’s speaking position. (87).

All four are crucial in examining the connections between CM and Science Fiction; specifically they allow me talk about (and back against) key science fiction concepts of power, knowledge, technology and difference.

For my purposes, McCarthy’s definition of CM is illustrative of such connections:

CM is “defined here as the radical redefinition of school knowledge from the heterogeneous perspectives and identities of racially disadvantaged groups –a process that goes beyond the language of ‘inclusivity’ and emphasizes relationality and multivocality as the central intellectual forces in the production of knowledge” (290).

McCarthy seeks a multicultural education that offers “a more systematic critique of the construction of school knowledge and the privileging of Eurocentrism and Westernness in the American school curriculum” (294). He continues: “Multicultural changes in the curriculum to address the present and future of race relations in the United States must be founded in the recognition that knowledge is socially produced and is systemically relational and heterogeneous” (301). Such a relationship to what counts as “knowledge” within the Science Fiction classroom is essential to my efforts here.

Teachers must question who is privileged by the way the Science Fiction curriculum is designed. As an example, here again McCarthy is insightful in his own questioning: “How is it that African Americans who have been in the Americas for at least as long as whites –how is it that the history, and writings, and culture of African

Americans are non-Western? Who is demarcating the West?” (295). What the Science

Fiction teacher must then do is to simply turn McCarthy’s questions into these: “How is it that African-Americans are not of the future? Who is demarcating the future?

Looking at the Science Fiction classroom through a CM lens allows to us to speak not only about the production and relationality of knowledge, but of technology as well.

Simply put, technology is a kind of knowledge (tech-knowledgy). The Science Fiction classroom offers a space to discuss how both knowledge and technology are constructed and made “official” in a way that can be deciphered. For instance, students in a Science

Fiction classroom must be encouraged to consider how technological development in one place is tied to technological underdevelopment somewhere else. SF teachers must ask questions like, “Why do some have this technology and some do not.” Such conversations centering on how power, knowledge, and technology orbit one another are essential to these curricular efforts.

Another central concept to both CM and Science Fiction is an examination of difference. Such conversations are difficult in that teachers must not reinscribe the

“othering” that particular students already experience in the classroom and larger society.

Indeed, multiculturalism is “not only about the discourse of alleged others, but is also fundamentally about the issue of whiteness as a mark of racial and gender privilege”

(Giroux 108). Thus, the goal of CM is “not to erase difference in the speculative future, but to change the ways in which we think about difference today” (Antonette 64).

Although talking about difference is seldom a safe activity within schools, the Science

Fiction classroom offers a space to consider these ideas through the symbolic language of robots and aliens. Here again, Antonette is helpful: “A critical multiculturalism can begin to interrogate the relationships between the dominant culture and those marked as different from it in order to make visible the mechanisms that support inequitable relationships and perpetuate concepts of difference that support those inequities” (43).

A story that comes to mind here is Ray Bradbury’s “The Pedestrian” (1951) in which a man is marked as different by an automated police car for being out for a walk at night. The character, Leonard Mead, is also different because he doesn’t have a television, a wife, or a profession. In case you haven’t read it, I don’t want to spoil the end for you. But let me just say, it doesn’t end well for Leonard. The story is often anthologized in textbooks; I used it as an introduction to Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 when I taught a sophomore English class. And I taught it as others did I am sure, with an emphasis on the price of progress theme. But now consider the possibilities of teaching such a story through a CM lens by focusing on the markers of difference Bradbury uses to get Leonard in “trouble” with the law. What might these markers tell us about the society in which Bradbury was living in 1951? Why does Bradbury choose these specific markers? But following such conversations, a CM Science Fiction teacher must ask questions like these as well:

1. What markers of difference spur more monitoring in our society?

2. How do different people experience monitoring differently? For example, how

do women experience monitoring differently than men do?

3. Could technological advancements in how society monitors people (i.e. police

drones, motion sensitive street cameras) lessen such differences in how people are

monitored? Why or why not?

It is these types of questions that must be hacked into science fiction curricula. Going beyond the additive content integration of Afrofuturist literature, a shift towards a CM

32 perspective makes the construction of both identity and difference visible in a way that we too often ignore in the classroom.

Before moving on, one word of caution must be said about CM and its antecedents, Critical Pedagogy, and even earlier, Critical Theory. Specifically, I want to avoid making the mistake that others have made when discussing these theoretical frameworks as emerging from the Frankfurt School of Social Research in Germany in the

1920’s (Kincheloe & Steinberg 23). Although I am not here to discount such influence, I do however want to emphasize that such accountings fail to mention W.E.B. DuBois and

Carter G. Woodson much too late, if at all. For example, although Kincheloe and

Steinberg use the “spirit” of DuBois to add race into the scope of CM, this name-drop occurs two pages after they have attributed the critical theoretical tradition to Max

Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, etc. (25)

This same point is made by Ladson-Billings in her essay, “Racialized Discourses and Ethnic Epistemologies:” “DuBois and Woodson remain invisible in the scholarly canon except as ‘Negro’ intellectuals concerned with the ‘Negro’ problem. Their forthright and insightful critique of Euro-American scholarship was every bit as ‘critical’ as that of the members of the Frankfurt school, but they would never be mentioned in the same breath as Horkheimer, Weber, Adorno, and Marcuse” (260). In this current example then, Kincheloe and Steinberg are guilty of including DuBois only to emphasize the inclusion of race as it pertains to the larger construct of CM. They do not feel it necessary to mention DuBois (or Woodson) when laying the foundation. This segregation is yet another unfortunate example of the hierarchies that exist even in the frameworks

33 intending to critique such systems. My efforts here will hopefully not make the same mistakes. To ensure this, I must remain critical of the Criticalists and of myself as well.

CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY & DATA ANALYSIS

I. INTRODUCTION: QUALITATIVE RESEARCH & THE “OTHER”

In the opening paragraphs of their introductory chapter to The SAGE Handbook of

Qualitative Research, Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln use the word “other” seven times. Here are a few such instances:

“Research provides the foundation for reports about and representations of ‘the

Other.’ In the colonial context, research becomes an objective way of representing the dark-skinned Other to the white world” (1).

“Furthermore, this ‘other’ was the exotic Other, a primitive, nonwhite person from a foreign culture judged to be less civilized than ours” (2).

Now if you can indulge me for a moment, I want to play around a bit with the above language:

Texts provide the foundation for reports about and representations of ‘the

Other.’ In the science fiction context, texts become an objective way of representing the green-skinned Other to our world...Furthermore, this ‘other’ was the alien Other, a primitive, nonhuman from an alien culture judged to be less civilized than ours.

The purpose of the above is to underscore the immediate connection one notices between the concerns of “the Other” deeply embedded in both qualitative methodology and science fiction. In saying, “from the very beginning qualitative research was implicated in a racist project,” Denzin and Lincoln highlight for me a similar issue at work in much of the science fiction canon in schools. This material must be taught with a critical awareness of how “the other” is made so through a skin-color that is often anything but white.

We can also consider the “Other” as an advantageous state of being, rather than merely a perspective of constrain (Ladson-Billings). Here, the “Other” is seen as having a perspective advantage that “humans” lack. Indeed, in the Science Fiction context, often the “Other” has traveled many light years to visit earth; we might stop for a moment to consider if we could learn something from them. But then again, that doesn’t sound like the most exciting plot for a Sci-Fi film. Regardless, my point in working from this qualitative stance is not only to “color” the science fiction classroom and curricula with the “Other”, but to also challenge the system of knowing that has led to this particular space and set of texts being so white. I also question why we are so unable to see such outcomes for what they are: examples of in-school segregation. Thus, I take Denzin and

Lincoln’s words as a call. My response is to use a qualitative research methodology. It seems not like a choice at all; it feels like a necessity.

In defining qualitative research, Denzin and Lincoln write that it “is a situated activity that locates the observer in the world. It consists of a set of interpretive, material practices that make the world visible. These practices transform the world” (3). In hopes of following in such a tradition, this study was guided by an active participant observer research methodology as well. I strove to be both researcher and participant in the everyday culture of these two Science Fiction elective high school classrooms. I entered these spaces in much the same way as a student teacher might. The thinking being that high school students have grown quite familiar with this role. My observations centered on the issues embedded in my research questions, but also included attendance data and level of voluntary participation.

This study’s second phase, one in which I participated more fully, my observations are more directly focused on these students and their reactions to this “new” material. I consider my “cooperating teacher” as a fellow researcher as he and I discussed how best to fit in the Afrofuturist materials. In addition, he was also in charge of taking observation notes when I lead the class. We decided to “hack” me into the class during a two-week period during the second half of the course. We discussed this gradual release program as the best way to introduce me as a teacher and the kind of material that I sought to integrate into the curriculum. In preparation for that time, I moved back and forth between my roles as observer in the corner and student teacher.

A consistent effort was made to remain critical of myself in the role of researcher.

In making sure this occurred, I kept in mind the following: “scholars must shed the bonds of rigid paradigms and stand in a new relationship to knowledge, the knower, and the known” (Ladson-Billings 271). This new relationship I entered into is a complex one for sure. If for no other reason than I have always been either at the front of the classroom or in the row of chairs. I have seldom been off to the side. This role of observer is a difficult one for me. I think too often in terms of the knower. But in the quote above, comes a way to reconsider knowledge(s), the knower, and the known. For me, this “new relationship” is best achieved through the lens of a Critical Qualitative research methodology.

II. CRITICAL QUALITATIVE RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

Although I discuss the critical stance earlier in relation to Critical

Multiculturalism, I pick this term up again to ensure I am not taking it for granted. Thus, I see my research as adhering to Canella and Lincoln’s view that critical means “any

37 research that recognizes power –that seeks in its analyses to plumb the archaeology of taken-for-granted perspectives to understand how unjust and oppressive social conditions came to be reified as historical ‘givens”’ (54). This interest in the “taken-for-granted” situation reflects my initial observations within the Science Fiction classroom space where the collection of mostly white male students is left unquestioned by school staff and the students themselves. Moreover, if this historical given is ever questioned, the answer is one that reifies notion that students of color aren’t interested in science, technology, or the future. Here again is Canella and Lincoln on critical qualitative research: “Such research, in addition to searching out the historical origins of socially and politically reified social arrangements, also seeks to understand how victims of such social arrangements come to accept and even collaborate in maintaining oppressive aspects of the system” (54). This view adds another way to see the Science Fiction classroom as dominated by white male students: as a ‘social arrangement’ where students of color are victims in the sense that they are excluded from this space through explicit and implicit means and perhaps even exclude themselves based on how schools define both them and the curricular material.

My use of a critical qualitative methodology seeks to reveal how the acceptance of this situation, not only masks a past and present inequality, but also plans for that same inequality in the future. Thus, my positioning reflects a commitment to work that “aims to understand itself as a practice that works with people to raise a critical consciousness rather than merely describe a social reality…It will contribute to social change directly and thus not only by informing policy decisions” (Carspecken 44). In adding this element of direct social change, I seek to challenge at a very local level “the injustice of a

38 particular society or public sphere within the society. Research becomes transformative endeavor unembarrassed by the label ‘political’ and unafraid to consummate a relationship with emancipatory consciousness. Whereas traditional researchers cling to the guardrail of neutrality, critical researchers frequently announce their partnership in the struggle for a better world” (Kincheloe. et al. 16). This emancipatory consciousness is then wedded to the work of the critical researcher. Thus, my work aligns itself to such research where the goal is to “develop languages, models, and practices of empirical and conceptual analysis and to create both spaces and opportunities in social and institutional sites for constructing a language of possibility and a pedagogy linked to the practice of freedom” (McLaren 174). Here again McLaren’s view of critical theory helps me to consider my work as a small part of a larger freedom movement: one that “has the practical intent of fostering a critique of the existing social order –the repressive, alienating, and dominating social reality –in order to further the struggle for, and realization of, human freedom and happiness” (179). As ever though, I must avoid the kind of gazing at the “Other” that Denzin & Lincoln describe even if it comes in the name of what I might choose to call “freedom.”

Next, I discuss the kind of critical qualitative research methodology I employ.

Here I lean heavily on the work by Apple and Carspecken in their 1992 piece “Critical

Qualitative Research: Theory, Methodology, and Practice.” In it, they lay out these five stages of critical qualitative research:

1. Monological data collection

2. Preliminary reconstructive analysis

3. Dialogical data generation

4. Describing system relationships

5. Explaining system relationships (514).

Although I discuss these stages later, I describe them now in order to provide a path for other researchers to replicate how I interacted with the study’s participants (Mr. Rain and his students) and what I did with the collected data as I moved from stage to stage. First, the monological data collection is made up of my passive observations of the two classes of Science Fiction at North High School in the spring semester of the 2011-12 academic year. Although I did not attend every class the entire semester, my attendance rate was

91% (which was higher than that of Mr. Rain, but more on that later). This “objective” data includes the course description and syllabi, daily class attendance (including tardiness), both voluntary and involuntary participation of students, and an account of

Mr. Rain’s lesson plans and pedagogical methods.

To help ensure such data was what “other people would agree with…if they were present at the time,” I employed two methods Apple and Carspecken suggest: a low- inference vocabulary and member checks (517). The first suggestion here worked well as

I found myself with little time during the classes to write down anything more than what was taking place. I include several example of this “preinterpreted data” below in the research narrative (550). In addition, I made use of “member checks,” by enlisting Mr.

Rain to look over these observations and provide any corrections he felt necessary. This engagement with Mr. Rain around my data was essential in fulfilling my goal of decentering my gaze as the only source of observation. Also, since Mr. Rain was both an

“object” of my study as well as a participant, such discussions prepared me for the transition into the stages involving more dialogue with the study’s participants.

The second stage, preliminary reconstructive analysis, is comprised of the interpretive notes I added to my observation notes; here focusing more on behavior and interactions within the classroom space. Once I had completed two weeks of “objective” observations, I felt ready to move to this crucial second stage. I reflected on my field notes and then wrote this analysis. An example of this type of analysis is the consideration of power, specifically “cultural power” as it exists and is reproduced in these classrooms. Indeed, something akin to when the star high school athlete enters the gym class, I would contend that the white male student enters the Science Fiction classroom with a cultural power that is only reinforced by the content of the course. More of this issue, as well as the notion of identity claims, will be discussed below (Apple &

Carspecken). More specifically, here below you will see an abridged example of how my field notes were followed by an “analysis” of them for possible meanings (this example is reproduced in the research narrative as well):

Day 18 -2/29/12

Lesson Plan:

1. What is Technology?

2. Why might we fear technology? (Participation picks up again here, why?)

Dependency, loss of control

Drives social change, breaks down bonds/responsibilities

3. Do we blame the scientist? Why?

4. What rifts does technology cause in relationships, society?

Analysis:

1. Continuing to Notice Pattern of Discussion in Class

Philosophical vs. concrete,

Question: If the same students are the ones engaging in these discussions, is it a good discussion?

Diff btw kinds of “capital” centered: intellectual vs. survival, based in day-to-day

Focus on “descriptive of present day”

2. Perhaps missing a chance to question how technology increases inequalities, difference, or otherness.

This preliminary analysis of the data occurred after each class and grew more complicated as the two respective classes (1st and 6th hours) took own their own unique characteristics. Although preliminary, this initial attempt at working my data provided a great deal of what would eventually become my more detailed findings. In the above example, this particular richness is seen in my speculation regarding the distinction between different types of questioning and kinds of cultural capital used within these classrooms. Such observation-based inferences provided me with a way to begin the dialogues that comprised the next stage of my methodology.

In this third stage, the dialogical data collection, I discuss my own direct interactions with Mr. Rain’s students themselves. Thus, I make the move from observer of a “naturalistic setting” to participant in a “nonnaturalisitc affair in which the subjects of study are asked to reflect on their lives in ways that may be new to them and to share in the production of a theory relevant to their lives” (513). This “new data” is generated in two ways. First, I recount my opportunities to lead teach Mr. Rain’s classes, both a three-day discussion of Ray Bradbury’s “The Pedestrian” and later in the semester, a two

42 week unit called “Multicultural Science Fiction.” Here, through classroom discussions and collected assignments I am able to consider how students respond to my various methods of curricular intervention. The second method of dialogical data collection is my formal interviews with selected students and Principal Watson once the semester is over.

In this stage, I sought what Apple and Carspecken term “contrast data” that exists between Mr. Rain’s teaching and my own.

The last two stages of my methodology are heavily intertwined and will be discussed here as such. Within the fourth stage, describing system relationships, I consider these two Science Fiction classes as “systems” in which the interactions between the students and Mr. Rain, the students and myself, and amongst the students themselves are examined. I then compare this system to other systems within the same school. Apple and Carspecken contend that this comparison between different “social sites” reveals the

“system relationships” that are more closely examined in stage five (513) This last step, explaining the relationships between these systems, allows me to reason the Science

Fiction class as a “system” that recreates models of segregation that we see in larger society, instead of being a more egalitarian, and yes, imaginative space. Here, I also consider student “interest” as mediated within our society and thus within schooling. (i.e. who is interested in science fiction and why? Who isn’t and why?) Indeed, I contend that this interest (or disinterest) is a racialized process (543).

Although I explain this process of moving from describing to explaining these system relationships in greater detail below, I share here some “system” questions that formed out of my understanding of Apple and Carspecken’s methodology and my own reflection on stages one through three. My critical qualitative stance seeks to take up and

43 then complicate the following questions posed by Apple (and others): “Whose knowledge is considered legitimate? Why is it organized in this way? Why is it taught to this group?

In this way?” (509). After thinking deeply about such questions, I have added my own wrinkle (in time): Whose knowledge about the future is considered legitimate? Why is the science fiction curricula used in today’s schools organized in the ways it is? Why is it not considered discriminatory that the Science Fiction elective is taught to an overwhelmingly white male student population? Do the curricular decisions, but also the pedagogical ones, teachers make in structuring such a course lead to classroom spaces that serve as examples of in-school racial segregation?

Additionally, Apple and Carspecken ask a set of questions that serve as starting points for my research at North High School: “What is the meaning of particular relations? For whom? Do these forms tend to reproduce or contest existing forms of subordination or oppression? Do they permit a questioning of existing relations by pointing to alternative social arrangements?” (511). What follows for me is again a turn towards how Science Fiction curricula can determine which (and how) students discuss the future in schools. Thus, my reforming of the above questions become these: What is the meaning of the particular relation between the Science Fiction curriculum and the

Science Fiction student? For whom is this relationship constructed? Does the Science

Fiction curriculum as a cultural form reproduce or contest existing forms of subordination or oppression in terms of how students envision how the present is “made” into the future? Does the Science Fiction curriculum permit a questioning of existing relations by pointing to alternative social arrangements in the future? These questions from other

44 scholars and my rephrasing of them will be considered as I move into the narrative of this research.

III. RESEARCH NARRATIVE

In order to begin the description of my monological data collection, first allow me to share how the North High School course catalog describes the Science Fiction elective:

“Course Description: This is an intermediate level literature course for students who enjoy or want to learn more about science fiction. Students will primarily read Eric

Rabkin’s Science Fiction: A Historical Anthology and several short stories from various other anthologies, tracing science fiction's historical development, its various types and its commentary on humanity and society. The course will examine science-based essays as well as some artwork which comments on science's role in society. Additionally, students may view one or more films (Blade Runner and/or The Matrix).”

Textbook(s)/Required Reading: Students will be exposed to several authors, including

DeBergerac, Swift, Voltaire, Mary Shelley, Poe, Hawthorne, Wells, Gernsback, Asimov,

Bradbury, Heinlein, Einstein, Sagan, Gould, Dick, Budnitz, Garnder, Crichton and others. Tests, quizzes for nearly all reading assignments, and several papers are required.”

Although a class is certainly more than what is contained in such a catalog, this course description and reading list could certainly be revised as a more effective call to students of color. For example, there is no mention of science fiction’s popular subgenres: speculative fiction, fantasy, anime, and horror/supernatural. In addition, an opportunity to list the topics to be discussed that would include gender, race, and class, is wasted with

45 such vagueness as “science fiction's historical development, its various types and its commentary on humanity and society.” Perhaps more glaring is the (mostly) dead white male membership of the course’s reading list. In fact Mr. Rain’s own syllabus includes only one offering from a writer of color: Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild.” This can be contrasted to how another English elective, “Rising Up,” is described in the same school catalog:

“Course Description: This intermediate level course will explore literature that focuses on marginalized voices struggling to rise up against established authority. Students will write about their own power and identity struggles as we examine stories of rebellion, ranging from the Beat generation’s rebels without a cause to Che Gueverra’s incipient revolutionary in Motorcycle Diaries. Student work will include personal narratives, literary and lyrical analyses, comparisons of artists, and personal creative expression through poetry and spoken word.”

Textbook(s)/Required Reading: The course will have a central novel (Toni Morrison’s

The Bluest Eye or Aravind Adiga’s White Tiger) as well as an independent reading novel, but it will also utilize a wide variety of genres (film, graphic novel, short story, poetry, song lyrics) to explore the issues common to Feminism, Hip-hip, and other instances of rising up; as E.E. Cummings once said, “To be nobody but yourself in a world that’s doing its best to make you somebody else is to fight the hardest battle you are ever going to fight.”

Surely, such comparisons could be taken too far. However, my point is merely that a stronger effort could be made to cast a wider net for the Science Fiction elective.

For example, the use of words like marginalized, authority, power, identity, and rebellion, could be easily lifted from the latter into the former. Although I grant that such catalog descriptions are often not how students ultimately decide to enroll in a course, I still contend that the possible benefits of such inclusive language certainly makes another draft worth the effort.

Next, I offer an abridged summary of my field notes from the first three days of classes as an example of my monological data collection:

Day 1- 1/30/12

Lesson Plan:

• Course Introduction

• Free-Write and Follow-Up Class Discussion on “What is Science Fiction?”

Field Notes: Both classes had a good discussion (w/ teacher and amongst themselves) on this question of defining science fiction. Nice way to start w/ prior knowledge by letting students form & share their own opinions on what this genre of literature really is.

1st hour is has very few students of color. Had a nice interaction with Isaac (Af-AmB) about staying in the class. He ended up dropping the class though L.

6th hour had a more lively discussion & has more diversity. Connection? Will need to consider how these two aspects have a cause and effect relationship or not.

Day 2- 1/31/12

Lesson Plan:

• Class Discussion of Definition Packet (Homework from Yesterday)

• Handout: Warm-Up Writing & Genesis from Homework

Field Notes: Good discussion on Asimov and Chisholm. Pretty good participation by 2 girls in 1st hour class. 6th hour again is a great discussion. Students talking to one another and bringing in own “knowledges” and capital. Diversity of students participating.

Day 3- 2/1/12

Lesson Plan:

• Quick Quiz on Genesis Reading from Yesterday’s Homework Assignment

• Class Discussion on Le Guin’s article on Defining SF

• Watched “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” as Metaphor; Representation of What?

Field Notes: Discussion in first hour started off rather slowly; kids still asleep, hump day effect perhaps. Talked about films/books as examples of pessimism in SF and debated whether or not Le Guin’s assertion was accurate. Future as a metaphor to describe the present day reality.

After the first few days of classes I was able to consider the enrollments as set.

Here below is the breakdown of students in the four sections (another teacher was teaching two sections during the same semester) of Science Fiction based on gender and race as compared to the school-wide demographics:

Rain’s Two SF Classes: 1st hour: 27 students/ Gender (29.6% female) Race (22.2% students of color) 6th hour: 28 students/ Gender (35.7% female) Race (35.7 % students of color) Rain’s Totals: Gender: 33% Female (18/55) Race: 29% Students of Color (16/55) Two Other SF Classes: 7th hour: 27 students/ Gender (11% female) Race (22% students of color) 8th hour: 25 students/ Gender (28% female) Race (16% students of color) Totals: Gender (10/52) 19% Female; Race (10/52) 19% Students of Color

Totals of Four Science Fiction Classes (107 Students): Gender (28 Females, 26%) Race (26 Students of Color, 24%) North High School Demographic Statistics for the 2011-12 Academic Year: Gender: Males (50.7%) Females (49.3%) Race: White (55%) Students of Color -including more than one (45%) Findings: Females in Four Science Fiction Classes: 23.3% Lower than School-Wide Percentage. Students of Color in Same Four Classes: 21% Lower than School-Wide Percentage.

In order to consider the above data, allow me here to shift into stage two of my critical qualitative methodology: preliminary reconstructive analysis. Although it is certainly not a surprise that females and students of color were underrepresented, there was more diversity than I expected, especially in 6th hour. However, aside from two

Asian American girls, there seems to be no girls of color. This is equally unsurprising, but we must be sure to ask questions (like the following) when considering shaping any curricula that hopes to further diversify such a course: Are girls of color doubly excluded based on their race and gender? How can such a course be changed to lessen this exclusion? How much self-exclusion is going on here and why? What is it about race and science fiction perhaps that affects the girls more than the boys? For many students perhaps, the notion that the Science Fiction elective is a boys-club is not exactly a revelation; however, the number of Caucasian girls (and perhaps Asia American girls) means that these “other” girls of color are experiencing a raced exclusion in a more complex way.

Another issue that the above numbers hide is the number of African American boys who either dropped the class during the first few days or deeper into the semester.

These decisions show even more that this particular Science Fiction course could be turning off the interest students of color are at least initially willing to express. For example, a student I will refer to in my field notes as Isaac dropped the class after the first day. Since I noticed his reaction to the amount of reading Mr. Rain told the students they could expect, I made sure to talk to him as he left class. I told him that I was going to be doing some “cool stuff” later in the semester and he wouldn’t want to miss it.

Although he was receptive, he never returned to the class. After Isaac and three other

African-American males missed the second day of classes, I considered what I could do to retain these students. Such thinking led to an email exchange with North High

School’s Principal, Mr. Watson. The following are the condensed version of our emails written on January 31 and February 1 respectively:

Principal Watson,

One issue that came up today was the possibility that four African-American males may have dropped the course between yesterday and today. These four young men were in class yesterday and three of them are still on the rolls but were absent today.

Selfishly and just in general, I am hoping these young men are still enrolled in the course as it seems this kind of course is too often segregated. On the other hand, maybe they transferred into an English elective that will appeal to them more.

Although I am aware of my very limited reach here within your school, …I would love the chance to talk these young men into switching back into the class if they did decide to switch. I apologize if any of this is over-stepping.

Thanks,

Jim Hollar

Jim, I encourage you to follow up…arrange to meet with these AA boys during lunch or resource hall to get more info. regarding why they dropped. You have to be careful that if they get back into the class they don't fail. You wouldn't want to feel responsible for encouraging students to be in the class and they not experience success. Balanced racial participation in a class is one thing; correct academic placement with appropriate supports to achieve success is indeed something else.

Watson

In the end, Isaac did drop the class that first week, while two other African

American males dropped the course later in the semester. The conclusions to be drawn from this are difficult considering all the possible reasons for school disengagement; however, Principal Watson’s comments made one item quite clear to me: I have yet to become comfortable with the role of a passive researcher. This issue continued for me the entire semester and made it more difficult to gather data in an objective way. I often found myself behaving more like the high school English teacher I was for six years than the researcher I needed to become to succeed with this dissertation. Moreover, after four years of thinking and writing about this kind of curricular intervention, I saw places for its insertion at every turn and grew frustrated by my status as objective observer.

Another realization, although linked to those discussed above, was how difficult it was to keep my field notes (Stage 1) from veering into analysis (Stage 2). Fortunately,

Apple and Carspecken deal with this issue similarly by italicizing analytical comments to distinguish them from their actual field notes (515). In order to account for this mixing of observation and analysis, I started to underline where I saw my “field notes” creeping

51 into analysis. For example, the following abridged excerpts from the second and third weeks show my field notes including this “other” voice in the machine:

Day 7- 2/7/12

Lesson Plan:

• More Discussion of De Bergerac

o Age valued more than youth questioned

o Philosophical questioning

Day 8- 2/8/12

Lesson Plan:

• Tree of Knowledge as Tree of Technology

• Not Asked: Who gets tech? Who doesn’t and why? Who decides?

• More focus on philosophical questioning; Do these conversations exclude?

• Is there a way to make connections to “descriptive of today” stronger?

Not that students of color aren’t interested in these topics, but is there a certain privilege at work when this is such a strong focus?

Day 9- 2/9/12

Lesson Plan:

• “Wolverine” Discussion

• More thoughts on style of questioning; too lofty at times, for too long?

o Does calling on only volunteers exclude? Does it set up an environment where students of color are expected to participate?

o Whole-class discussions are dominated by same “privileged” students

o Some use of groups, but emphasis remains on coming back to whole

o Idea: Mix this around, emphasize groups or individual work to give students who aren’t volunteering, another opportunity to speak in class.

From this more blended point of view between stage one and stage two, comes my first direct critique of Mr. Rain’s teaching. This analysis considers how the kinds of questions and the manner in which we elicit responses from students in a classroom space can privilege and disadvantage particular students. To make this critique I first need to make the distinction between two styles of questioning: philosophical and concrete. In order to be clear with this distinction, let me use two closely related examples from my field notes. First, the philosophical: “What is technology?” Second, the concrete: “Why do we fear technology?” Here is a summary of my notes from this day:

Day 18 -2/29/12

Lesson Plan:

1. What is Technology?

2. Why might we fear technology? (Participation picks up again here, why?)

Dependency, loss of control

Drives social change, breaks down bonds/responsibilities

3. Do we blame the scientist? Why?

4. What rifts does technology cause in relationships, society?

Analysis:

1. Continuing to Notice Pattern of Discussion in Class

Philosophical vs. concrete,

Question: If the same students are the ones engaging in these discussions, is it a good discussion?

Diff btw kinds of “capital” centered: intellectual vs. survival, based in day-to-day

Focus on “descriptive of present day”

2. Perhaps missing a chance to question how technology increases inequalities, difference, or otherness.

Although you may argue that since technology is made up of physical material and fear is a deeply meaningful aspect of our lives, my distinction between philosophical and concrete is anything but clear. However, my contention is that the questions we ask of students must offer a variety of ways to engage with what we want them to come to know. The two questions offer unique ways to elicit how students feel about technology and its role in their lives. Simply, the two questions work best together. The above example is one in which Mr. Rain makes use of both styles of questioning. Moreover, I am sure Mr. Rain would agree with me that good teaching involves both; however, my research shows his questioning style in the Science Fiction classroom to be more philosophical than concrete. An example of this kind of slant towards the philosophical is seen here below in regards to Mr. Rain’s question “What does it mean to be human?”

Day 15 -2/23/12

Lesson Plan:

1. Prep for Monday’s in class essay exam

2. Tim does a really great job with this; lots of modeling.

3. Focuses on “So What?” question for students to consider

4. How is SF descriptive of NOW!?

Analysis:

1. The central question: What does it mean to be human? This question must be broken down or added to. For example, what does it mean to be a person? How is this constructed in our society? In the future? In the past? Present day examples as the Personhood amendment. In the past, Constitution 3/5ths of a person, Dred Scott case.

Although Mr. Rain made this question a central one to the course as a whole, he misses the opportunity to encourage his students to look at the question in ways that would consider issues of power and who gets to define “human” and why. The result of this then is a privileging of thought that does not need to account for the knowledge (both historical and contemporary) that some are considered more human than others. Thus, in its own way, such a style of questioning includes some and excludes others around what is means to converse on a subject intelligently in the classroom space.

The harm done here is two-fold: the students who flourish in such philosophical conversations miss an essential aspect of how the definition of humanity is constantly mediated within a society, while the students who experience a more difficult time trying to enter such conversations see no way to add their own voices. As I watched these conversations take place, it was often that these latter students were students of color.

Thus, my preliminary analysis here leads me to consider Mr. Rain’s style of questioning as a routine of classroom practice that should be tracked as I move into the later stages of my methodology.

Here below are examples of abridged field notes after I started focusing on participation of students of color that shows how a level of concreteness may help involve a wider range of students:

Day 26 -3/12/12

Lesson Plan:

1. Asking students to consider, then sharing w/ classmates (one-on-one):

What do reactions (from self & story) to impending disaster tell us about human nature?

2. Putting Ideas up on Chalkboard

Survival instincts, Divisiveness, Selfishness, Mortality & human nature

Denial/Skepticism, Irrational

Analysis: Participation of Students of Color in 6th Hour

Jon –“I shouldn’t be alive” comment, uses his knowledge of it to connect show to ideas in lecture, looking at Rain, which he usually doesn’t do, working on late sheet (which he turns in, only student I talked with to do so), and taking Analysis. Ask students to bring in their knowledge more often. Another example of a student connecting into present cultural text/artifact

Rain does this with “high” culture, but less so “low” culture. Could ask students to bring in their “knowledges” more often in hopes of connecting stuff they “know” to the stuff he wants them to come to know. Prior knowledge

Teddy –Engaged by language anecdote from Rain, taking Analysis,

Bring in issues around language more somehow; validate his knowledge

What I see here is Jon (African American male) and Teddy (Hispanic male) participating in ways they usually did not in response to Mr. Rain’s effective use of

56 asking to students to bring in their own experiences to discuss his question. In this case, it was Mr. Rain’s own experiences, the reality show “I Shouldn’t Be Alive” for Jon and a personal anecdote about his bilingualism for Teddy, that stimulated Jon and Teddy’s engagement in the class discussion.

Mr. Rain’s success above leads me to consider how cultural power and identity claims interact within these classroom spaces. To do so, I focus on particular sets of cultural capital based on white authors and white fictional characters used during classroom discussions. This next set of condensed field notes shows this “other” privileging:

Day 11- 2/16/12

Analysis:

• What are students of color saying in the whole class discussions?

• Is this format helping them connect, engage, extend w/ the material?

• Use of Allusions as Cultural Knowledge; Lots of White Guys Referenced

o This becomes another way for the already talking to hear themselves

o But what about other voices?

Day 14- 2/22/12

Lesson Plan:

1. Poem Packet Discussion & Close Reading (Yeats, cummings, Keats)

Analysis:

1. Although the poems are connected to the story, why not throw in some other voices?

-Seems to be another place where a certain “voice” is allowed to be heard.

Day 21 -23/5/12

Analysis:

1. Other Mythologies (Not just Greek/Roman

-decentering Western knowledges; instead multiple knowledges

2. White Things: Prometheus, Pandora, Oedipus, Prospero, Faust, Plato, Sophocles

-Lessening focus on White Dudes as foundational texts

-“It’s in the textbook” argument; cultural literacy

But this argument becomes just a way in the present to sort students in the future, not to educate them in the present for the future.

This use of a certain kind of cultural capital is not surprising as it follows curricular content that is equally white. Although Mr. Rain included examples outside this narrow lens from time to time, this white-on-white joining of content and cultural referents was common enough to see as another way that the course and the teaching of it work together to include and exclude in racialized ways. Earlier in this chapter I discuss cultural power as a way to understand how white male students feel within this classroom space. This power allows this student to see himself as “the One” whose identity is validated. It is his own face he sees in the visual productions. It is his voice he hears as leading the meta-narrative of the future. Such privilege is in fact unearned and flows out of the wider pattern of how larger society tends to view the role of whiteness in the future. The curriculum content and the cultural capital used by Mr. Rain reinforces this security of place for the white male students, but does little to draw out students of color.

Instead, all teachers, even very good ones like Mr. Rain, must make consider the connection between cultural capital and cultural power if they seek to create a classroom space where all students can claim and be recognized for an identity tied to interest and knowledge in science fiction. In an effort to add a possible solution to these critiques, allow me to share my abridged notes from one class day in particular:

Day 25 -3/9/12

Lesson Plan:

1. Small Group Work on “The Star”: How do people react to the star?

2. Putting Examples Up on Chalkboard

3. Class Discussion: A metaphor is hurdling towards earth. What do you do?

4. Matching up students’ reactions to those from story.

5. Ask students: What is the commentary on human nature in these doomsday reactions?

Analysis:

1. Pretty fun and engaged conversation with the “What would you do?” especially

-Interesting: What is more dangerous in apocalypse? Meteor or people?

-Also, could be a place to discuss how such an event would effect us along race, gender, and class lines.

Here, Mr. Rain does an excellent job of mixing in both styles of questioning.

Asking the students what they would do if a meteor were heading our way evoked some participation from certain students of color that supports my earlier call for more concrete questioning. However, the point I wish to make here is to ask how these conversations around the meteor could have included race, gender, and class. One simple way to do so

59 would be to use W.E.B. DuBois’s short story “The Comet.” Not only would such integration of a writer (and a Doctor of Philosophy) of color help broaden the course content, but it would also help broaden the discussion. Briefly, “The Comet,” written in

1920, involves a similar scenario as “The Star” by H.G. Wells. However, what DuBois does differently is take a look at what such an apocalypse would mean for the race relations, specifically one between an African American man and white woman. At only thirteen pages, the text could fit easily as a companion piece to the Wells. If Mr. Rain wanted to use “The Comet” even more intentionally, he could first take a look at Reiland

Rabaka’s 2006 essay, “W.E.B. DuBois's ‘The Comet’ and contributions to critical race theory: an essay on black radical politics and anti-racist social ethics” in which Professor

Rabaka does a close-reading of the short story and discusses its implications in detail.

Such an idea also makes sure I keep DuBois and this thinking about perspective advantage close to how Science Fiction course can include notions that might seem

“alien” to others.

Although much more needs to be said about routines of classroom practice, cultural power, and identity claims, I will reserve such discussions for stages four and five. To get there, I must first discuss in detail my experiences as I moved from the side of Mr. Rain’s classroom to the front of it during two separate lead teaching stints. In both,

I discussed my research questions and larger intentions with the students to ensure that our dialogues were open and honest. Thus, as Apple & Carspecken write of the dialogical data gathering stage, my research now turns to offer “the people under the study some control over the research process, yielding a more democratic form of knowledge

60 production” (531). In this way, even though I was their teacher for a time, I tried to locate myself as always a researcher.

My first teaching experience involved a mini-unit on Ray Bradbury’s “The

Pedestrian” and lasted for three consecutive class periods. Thus, my initial curricular intervention is quite a light touch: Bradbury is a favorite of Science Fiction curricula and also, a white male. I was interested to see how Mr. Rain’s students would receive my

Critical Multicultural perspective in regards to this story. In Chapter 2 I discussed “The

Pedestrian” as a way to explain how “standard” Science Fiction materials can be taught in ways that include issues of difference too often excluded. Here below I offer segments of each day’s lesson plan to show how I developed and implemented these ideas:

Day 1- Ray Bradbury’s “The Pedestrian” I. Opening Activity (10 minutes)

1. Look at Web Article on Next Generation of Drones Built at John Hopkins University

2. Look at NYT’s “Room for Debate:” Drones in Afghanistan, Drones in … Akron?”

II. Hollar Prompt #1 (In their notebooks; won’t be asked to share or turn in) (10 min.)

1. Write about your experiences being monitored or interacted with by police and/or other figures of authority outside of the home. Who was it? Where? Why? Outcome? III. Discuss Handouts: Day One Worksheet & Copy of Story (5 min.) 1. Do you think your response to the prompt is different from your classmates? Why? The above question on possible differences in their experiences as monitored represents my first effort to enter into a dialogue that is at the heart of this third stage. Up until this moment, although I had talked to them about my research intentions, I had yet to talk with them. By the end of my two-week unit I asked them pointedly about the lack of

61 diversity in their classroom in terms of content and students; however, I thought it best to begin here slowly. Out of the fifty-three worksheets I collected, responses were evenly split between thinking that their experiences would be different or not. I was surprised by these results to be honest. I thought the majority of them would consider themselves unique from their peers. Much like my earlier anecdote with the students from the summer enrichment program, I was again surprised how quickly I leaped to the wrong conclusion about what students will say.

In terms of the explanations of these responses, most interesting were the discussions of both youth and race. Of the twenty-six students who thought their responses would be similar, four specifically mentioned that being “teenagers” would tie their experiences together. Similarly, of the twenty-seven students who thought their responses would be different, four mentioned that “race” would be a factor. But now all of sudden I am hesitant to leap to conclusions about what this data tells me. In addition to the evenness in experiences being similar or different, this numerical similarity in students writing about youth and race is interesting. Indeed, the students are surrounded by youth in the classroom, but they are also surrounded by whiteness (at least in this particular classroom) in a similar way. For example, in Mr. Rain’s first period there are two adults (myself and Mr. Rain) and twenty-seven teenagers, while there are five students of color and twenty-two whites.

Now when these students move out into the hallways they see even more teenagers as compared to adults, but they also see much more racial diversity. The question becomes, do these students (both of color and white) bring this awareness of the school’s diversity into this more racially segregated space and how would this impact my

62 ability to infuse course content and discussions with more complex notions of difference?

Another issue is the concern that this school system that structures diversity in the hallways, but leaves classrooms segregated by race is all too common at North High

School. How these students in particular think about the “other” on the other side of the classroom door is perhaps a “normative structure” to give further consideration as my dialogue with the students continues (534).

Day 2

I. Hollar Prompt #2 (10 minutes)

2. What are the markers to your identity? How many of these markers are in your control? How many are outside of your control?

II. Small Group Work (15 min.)

1. What markers of difference spur more monitoring in our society?

2. How do different people experience being monitored differently? For example, how do women experience monitoring differently than men do?

3. As a group, come up with a list of statements that state these differences:

On Day 2, I again use a journal prompt as another way to elicit student responses.

As both an alternative to and preparation for whole-class discussions, these prompts connected the students to the material at hand through their own experiences. In the first prompt, students were asked to consider their experiences as a way to think about the material. I then used a worksheet question to have them consider how these experiences compared to their classmates. In the second prompt, students were to consider the markers of their identity and then later were asked if particular markers produce more monitoring. Such use of journal prompts is certainly not new; however, as a less intrusive way to ask concrete questions, the prompts help prepare students for whole-class

63 discussions that while surely focused on the literature’s themes, was also grounded in the real lives of the students.

Moreover, the use of these prompts and following them up with more concrete worksheet questions, gave me a chance to attempt a more “private” dialogue with students than is sometimes possible in whole-class discussions. This contrast data allows me to carve into the differences “between the way people act and speak in naturalistic settings and the way these people talk about their behaviors in an interview or group discussion” (531-2). Although perhaps not exactly what Apple & Carspecken had in mind, I would contend that this quieter version contrasted the “norms operating in routine contexts” of larger classroom discussions and assessments (532).

Day 3

I. Warm-Up Reading: NYT Op-Ed “Why is the NYPD after me?” by Nicholas K. Peart

II. Return to Last Questions on Handout & Then Answer & Discuss #4-5

4. Could technological advancements in how society monitors people (i.e. police mini- drones, motion sensitive street cameras) lessen such differences in how people are monitored? Why or why not?

5. What about the Trayvon Martin killing? How about surveillance helping us to know what really happened? Example: hotel parking lot cameras in Mississippi murder case.

For the last day of my mini-unit on “The Pedestrian,” I made explicit the connection between the issues raised by Bradbury and contemporary issues involving race like New York City’s “stop and frisk” policy and “driving while Black.” Even though Mr. Rain did discuss science fiction as being “descriptive of today,” I felt such connections were often still too philosophical. The above connections to the murder of

Trayvon Martin and James Craig Anderson are nothing if not concrete. Although I need

64 to be careful not to take advantage of these events or apocalyptic-like events such as

Hurricane Katrina, I feel that the teaching of science fiction has a responsibility to take the “descriptive of today” axiom seriously. If we do not, then what is it exactly we’re doing for these students? In asking students to consider the possibility of a positive outcome to more advanced monitoring systems, I both return to issues raised in my first journal prompt and (and more significantly) urge students to add issues of race, gender, and class into the more traditional science fiction classroom discussion of increased technology’s impact on human freedom.

As for question #4 above, responses were mixed. The largest group of similar responses comprised twenty-two students wrote technological advancements could lessen differences in monitoring. Here is a sampling of these responses as they appeared on the survey:

“They could be used to monitor the police and to monitor people so the police don’t have to.”

“I think it would lesson the differences in how people are monitored, but it would also lessen the effectiveness of the monitoring. Drones and cameras can’t discern normal activity from criminal activity, even if they don’t distinguish between social groups or racial groups.”

“Yes, because it may not matter who you are or what you look like, it will still see you.”

“Yes, because with mass monitoring, everyone is being watched instead of just a select few. It would be more fair than only selecting a small group of suspicious people to watch.”

“It would lessen differences because it would be such a public and everywhere thing. While it would lessen differences to some point it would also monitor everyone more which is a huge hit to personal privacy.”

The next grouping, made up of twelve students, discussed some version of a “Yes, but only if” response. Here is a sampling of these responses as they appeared in the survey:

“Motion sensitive cameras would lessen the differences, everyone who moves would be monitored. Drones would not because they would probably be programmed to look for certain indicators.”

“Possibly. Either new tech will move us towards monitoring everyone all the time, or it will make it easier to zone in on ‘suspicious’ people.”

“I think they would change how people are monitored if they are completely autonomous. That is, no humans directing them/ giving them orders. Every human, regardless of whether they realize it or not has biases that would show in taking surveillance.”

The last group comprised nineteen students who commented that such advancements would either have no impact or make such disparities even greater. Here are a few of those responses:

“Drones would simply intensify the differences because they would have the prejudices programmed in.”

“Technology is a reflection of humanity, so if it is a drone that looks for markers that are programmed by humans it would be influenced by their prejudice.”

“I believe the drones would be programmed to watch for specific stereotypes and minorities more than others, it would be just the same as it is now.”

In addition, I looked specifically at how five African American and three Latino students responded to this question. Of this group of eight, two students thought the differences would be lessened:

“If monitoring becomes more based on technology, viewing a broad scene, then there will be less room for unfair monitoring.”

“I believe there wouldn’t be preference on our society and our rules would apply to everyone. Our streets would be more secure and less crimes.”

Similarly, only one of these eight students of color made a comment that fit into the

“Yes, but only if” description. Here is that response as it appeared on the survey:

“Yes, it can, rather than monitoring one race more than the other, we all are equally being monitored as a whole. But then again this could also back-fire and they might monitor us as a whole, but still be monitoring one race more strictly than another.”

The five remaining students all commented that there would be no change or even an increase in these differences in how we are monitored. Here are all five of those responses as they appeared on their respective surveys:

“Increase it b/c they would that stuff where ‘the problem’ is, in what they consider the bad neighborhoods and be more judgmental.”

“I don’t believe so because the people who make the technology. The people would make the machines bias and if not monitored, the machines could be deadly to the people they consider threats or who their makers considered threats to society.”

“Their going to be monitored by someone anyway and that person could be prejudices and watch who ever they want from a distance.”

“I don’t think so because they would merely increase the density of the technology in ethnic and low income neighborhoods, and other places traditionally monitored.”

“Personally I feel like nothing would change because we live in a white society and of course blacks and minorities will always be targeted. They would just watch minorities instead of having to stop and frisk them down.”

So if you can forgive another attempt at quantitative analysis, 62.5 % (5/8) of the African

American and Latino students answered “no change or increase,” while only 31.1% of the white and Asian American students (14/45) did so.

Now I understand I have just entered a problematic area of separating students racially, and done so with data so limited in numbers as to be equally problematic.

Pushing all of that to the side for the moment, I would contend that such a disparity

(62.5% vs. 31.1%) is data worthy of further study and analysis. For now, I will say that these numbers suggest that the experiences (and thus, knowledges) of students of color can connect strongly to the issues discussed in science fiction material. Thus, like seeing the lie behind cultural deficit thinking that places the blame for being poor on the poor, we must discard the notion that the reason these classrooms lack students of color is they

“just aren’t interested in technology or the future.” Into this space comes the responsibility of teachers (myself included), to frame the “descriptive of today” discussion to include these concerns.

Once my three-day unit was completed, I returned to the side of Mr. Rain’s classroom and tried to return to stages one and two of my methodology. I found shutting down the dialogue with the students to be quite difficult however. The classroom is after all a small place. Thankfully, I was back in front of the classroom only fourteen class periods later. In that time, students had watched the film Blade Runner over the course of four class periods and then taken an essay exam on the film’s thematic elements. Mr.

Rain and I decided my next teaching opportunity would begin on the Monday following the Friday exam on Blade Runner. Over that weekend however Mr. Rain’s wife gave birth and come Monday morning first period, Mr. Rain’s substitute was taking attendance as I began my unit on “Multicultural Science Fiction.” Although Mr. Rain’s absence that particular morning was a surprise, we had discussed his parental leave far in advance.

We both felt our plans could continue. I suppose the only difference was that my dialogue with the students over the following two weeks was less from the perspective as a researcher and more like a regular classroom teacher. As I began my more forceful

68 intervention of “other” voices into this curriculum, the students had the opportunity to respond with an honesty that perhaps would have been missing if Mr. Rain had been present. Regardless, for much of the next two weeks, Mr. Rain was not in the classroom during first and sixth periods. Although I do not consider this to have affected my research much, Mr. Rain’s time away from class certainly bears mentioning here. He and

I discussed via email how best to accomplish my research goals while at the same time understanding that it was still his class.

In beginning my more overt intervention, I decided to first return to the film

Blade Runner. The class and I discussed the film’s visual elements in terms of how this particular future was imagined and the themes that could be said to follow such a rendering. I also asked them to consider what they didn’t see in the film and what that might mean as a way to reinforce an understanding of both inclusion and exclusion.

Then, we read and discussed Asian-Canadian writer, Larissa Lai’s short story “Rachel.”

The story is a reimagining of the character “Rachael” from the Blade Runner film. In the film “Rachael” is the latest in android technology; in fact she does not even now she is one. And of course, she is white. What Lai does, in addition to changing the character’s name to “Rachel,” is to give her Chinese heritage and thus racializes this depiction of the integration of humanity and technology. Although much more could be said on Lai’s intentions here with this complex piece of “fan fiction,” I would instead like to move to how I used the story within my unit. Here below are a few condensed segments from my lesson plans:

Day 2:

I. Take Out Copies of Larissa Lai’s “Rachel”

-Intro Author; Mention Poem, Watch Portion of Vimeo Reading

II. Answer Questions for Tomorrow:

1. Why do you think Lai felt the “Rachael” character had something left to say?

2. What is this something do you think? Why her and not another character?

3. What is her purpose behind offering this counter-narrative?

Day 3:

I. Take Out Yesterday’s Agenda & “Rachel” Short Story

II. Defend or Refute the Following Assertion (Three Sentences w/ Evidence)

In “Rachel,” author Larissa Lai seeks to diversify that neutral but somehow always white construction, the android. Lai gives the replicant Rachel not only a race, but also racialized memories that offers a counter-narrative to the film’s depiction of the future.

Day 4:

I. Discuss Creative Writing Assignment

-Pick a Character (Pris, Zhora, Leon, Gaff, Chew, JF / Just Not Roy or Deckard)

-Try to Mimic Lai’s Method in Story:

-Steal Plot & Dialogue, But Add Some New Element to Characterization

-Start at a Point in the Actual Film, Or Before/After

-Time to Share Ideas or to Write Later in Class

Day 5:

I. Discuss Creative Writing Assignment

1. Why do you think your character had something left to say?

2. What is this something do you think?

3. What is your purpose behind offering this counter-narrative?

In adding Lai’s story to the course content, I accomplish my first goal of adding more diversity to the curriculum. I do so perhaps safely, by tying this additive content to the material already in place. However, in moving from the simple discussion of a story to asking students to either defend or refute the thesis statement above, I move into more direct dialogue with how the students “see” race as existing not only in “Rachel,” but in

Science Fiction in general as well. Moreover, by assigning the students’ their own counter-narrative project, in effect, telling them to “talk back” against the film’s narrative, I (hopefully) reinforce the idea that when we imagine the future it is perhaps most interesting to consider what and who we leave out and why.

The next piece of additive content was the first story that in a sense had to stand alone, apart from the material Mr. Rain normally uses. For this, I used Nnedi Okorafor’s

“The Magical Negro.” Okorafor’s short story served as another example of a writer of color countering a speculative world of uncritiqued whiteness. This time, instead of Blade

Runner, the meta-narrative taken to task involves a Thor-like white hero common to both fantasy literature and superhero films. In the story, the “Magical Negro” character refuses to fulfill his destiny and thus becomes the hero. Please see the lesson plans below for how

I used this story and for a definition of the “Magical Negro” stereotype:

Day 6:

I. Read New Story in Class: “The Magical Negro” by Nnedi Okorafor

II. Introduce Author, Visit Website, & Discuss “Magical Negro” Trope in Fiction

-An African American character stereotype in film. This “magical Negro” is present primarily to aid in the growth of the white protagonist. Often this African

American character is sacrificed in order for this growth to take place. Regardless of whether or not the “magical Negro” literally survives till the end of the work, this character is present only as in service to the white lead.

-Examples?

Day 7:

I. Discuss as a Class

1. For a few moments consider why stereotypes exist. Think of stereotypes in life in general, in fiction, in film. Why do we use them? Why do we consume them?

2. What could be the reason this specific stereotype exists in speculative fiction?

Why would it be repeated? Why repeated in this particular genre? Why might some writers and/or directors envision a future or alternate worlds with this kind of character?

II. Discussion Questions (or Answer on Agenda)

1. What is Okorafor up to here? What is the point of the story?

2. What similarities exist between this story and Lai’s in terms of what they say regarding race and/or racism? If you see none, please explain why.

With this last question, I attempt to draw the students back to Lai’s “Rachel” and to “see” how much this whiteness of Science Fiction hides from them. Although perhaps heavy-handed, my intervention now invited what I hope is a dialogue not between teacher and students, or knower and known, but an open and honest one between researcher and subjects.

To do this, I next gave the students a handout on Afrofuturism to read. Here below are some questions I asked afterwards in hopes of gathering this dialogical data:

Day 10:

I. Answer on the Back of the Handout

1. What other kind of futurisms have been left out here? Is that a problem for envisioning a more diverse kind of speculative fiction class? How big of a problem? Why?

2. What is your overall response to this way of thinking race in this genre? What could be beneficial about? If you don’t think there could be, explain why please.

The responses from the students to diversifying Science Fiction material and increasing the focus on race in the genre fell into three general categories: positive, negative, and a mixture of the two. Of the forty-four responses I collected, twenty-two students were positive. Here is a sampling of these responses as they appeared on the handout I collected as a class assignment:

“It could help us understand many other cultures and I think we would be able to have many different points of view and ways of how other people think about the future and so on.”

“I believe speaking about race in this genre is potentially very beneficial. Speaking about race is any genre is beneficial.”

“Bringing race into science fiction allows the genre to express ideas that are more relatable to humanity and society. In many works of science fiction the black race is almost non-existent which shows you what society believes will happen.”

“I believe that bringing race into science fiction would add an important viewpoint to the discussion. Bringing race into sci-fi would hopefully create discussion on the future of racism and prompt students to think about solutions.”

Before discussing the ten negative responses specifically, I show here a sampling of the twelve responses I categorize as reflecting a mix of positive and negative:

“It is beneficial because it relates to our present social situation so much. It is too bad that sci-fi that incorporates race need to be given its own umbrella category though.”

“I don’t think we need a separate term for these genres, but I object to it. These sub-divisions are only (in my opinion) serving to narrow down the science fiction genre.”

“I think the best way to focus on race in sci-fi is not to think about any race in particular, but just to imagine a diverse world like our own.”

Overall, I was enlivened by not only the thoughtfulness that went into these responses, but also the sense that the majority of the students understood the benefit to broadening both the content and the discussions of their Science Fiction course.

However, I knew I needed to dig into this data, specifically the ten negative responses more closely. So here, instead of focusing on what the African American and

Latino students wrote, I want to examine how a “minority” of the white students responded. Once I read the ten negative responses (all written by white students) over again, I placed each into one of three categories: first, students who felt including these diverse perspectives would lessen the “quality” of the course, second, students who believed the class would either end up leaving out a particular group or be spread out too thin, and third, students who expressed the belief that somehow the discussion of race is racist. Here are the two responses from the first category:

“I feel that we might miss out on other works that might be more important to our understanding of science fiction.”

“The author and their skin color is not a major concern, rather the quality and content of the work.”

Next, the three student responses from the second grouping:

“The problem isn’t a lack of material. It’s just that we only focus on afro and chicanofuturism because those issues are bigger in America. However, in today’s society increasingly globalized society, I find such a choice extremely shortsighted.”

“If race based futurisms was infused into a class all races would have to be included, especially somewhere as politically correct as here.”

“The problem with including very specific race based futurisms is that you, in all likelihood will leave some out. If the point if diversifying a sci-fi class is to get other points of view, then why shift the focus from white sci-fi to just Afro or Chicanafuturism? By doing that you are leaving out stuff written by other groups.”

Although the above comments are interesting, it is on the comments from the last group of white students that I want to focus. Here are those five responses:

“When race becomes the main point of a literature class it becomes more divisive by pointing out differences that feed stereotypes.”

“If you start focusing on race, you just divide people.”

“I think that creating an entire genre for different races is a new way of going back to ‘separate but equal.’ I don’t understand why there can’t just be science fiction with a black character. By making it an entire separate genre for black people we are being racist. I think it is just perpetuating racism.”

“I don’t think it would help our racism problem in society. If you discuss how each race’s stories are different, then we just keep thinking about racial differences.”

“I don’t like it. We really need to stop labeling things as when we do we just bring up more racism. What needs to happen is we just need to stop talking about it. Yes, it was tragic but it was in the past and if we always dwell on those things racism will just continue and things will continually be put into categories.”

As I stated earlier, I need to be careful with how much take from such a small sample of data. To me, such thinking exemplifies the frustration that I had earlier assumed to be one of the effects of this intervention. One way I saw to challenge such thinking was to use the analogy of bullying. Sadly, this issue has a hypervisibility of its own in our schools these days. I told the student that believing “talking about race creates more racism” is akin to thinking talking about bullying creates more bullies. Regardless, in terms of my

75 methodology, I am even more convinced that including these worksheet responses as dialogical data makes sense as I do not believe that these five students would have same these comments during a whole-class discussion. As for the impact of such statements on my research, I would say that the reality of race and racism continue to be difficult topics for white people to discuss intelligently, but a step towards having these “courageous conversations” could be letting them begin in more imaginative ways.

The last two data sets I want to share in this narrative are results from a survey I gave to both Mr. Rain’s classes and from the interviews I did with selected students and

North High Principal, Mr. Watson. The survey amounted to a summation of my two- week teaching unit and expanded on the dialogue I discuss above. After his return, Mr.

Rain was kind enough to allow me to engage is this type of dialogue even though it was quite obviously focused on my research and less tied to the material he still needed to cover before the semester ended. Before handing out the survey I talked with both classes about my research in a very direct way. In addition to creating the survey, I made a handout that offered a definition of multicultural education, detailing four main approaches to it (contributions, additive, transformative, and social action), and listed my research questions as well as key assertions I had come to in writing the proposal for this dissertation. Although this decision to step in front of these students as so clearly a researcher surely affects my results, I am confident that such a stance follows the path of critical qualitative methodology that I set myself on at the start of these efforts. Here below is the first segment of this survey I wish to discuss:

Directions: For each statement, circle (or write in and then circle) the number that corresponds to your opinion and 2) providing a brief explanation of your reasoning.

1. Little can be done to increase the number of young women taking this course.

1 2 3 4 5

Strongly Disagree Neutral Strongly Agree

Please explain your reasoning:

2. Little can be done to increase the number of students of color taking this course.

1 2 3 4 5

Strongly Disagree Neutral Strongly Agree

Please explain your reasoning:

Statistically, the students who completed the survey agreed on what could be done or not done in regards to increasing the number of young women and students of color: both set of responses averaged in the “Neutral” range. For including more young women, the average of 49 responses was 3.06, while the average for including more students of color was 2.85. This similarity perhaps shows how the students linked in some way the tasks of making Science Fiction more diverse in terms of gender and race.

However, more interesting with these particular responses were the two instances of students choosing “Strongly Agree.” In 49 surveys (and thus 98 responses), the only two “Strongly Agree” selections were on #2: Little can be done to increase the number of students of color taking this course. Although the overall averages discussed above belie the importance of such outliers, I continue to be drawn to such data, especially when I

77 think it underscores the frustration students felt toward my intervention. Under “please explain your reasoning,” one of these students wrote the following:

“Students of color have absolutely no incentive to take this class; it doesn’t look especially good on a college app and it is not easy. Therefore, it is a matter of interest and they just aren’t interested.”

Such thinking, much like the “discussing race is racist” reasoning, is both alarming and instructive to my efforts. My first response to this explanation was which classes look good on college transcripts and are also easy?

But more to the point, this student is emblematic of how Science Fiction is allowed to remain so segregated in terms of gender and race. Simply, certain students are expected to in such classrooms and certain “others” aren’t. These expectations are expressed by both teachers and students and then are reflected in classroom discussions and materials. Such curricular exclusion then trickles down to when this kind of material is used in the earlier grades and thus, the “system” begins to reinforce itself. Although I will say more about how interest is mediated in discussions of stages four and five of my methodology, this student’s mentioning of both “incentive” and “interest” are also central to my earlier discussion of how cultural deficit models are reinscribed in the ways we think about how students of color “just aren’t” interested in their future. For me, this kind of thinking is another reason why this intervention is so important: we must find opportunities to challenge such notions in our young people. For me, the Science Fiction classroom, one where certain “aliens” are expected, but others aren’t, becomes the perfect place to counter these different forms of racialized (and gendered) exclusion.

The first survey question below focused specifically on this curricular exclusion, while the next fixed on the benefits of an integrated classroom:

5. A “Science Fiction” course that makes use of mostly white male authors is not a problem.

1 2 3 4 5

Strongly Disagree Neutral Strongly Agree

Please explain your reasoning:

6. In order to have productive conversations about the future, a diverse classroom (students and curriculum) is essential.

1 2 3 4 5

Strongly Disagree Neutral Strongly Agree

Please explain your reasoning:

As with the earlier “Little can be done” questions, the students’ responses here showed some agreement on these two issues: both sets averaged between “Neutral” and what could be termed the “Agree to Some Extent” response. For the problem of too many white male authors, the average of 49 responses was 3.57, while the average on the need to have discussions with an integrated group was 3.79. As a teacher and (hopefully) a burgeoning scholar of Multicultural Education, I found these numbers to a bit disheartening. This was especially true for number five. Here I show responses from

79 several different students to underscore how some students rationalized the exclusionary material in terms of the past or the present:

“I want interesting, well-written stories, whether by white males or not. I don’t want affirmative action.”

“The emphasis should not be on race or we will invariably become racists (subconsciously or otherwise).”

“Just use the best stories, without looking at the author, pick the greatest stories of all time. Too much emphasis on selective perspective will harm the class by using possibly inferior books and materials.”

“It is a coincidence that the best happen to be white.”

“Appearances shouldn’t matter when writing stories.”

These response tell me that, for all the diversity that exists in North High School and for all the post-racial wishful thinking after President Obama’s first election, race remains a subject far too many young people are completely unable to think about without making use of flawed or ignorant “ideas.” For instance, this notion that an increase in multicultural material dumbs down the curriculum somehow speaks quite plainly that we have many miles yet to go in dispelling the myths surrounding

Multicultural Education. Such students seem to think that if a story is in a textbook, it has to represent the “best” of what a genre has to offer. Even more disconcerting was this:

“The emphasis should not be on race or we will invariably become racist.” As I discussed earlier, this kind of re-branding of what racism actually is identifies how much ground we have lost in our ability to define the terms of the conversations correctly.

Although the average for the responses to question number six (3.79) was less discouraging, these two examples below link to the kind of thinking just above:

“Productivity does not depend on diversity.”

“The classroom can function at 100% with or without minorities. End of story.”

Now if we assume that these students are white, it appears that they have somehow reshaped in their minds what segregation and exclusion are, much like with racism. For them, a classroom is not segregated as long as they are in it. For them, it is not exclusionary because the “others” aren’t needed anyway. Such responses have made it clear to me that the use of anonymous surveys allows for a dialogue unhindered by identification, but perhaps also becomes a license to be controversial which then may undercut how much can be gleamed from these comments.

However, it is important to note here as well the positive comments made by students in order to emphasis that there is a way for students to learn one another, not just the teacher:

“Future’s global, ppl.”

“Having varying different points of view allows for new ideas to come to light.”

“We need the input of everyone to help with the future.”

“Diversity is essential to bringing perspective to every discussion.”

“The most productive are when discussions are from a variety of backgrounds.”

What I need to do in any future iteration of this work is to make such student voices louder within the classroom space to intervene from yet another angle.

Additionally, the most interesting aspect of these comments was that some of them were from the same surveys I use directly above. For example, the same student commented on

“affirmative action” and that “future’s global.” Similarly, the student who wrote, “it is a coincidence that the best happen to be white” also wrote “having varying points of view allows for more ideas to come to light.” And finally, a student responded with a

“Strongly Disagree” to number five, but then wrote, “The most productive are when discussions are from a variety of backgrounds.” This schism between these particular students’ inability to understand diversity of content and their ability to understand diversity’s value in terms of discussions is one that deserves more consideration. Perhaps though this difference has something to do with the fact that student diversity can sit next to you or on the other side of the room, or not be present at all. This presence or invisibility could be harder to ignore than a course textbook.

The last method of dialogical data collection I would like to share is the interviews I did with six students and Principal Watson after the semester ended.

Although I will say more about the difficulties I encountered with interviewing as an aspect of methodology in the next chapter, I will say here that these face-to-face meetings did not produce the insight that I was hoping. It is obvious to me now that I need to gain more experience with the interview process itself. In listening again to my recordings, especially the interviews with students, I hear my voice way too much. If I allow myself a moment of rationalization, I would say a dialogue between the student and myself, instead of a formal interview, was an attempt to follow in the spirit of Apple and

Carspecken’s stage three. Regardless, the interviews with the six students provide a very clear place for me to grow as a researcher.

The most salient aspect that came up in the student interviews was the issue of why they decided to take the class (Question #1). Three of the six students said the reason they took the Science Fiction course was limited to a mild interest in the material. For example, a student a will refer to as Xavier, said the following:

“I knew someone else who had taken the course and liked it and wanted a to take a non-honors class.”

Another student, Tanner, said he “took the class because my brother took it two years ago and said Mr. Rain was a great teacher.” The other, a student I will refer to as Quincy, said his reasons had more to do with course scheduling than anything else. During his interview Quincy said that he had

“…really no other option and had to take sci-fi to graduate with enough English credits.”

This interest, or lack thereof, offers the notion that student motivation to take Science

Fiction is more haphazard than I originally may have considered. Granted, the students aren’t going to tell me directly that they took the class because the material appealed to their race and gender.

For me, such responses are both confusing and hopeful. If the reason many students take this course is something other than a genuine interest in the genre, then what does that say about my contention that this course excludes students of color who are too often not represented in that material? These responses also complicate the belief of many that says students of color don’t take Science Fiction because they aren’t interested in it. Although a limited sample size, these students seem to be saying they

83 weren’t really excited by the material beforehand either. For me, this underscores the complexity of student motivation in class selection.

However, the more hopeful angle here is that student motivation is perhaps more malleable than I initially considered and thus perhaps an integration of students of color can be achieved more easily by attracting the “mildly interested” students. For me, this line of thinking, although undercutting perhaps some of my contentions above, heightens the need to make sure the students of color who are also just “mildly interested” aren’t turned off by the course either by the course description or by that first day of class.

In support of this hopeful notion as well is the fact that half of the interviewed students recalled the science fiction material they read in middle school (but not directly impacting their decision to take the elective). Here is Xavier,

“I remember reading a lot of this stuff in 7th grade.”

When I asked him to be a bit more specific, he remembered “Bradbury stories and

Twilight Zone episodes.” Such recollections emphasize (for me at least) the narrowness of this material exists in the earlier grades as well and thus remains a place to look at broadening the science fiction content middle-school English/Language Arts teachers are using. Such an effort in grades 6-8 could very well be a way to not only increase “mildly interested,” but also expand what students come to expect when they walk in the door of the Science Fiction high school elective. It doesn’t all have to be variations on Hunger

Games does it?

Another interesting aspect of the interviews deals with what students mentioned as their least favorite aspect of class (Question #14). Here, two of the six interviewed

84 students reported this aspect as involving classroom discussions that seemed to “run on.”

Here are those comments: the first from a student I will refer to as James, and the second, from Quincy.

“I suppose the thing I got tired of were a lot of repeating, back and forth.”

“I didn’t like the kind of rut in discussions where people just seemed to be arguing with each other over nothing.”

For me, such responses connect to the earlier discussed survey question regarding how the quality of discussions is impacted by the diversity of voices heard within it. Again, I must admit to the small sample size here; however, I can’t help but consider these voices to be supporting my contention that Mr. Rain’s class discussions involved the same small number of students and revolved around similar philosophical questions like “What is technology?” In fact, James, in response to the “least favorite” question, added that he felt “What is technology?” to be “too vague.” Added to together, these responses from students further convince me that content and pedagogy are areas where this elective can be adapted to better reflect a wider range of not only authorial voice, but student voice as well.

Before discussing my interview with Principal Watson, I must pause to say I am uncomfortable with adding the detail that he is African American. I did not do so earlier because I worry about how this aspect of his identity may lessen his level of anonymity within this supposedly blinded research. However, how his race may impact his position as a leader of North High School in general and to speak to the issues I raise specifically,

I feel that adding this detail adds an important context that would be lost without adding this detail. Simply, I need to consider what constraints might be in place for him around

85 conversations about students of color given the intense political nature of his position.

The obstacles to an African American principal’s ability to name in-school segregation as such and then to advocate for change is complicated by the racial demographics that define the school as a majority white middle-class school with powerful stakeholders always close at hand.

In terms of our actual conversation, Principal Watson repeated use of term “self- selection” helps build a bridge from the above discussion of student motivation within the student interviews. Principal Watson stated that the primary reason he felt more students of color did not take the Science Fiction elective was that classes at North High School were “self-selected” by students. This reasoning of course has the curb appeal of common sense, but I found it interesting that he kept coming back to the term as a way to stay away from my more insidious explanation: in-school segregation. He mentioned how the many options available for students at North, especially in terms of English electives, make this course selection process even more difficult to say much about in terms of any overt exclusion. Indeed, North High School is a unique place in terms of the opportunities for students, including the options to express themselves in creative electives and extra- curricular programming. Ironically, the Science Fiction elective itself is an example of this since it is the only high school in the area to offer the course. In this way, the diversity of opportunities becomes perhaps a blessing and a curse upon my research. It was the only school that offered the chance to enter the elective in the ways I wanted but the school also offered its students of color many chances to “select” a “more interesting” course than Science Fiction. However, Principal Watson’s insistence on “self-selection” and emphasis on Science Fiction being a “hard sell” to students of color still stuck me as

86 a way to, albeit gently, remove our complicity in allowing some spaces within schools to remain segregated by what can appear to be something as simple as student choice.

Principal Watson’s other use of “self-selection” had more to do with the teachers of the electives, for example, Mr. Rain and his Science Fiction course. He stated given the narrowing of much of the curriculum, the electives that are still offered attract teachers searching to bring some of their own interests into the curricula. This is certainly true of Mr. Rain. This point underscores my (much) earlier point that electives remain a space where curricular freedom is still apparent in schools. However, Principal Watson’s comment here was another way to explain why this material may not appeal to students of color: Mr. Rain’s “self-selection” of Science Fiction material could attract white male students and perhaps there isn’t much to be done about that, from his position at least, given this freedom in teaching electives. Here, we add another level of complexity to that earlier irony: there is a space here for curricular freedom but the teachers are making use of it because they are mostly white teachers and still see science fiction as a genre unburdened by race and racism.

Let me say here unequivocally that Mr. Rain is not this kind of teacher. He has integrated his course with quite a few materials that speak to the issues I find to be so lacking in the wider genre and did so before I came on the scene. Moreover, his interest in furthering this transformation by being a part of my research is proof to his dedication to doing all he can to help students explore a diverse set of ideas. However, Principal

Watson’s point is an insightful one in that teachers can also “self-select” what themes to include in a course and these choices are impacted by what these teachers feel “confident and comfortable” in discussing. Much like white students who grow comfortable in high-

87 achieving homogenous classrooms, white teachers can get too used to white curricular material in the books and white students in the seats. In reflecting on Principal Watson’s comment, I would say that in defaulting to more philosophical questions (What does it mean to be human?) Mr. Rain stays in his “confident and comfortable” zone. There were instances where I did feel Mr. Rain could have spoke to race and racism within a text for directly, but admit that my perspective is clearly biased.

However, my hope is that in watching me attempt to put race and racism at the forefront of discussions of the future, with texts by both white and authors of color, Mr.

Rain will be even more willing to stretch out a bit in the coming versions of the course.

Thus, I hope in some small way I was a cheap form of professional development for Mr.

Rain. I realize I am brushing quite close here to sounding like just another ivory tower academic, but as a teacher, I know how often we ask “Yes, but how do we do it?” I would hope that even after reading my dissertation, Mr. Rain would agree.

CHAPTER 4: FINDINGS & IMPLICATIONS

I. DESCRIBING & EXPLAINING SYSTEM RELATIONSHIPS

Although I shared some “findings” in the above narrative, I begin here a more formal discussion that focuses on the work I did once the semester at North High School had ended. To do this, I make specific use of the final stages of my critical qualitative methodology. First however, I wish to warn my readers that in the following I do not make much of an attempt to distinguish between describing and explaining the system relationships I “found” in this post-data collection period. In order to provide reasoning for this, I provide Apple and Carspecken’s description of these two last stages:

“In stage four, then, the critical researcher begins to examine relationships between social sites and social groups” (535).

“In stage five, reasons for these system relationships are sought by building the findings ‘outward’ toward a general model of society” (513).

“This will involve a search for the complex ways in which specific cultural realms both contribute to and contest more general social relations of inequality found throughout a society” (541).

Because of this linkage between “social sites” to “social groups to larger “models of society,” I am confident that such blurring between stages four and five will not detract the effectiveness of this discussion.

To begin, I describe the relationship existing between Mr. Rain’s Science Fiction classrooms as a social site or system to a “social group.” For my purposes, this larger group is simply North High School itself. This “school to classroom” relationship is indeed one of the several Apple and Carspecken mention as the most common for critical

89 researchers to use (535). I also discuss how I see a similar system relationship present within the larger social system. In doing so, I again take a question from Apple and

Carspecken and add onto it. First, they say we must ask ourselves, “What role does the school play within an unequal society?” (541). Then, pushing into this concern more specifically, I ask, what role does a diverse school, but one made up of racially segregated classrooms, play in reproducing inequities in larger society once these students move out into the “real” world?

These connections between various systems and the questions that followed were a result of “returning” to my initial data collection once the semester was over. One such piece of data, the 2012-13 racial demographics for North High School, is provided here:

Total Enrollment: 2,072

American Indian: 0.5%

Asian: 10.3%

Black: 14.3%

Hispanic: 14.4%

Pacific Islander: 0.1%

White: 54.8%

Two or More Races: 5.6%.

Although this data, compiled from the Wisconsin Department of Instruction’s website, can be flawed in terms of collection methodology itself, I offer it as support that in some ways the student body at North High School is a racially diverse one. It is certainly one of the reasons I wanted to be my research there as it provided the best chance to be witness to either the inclusion or exclusion of students of color in the Science Fiction classroom.

Simply walking around North High School can reveal the potential positive effects of this diversity are visible on campus, including the presence of several organizations that revolve around a sense of valuing multiple cultures and identities. Moreover, both students and faculty express a pride that such inclusiveness exists.

However, it was a reconsideration of this demographic data above along with the underrepresentation of students of color I saw in the Science Fiction classes that brought me to a “new” way to think about the relationship between classroom and school. More simply, I considered whether there was a negative aspect to the sense of satisfaction

North High School students and staff expressed about the school’s inclusiveness. In the classrooms I entered there was not only a lack of diversity, but also a feeling that such exclusion was not a problem since the school as a whole was diverse. In this sense, these classrooms become the “social site” within the larger school system that segregates students based on race. Of course, this is not new. Many scholars have written incisively on the subject of tracking “systems” within our schools (Oakes 2005, Gamoran 1992).

Then again, the statements from Mr. Rain’s students (especially the white students) proclaiming that this lack of diversity in the Science Fiction classroom was not a problem is yet another way such systems of segregation are reasoned. This system of segregation may not be one that “tracks” students in the traditional sense, but this system exists for more complex reasons than merely the “fact” that students of color “just aren't interested” in the material. This interest is mediated by larger cultural influences and then reinforced by the content choices teachers make. In this way then, North High School is a system that manages to segregate a diverse population similar to how this occurs in other areas of our society.

Here, I was left with two contradictory images of my time at North High School one, the picture of racially diverse hallways and the second, Mr. Rain’s 1st and 6th hour quite white classrooms. I wondered how students came to reason this contradiction for themselves. How did statements like these below (in response to Survey questions #2:

Little can be done to increase the number of students of color taking this course.) fit into how larger systems of segregation?

“I think sci-fi is all about interest, if one is not interested in the base, in science fiction in general, little can be done to encourage participation.”

“Actively discriminating against students of color is of course wrong, but actively trying to increase the number of students of color is wrong too.”

“I don’t really know, because although a lot of the colored kids I know are in school, they don’t enjoy it and this class is a two-sided discussion so I’m unsure if kids could be tempted into it.”

In looking back at this comments, I was reminded of a speech then newly appointed

Attorney General Eric Holder made commemorating Black History Month in 2009. In it he discussed the voluntary “social segregation” still at work in American life because on

“Saturdays and Sundays America in the year 2009 does not, in some ways, differ significantly from the country that existed some fifty years ago” (Holder). He continued, describing our country as one that had “not come to grips with its racial past nor has it been willing to contemplate, in a truly meaningful way, the diverse future it is fated to have” (ibid). This “system” of segregation that Attorney General Holder describes is similar to the system relationship I see at work within North High School.

However, the way this operates in the school is the opposite in that North High

School students seem socially integrated, but then accept segregation as they move into their respective classrooms to “work.” There is an acceptance by white students, students

92 of color, teachers and administrators that this kind of exclusion in the Science Fiction classroom is to be expected and accepted since the content is in a sense itself exclusionary: science fiction is a white guy thing. This should sound familiar to us; it may even smack of that dreaded common sense. But we have (I hope) come a long way is dismissing the idea that math and science courses were white male domains. We have come to understand that teaching History or English from a strictly Westernized paradigm is harmful to both white students and students of color. But why have we stopped here? Why has this progress away from the acceptance of both monocultural content and attendance lists been locked out of the Science Fiction classroom?

Why, almost 100 years after John Dewey wrote, “to have a large number of values in common, all members must have an equitable opportunity to receive and to take from others,” are we still accepting any form of segregation in our schools? (84). Dewey continues here with a warning, but also perhaps an answer to my question: “Otherwise, the influences that educate some into masters educate others into slaves” (ibid).

Whether it is the science fiction material in the regular English classroom or the elective as a whole, we accept this exclusion of content and student. And even more troubling is the question why do so many see this segregation as stemming from the supposed disinterest of students of color. I am still curious about when and where we accept kinds of segregation in schooling and why just then and there. And how does this reasoning travel into other areas of schooling and life? Such reasoning seems far too familiar to whites believing African Americans didn't really want to integrate, that they were better off over there. This “benign neglect” thinking continues because it serves those who benefit from segregation, not those who are harmed by it. This kind of self-

93 serving attitude hides less hate today than it did a generation ago perhaps, but it's still exclusionary.

The reasoning for the lack of diversity is once again placed at the feet of the excluded. This is similar to the deficit thinking discussed earlier. In thinking this way, we let ourselves off the hook in terms of inclusion. It becomes "common sense" to think that this material is more interesting to white boys, and we don't really need to consider the matter any further. We ignore the quite simple idea that the whiteness of the curriculum causes the whiteness of the classroom. We ignore how such classrooms can

undermine our democracy…by encouraging silence and separation where communication and connection are needed. These practices heighten divisions among groups and prevent young people from becoming active social participants in the life of their school –and later in the broader community where, ultimately, we must all learn to work and live together (Darling-Hammond).

Although we know that our country is growing evermore diverse, too many teachers of this material refuse to consider that race as a theme has a place alongside issues like humanity's intersection with technology. So the effort here must be to take multicultural education into places it has yet to go. Taking a cue from Attorney General Holder imagined, we must:

Imagine if you will situations where people- regardless of their skin color- could confront racial issues freely and without fear. The potential of this country, that is becoming increasingly diverse, would be greatly enhanced (Holder).

But I am left here wondering why we avoid the simplicity of Holder’s advice and in particular, how are segregated classrooms in divers schools helping to prepare students to continue this avoidance in the present and the future. In order to consider this reasoning, I want to focus on the issue of the resistance, specifically from white students, to “seeing”

94 race as an integral aspect of both science fiction and the future. I see this resistance as relating to Apple and Carspecken’s contention that attempting to change patterns, like the one that places concerns of race and racism outside the Science Fiction realm, affects those who “benefitted from the system relationship” and thus trying to make “changes result in conflicts” (547).

As someone who was a teaching assistant for college courses that fulfilled the

Ethnic Studies requirement at a predominately white university for three years and now teaches a Multicultural Education class to mostly white students as a part of their teacher education program, I feel I have a good amount of experience with white resistance to conversations about race. Moreover, I can recall in my own life when I felt ideas perhaps close to ones these students expressed. But then I got straightened out as they say (having an African American brother helped a lot) and realized that this resentful response to my

“white privilege” only served to hide from me to the choice it allowed me make: I am not the problem so I don’t need to think about solutions. This choice was passive in the sense that it was drowned out by the louder frustration I felt. So it is with both empathy and anger that I read statements by students expressing this desire to keep their little white space all to themselves.

In order to think about the resistance I witnessed more critically, I want to return to the work of Joyce King, specifically her notion of “dysconscious racism” (1991). First, she defines dysconsciousness as “an uncritical habit of mind (including perceptions, attitudes, assumptions, and beliefs) that justifies exploitation by accepting the existing order of things as given” (Ibid). She continues to describe “dysconscious racism”

…as a form of racism that tacitly accepts dominant White norms and privileges. It is not the absence of consciousness, but an impaired consciousness or distorted way of thinking about a race…Uncritical ways of thinking about racial inequity accept certain culturally sanctioned assumptions, myths, and beliefs that justify the social and economic advantages Whites have as a result of subordinating diverse others (135).

By applying this ‘impaired’ thinking to racism (and thus to other forms of exploitations as well), King’s term can help facilitate a discussion about what white students may choose to not understand about the world around them and the ways that choice is made easier both by a segregated curriculum and classroom as seen in the Science Fiction elective at North High School.

Although King’s work here evolves out of her teaching experiences in higher education, I contend this dysconsciousness works in similar ways here. For example, here are a few more responses from white students to the same survey question discussed above:

“This class looks pretty diverse to me. Who ever takes it takes it.”

“I don’t think race effects the # of kids taking this class.”

“Again there should be no reason for racial ethnicities to not attend this class, but that’s entirely up to them.”

Such “uncritical” responses reminded me of those King uses in the “Dysconscious

Racism” piece to show this “habit of mind” in white student teachers:

“Blacks probably have lower self –esteem and when you have lower self-esteem, it is harder to move up in the world…Blacks group together and stay together.”

“Discrimination is still a problem which results in lack of motivation, self-esteem and hence a lessened ‘desire’ to escape the hardships with which the are faced” 136).

What was most striking to me in looking at both sets of comments here was how the white high school students seemed to be well on their way to becoming the same kind of students King (and myself) see in teacher education classes.

Moreover, such ‘uncritical’ curricula and discussions de-race the future and are another way present subordination is sanctioned in our schools. This de-raced science fiction curriculum also acts as a controlling discourse; the future is constructed as a place without Du Bois’ “color-line,” even though the line between human and alien is a constant theme within so much of this material. This limitation of the future through curricular silence is yet another example of how schools intentionally avoid the subject of race, which then in turn impairs students’ ability to discuss race and racism with honesty and open-mindedness. What we end up producing in the next generation is a habit towards uncritical thinking around race and racism. We must aim to make such conversations more explicit within our schools in general to alleviate this inclination towards dysconscious thinking in our students.

When educators intervene in any school curriculum, as I am attempting here, there is the inevitable push back from those who view themselves as protectors of the existing curriculum. Simply, as the epigraph from Arnold Krupat contends, the canon so many defend is part of the problem with our school curricula. Specifically, it is the science fiction canon, and our unquestioning trust in it, which limits how students, particularly students of color, are able to “see” their future. To be included in such a canon, the literature must be old (ironic since it imagines the future) and respected. Thus, by seemingly non-discriminatory exclusion, this science fiction canon is constructed as very male and very white.

This line of “canon as curriculum” reasoning is akin to forcing young people to watch only professional baseball games from the later 1940’s and early 1950’s, before the league was integrated. Although historically such athletic endeavors can certainly represent more than segregation, the baseball fan must move forward just as the game did. Unfortunately, many science fiction and fantasy reading lists have not moved into the present, much less the future. These courses (and thus the classrooms as well) are spaces still too often reserved for white male students

For me, perhaps the most important idea that flows out of these findings is how these “systems” allow us to ignore the curricular and enrollment segregation we should see plainly. What must be done then with this realization is that for change to occur, like in The Matrix films, we must dedicate ourselves to hacking into the system from within it. Clearly then there must be a stage 6 to my methodology, one that would more obviously “contest” these inequities. I call it “changing system relationships” and it will focus on efforts to impact the system relationships and the discrete routines of the

Science Fiction classroom that make it so easy for students to separate race and racism from the future. Students must somehow be encouraged to bring these issues into class and then class discussions without teacher prompting. Then, perhaps race, as a topic of inquiry, would be as familiar to students of Science Fiction as class issues have become.

I am confident that such work begins by encouraging teachers in these classrooms to ask more concrete questions that are grounded in the everyday lives of their students.

Although we need to ask philosophical questions, we must be sure to help students connect personally with the themes we are trying to explore with them. As I said earlier, both these styles of questioning work best together and offer more students a way into the

98 material. If this shift can occur when this kind of literature is used in the earlier grades, along with the content interrogation of authors of color that is long past due, then maybe both race and students of color won’t seem so “alien” to those already welcomed into the

Science Fiction space.

Another system relationship that exists here is the one between the cultural products of science fiction, especially the Blade Runner and Matrix films, and the how this material is interpreted by Mr. Rain’s students. In order to discuss this as a “finding” I return to Apple and Carspecken, specifically their use of Richard Johnson’s “circuit of cultural production.” They describe the four features of Johnson’s “circuit” in this way:

The qualitative researcher can ask (1) where do cultural themes come from, (2) what possible meanings do they bear, (3) how do the subjects of the study interpret the meanings, and (4) in what ways do these interpretations affect the daily lives and routines of the people being studied. (539-40)

So in keeping with my habit of rephrasing the ancestors here, I ask first, (1) where do the cultural themes about science fiction come from, (2) what meanings do they bear regarding race if the popular science fiction films these students are familiar have little to say (at least explicitly) about race, (3) how do these students then interpret the connection between science fiction and race, and (4) in what ways do such interpretations affect how these students choose to understand race as an essential aspect of their Science Fiction course? Thus, since so much of science fiction film ignores explicit discussions of race, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that these students balk at including race as a an essential theme. The effect here then is that even though Mr. Rain included films with implicit racial themes, his students had a difficult time interpreting the films through the lens of

99 race. For example, many students had a difficult time “seeing” Larissa Lai’s point in changing Rachel’s (from Blade Runner) to an Asian character in her short story and later in the semester, when they were given the chance to choose “race” as a subject of inquiry for the final exam on The Matrix, almost no one did.

The aversion to discussing race as existing in science fiction films mirrors the acceptance of a Science Fiction curriculum dominated by white authors. Moreover, this

“blindness” to race as a subject of these cultural productions becomes yet another way to defend the belief that “students of color just aren’t interested” in this material. Instead, we should understand how difficult it might be for students of color to see themselves in a

Science Fiction class because how our culture produces the genre in film and other forms.

Since “interests” are only imagined through “cultural productions of them,” a student of color may experience a “mismatch between one’s interests and the culturally shaped ways in which one thinks and talks about them” (543). Put simply, we owe students of color a better Science Fiction then the one they see in these larger cultural productions.

We need to understand this “interest” as structured within larger society and then reinforced (or locked) by our schooling. Only then can we seek answers to who is interested in science fiction and who isn’t and why? In an effort to help with these efforts,

I discuss several more complex representations of African Americans in science fiction and fantasy films, as well as in graphic novels, later in this chapter.

II. CHALLENGES & LIMITATIONS OF RESEARCH

The most obvious limitation to my research is one I noticed on the first day of classes and could do little to ameliorate: the lack of students of color in Mr. Rain’s two

100 classes. Although such numbers support my notions of exclusion, I was still a bit surprised at the disparity considering the overall racial demographics of North High

School. Since the end of school year, I have spent much time reflecting on this concern, specifically in terms of Isaac and the other two African-American males who dropped the class. Although I discuss this frustration in the narrative above, I want to emphasize here the space that must exist between the student entering a classroom and the moment he or she decides to drop the class. Although it is impossible to know the reasons why the three students dropped, that they did emboldens me to even more forcefully consider it is in how teachers introduce this kind of course that can make an immediate difference in how inclusive such a space can be. The challenge for me then is to seek ways to encourage teachers like Mr. Rain to reflect on how students of color may “read” the course on those first days of class.

The second most troubling limitation is one I mention towards the end of Chapter

3. Simply, the interviews were a source of considerable disappointment for me in the sense of my own effort. Simply put, I have a great deal to learn about their use within such research. The ways in which these interviews are a limitation to my research are both simple and complex. The clearest one to me now is that my interview questions for the students were too similar to the ones I asked them in the survey I detail above. This mistake was compounded by the fact that the most of these interviews took place the week after the semester had ended. This quick turnaround was a necessity due to student schedules, but it did not allow enough time for me to consider the surveys and come up with a set of questions that responded to that data. More complexly perhaps, by advocating so strongly for the issues of diversity of content and class enrollment I may

101 also have discouraged both students to take part and then when they did, to provide a level of honesty in the interviews I did complete.

A central issue was I simply couldn’t get the interviews I most wanted: ones with

African American students. In looking back on my efforts to secure such interviews, I have to admit the possibility that I was not assertive enough. Ever since my email exchange with Principal Watson, I felt a hesitance towards any obvious attention on Mr.

Rain’s African American students. I suppose this could also stem from reading about the researcher’s “gaze on the other” in Critical Qualitative studies. Either way, I felt that if I hounded certain students to get these interviews or added some kind of incentive to increase the likelihood of finding the “right” volunteers, my data would be infected to a degree. At this point, I am not sure how this concern relates to how I position myself as a

Critical Qualitative researcher. I realize I earlier made much of the willingness to step outside the standard confinements of the researcher stance, but I also couldn’t help feeling that there was only so much I should do to create opportunities for my dialogical data collection.

These issues with interviewing reinforce my belief in using both student work product and survey responses as the primary data collection methods. I found these elements to be the most interesting and I simply should have done more of both than I did. However, present here as well is the issue of diminishing returns with any data collection. If I had collected everything the Science Fiction students wrote and handed out multiple surveys, what would be the impact of this on their responses? Regardless, I suppose one reason I didn’t make a point of using more surveys was thinking the interviews were going to be a source of strong data results. Unfortunately, as the

102 interviews now exist as a part of my research narrative, it would be kind to call them a limitation. As I said above, I need to become a better interviewer. This concern is especially vital for me since I am currently teaching a class in which I assess a paper in which teacher education students interview a k-12 student of a different racial background than themselves. I grade between 75-100 of these papers a quarter in fact; maybe I can learn a bit from my students on this one.

In addition to the few students of color and the interviews, another challenge and limitation of my research was feeling that I simply didn’t have enough time to impact Mr.

Rain’s two classes. I wish I had the opportunity to “hack” into a quarter’s worth of instruction, instead of what amounted to three and a half weeks. As a brief aside here, it’s worth noting that originally Mr. Rain and I agreed that I would teach one of the two

Science Fiction classes for the entire semester and observe his teaching of the other. The only reason this did not occur was a delay in obtaining final approval from the school district to engage in this study. Regardless, two concerns flow out of this limitation of time and space: the first is the fear I don’t have enough “data” to meet the expectations of my dissertation committee and second, and more generally, I just feel like I left some of it out on the floor. As a scholar, I know I am a work-in-progress. But as a teacher, I have much more confidence; a bit like Neo when he realizes he is “The One” in the first

Matrix film. And although a great many teachers have been my Morpheus, it didn’t take me long to know how to bend that spoon. Or, to borrow from Audre Lorde, I know how to incite that riot. In the end though, the impact that I could have had on these students, but didn’t have time to attempt, is a regret. But this tells me something crucial about the

103 line that still exists for me between teacher and scholar. Thus, the challenge in moving forward is to find a way to be both and not limited by one or the other.

III. IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE & REPLICATION

This section includes a lengthy discussion of additional resources to further

“multiculturize” the use of science fiction material as either a secondary school elective or as part of a regular English/Language Arts curriculum in grades 6-12. In doing so, I seek to accomplish two central tasks. First, this discussion will “talk back” to Mr. Rain’s curriculum and thus continue to consider alternatives to it through the lens of critical multiculturalism. Much like my earlier discussion of teaching “The Pedestrian” from a

CM perspective, I want to present here even more materials through that same lens.

Second, I want to offer teachers a wealth of material that answers the “So how?” question. I justify such a lengthy focus on these materials as staying true to my intention to be a resource for not only researchers, but even more so, for teachers who may seek to replicate and expand my efforts here. Although much of the following is adapted from my Master’s thesis, the following materials emphasize the goals of my dissertation research and I hope soon I am able to put the material into practice myself.

The first author discussed in greater detail must be Octavia Butler, whose short story “Bloodchild” Mr. Rain included in previous semesters as well as the present one.

Although Butler passed away in 2006, her significance as a writer and an exemplar of

Afrofuturism continues. In this sense, her work lives on as only truly great speculative fiction can. As we move into the “real” future, Butler’s work offers a space for

104 speculative visions to become essential lessons for students of today and tomorrow. In addition, by writing in a genre essentially closed off to her by racial and gendered expectations, Butler’s determination and the success that followed can itself be used within the classroom. Her biography, unlike those of canonical favorites like Ernest

Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, can speak to adolescents today of all the best their future can become.

So, in the following paragraphs, I discuss a few specific Butler works as resources for teachers to use in replicating and advancing the work Mr. Rain and myself have done.

Although a marvelous story in its own right, “Bloodchild” leads off here to dispel the notion that African American writers of speculative fiction are limited to explicit discussions of race and racism. Within “Bloodchild” a unique transformation is taking place. It is the story of one human family’s tenuous existence on an alien world. For untold reasons, humans were driven from earth generations earlier and forced to settle in as property of the Tlic, a worm-like life form. Butler’s narrator, a young man named Gan, describes how each human family is wedded to a particular Tlic to assist with their reproduction. Specifically, Gan is matched with T’Gatoi, a leader of her society, to serve as the incubator of her eggs. As the story unfolds, Gan must face the reality he has in some ways chosen this relationship. He grapples with what will be done to him when

T’Gatoi’s eggs are violently removed from his body. Transformed here is Gan’s perception of himself. It is not only the male’s role in reproduction that has shifted, but also Gan’s notions of freedom and choice within his relationship with T’Gatoi. Although

Gan contemplates his own suicide, he eventually chooses (again) this role he had before

105 only considered in the abstract. He overcomes this crisis of self-alienation in acting as a protector of his family -a family that has now grown to include T’Gatoi.

At play within this story are notions of how power, control, and choice impact our relationships with “others.” And since power relations is such a key element to considerations of critical multiculturalism, I see “Bloodchild” as an excellent place to continue the discussion of what a reimagined science fiction curriculum would look like.

To emphasize this connection, I return to an earlier passage from Sleeter and May on how

CM “gives priority to structural analysis of unequal power relationships…The implication of this kind of structural analysis is that challenging power relations requires understanding how power is used and institutionalized” (10). Butler’s story considers an unequal power relationship at both the local level, within the intimate relations Gan and

T’Gatoi, and the global (or perhaps, galaxy) level, since Gan is human and T’Gatoi is an alien. Thus, students are challenged to reflect on how choice in our relations is mediated by the different ways power and control are employed. I also see Locke’s second element of CM coming into use here: “recognizing unequal power relations as a part of life and that individual and collective choices are circumscribed by the ethnic categories available at any given time and place” (87). Although choice within the world of “Bloodchild” is

“circumscribed” more by the categories of human and alien than by ethnicity, the essential theme for student still revolves around considerations of how our individual and collective choices involve the use of power.

With “Bloodchild” we also see a more literal example of power at work in how certain thematic meaning is inscribed upon a work based on the author’s race. In this case the imposition deals with how many readers (and critics) often choose to see a metaphor

106 for slavery inside the story’s discussion of alien and human relationships. Although educators must encourage students to make their own meanings from a text, we must also work diligently to point out when such meanings can often be limited by what we think an author “should” examine. Butler herself says, “It amazes me that some people have seem ‘Bloodchild’ as a story of slavery. It isn’t” (Butler 1996, 30). However, when I mentioned this quote from Butler to Mr. Rain, he said something to the effect that the story was clearly about race. Here we see perhaps the notion of “cultural power” being wielded by Mr. Rain in his ability to ascribe a particular meaning to Butler’s story. In effect, he gets to decide what the story is about and part of that “decision” is based on a limitation of what authors of color “get” to write about. Consequently, “Bloodchild” becomes even more useful to the CM teacher because of this inscribed slavery theme.

Thus, the theme of power relations exists within the text itself as well as in its critical reception. In both locations, power can be examined as a complex (and often unequal) negotiation based on the individual and collective assumptions we bring to the text.

Whether it is the main character in “Bloodchild” or the reader, each must seek to understand how power mediates our choices in life. From Butler’s quote above, we see an artist explicitly taking the power to define her story back from those who would seek to transform her work’s meaning into something that makes more “sense” for an African-

American women to be writing about.

As a companion piece to “Bloodchild,” students would also benefit from reading

Butler’s essay, “The Monophobic Response.” This two-page essay highlights Butler’s conception of the alien as a conveniently and repeatedly constructed, but unrecognized

“other.” She writes, “No wonder we’re so good at creating aliens…And yet we are unable

107 to get along with those aliens who are closest to us, those aliens who are of course ourselves” (Thomas, Century 416). In true speculative fiction fashion, Butler ends the essay with a visioning of the future that includes “real” aliens. She ponders what realizations might follow our acknowledgement of “other” life forms. Butler asks these future selves, “What will we feel? What will be born of that brief, strange, ironic reunion?” (Ibid). Butler allows us to imagine a moment in the future when we will have the opportunity to awaken to our human connectedness. Such imaginings offer teachers and students a way to discuss community as more than a unit title in a textbook. Butler’s particular envisioning here gives us a chance to talk to one another about community as a characteristic of human nature that still has the power to transform our lives today, tomorrow, and all the days after.

In the following paragraphs I discuss three more works by Butler, “The Evening and the Morning and the Night,” “Speech Sounds,” and Parable of the Sower, as a way to broaden Mr. Rain’s curriculum that often excluded race as a concern of technological advancement. For example, the plot of “The Evening and the Morning and the Night,” focuses around “Duryea-Gode,” a disease that causes self-mutilation and mental impairment. Ironically, the disease was caused by a drug called ‘Hedeonco” which was manufactured as a cure for cancer and other diseases. Here, as in many other works of speculative fiction and film, we see technological advancement, specifically pharmaceutical research being critiqued. Although the critique of technology is a standard theme, the issue of how future medical “knowledge” will be constructed and at what cost can be discussed within the classroom as involving both historical and contemporary components. We can even return to Mark Dery’s point that the history of

108 technological advancement in America has at many times been willing to sacrifice the health and lives of African-Americans. Harriet A. Washington’s Medical Apartheid: The

Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present and is an excellent resource to recount the nature of medical “knowledge.”

Such interdisciplinary discussions could even extend into the health care debate. Looking at this contemporary debate, as well as the surrounding rhetoric, students will see connections between Butler’s story of disease and the ways in which sickness is allowed to take hold in certain communities and not others.

On a more personal level, Butler’s story shows how those infected with DGD are excluded from society. Yet at the same time the inflicted strive to create a place within society and a place sheltered from it. This theme enables the opening up of discussions around concepts of alienation and self-alienation. Students will come to understand how the former often leads to the later. More importantly, Butler’s story provides a vision for how to act against such a process. The narrator, Lynn has been inflicted with DGD since birth. She has been the victim of exclusion and suspicion all her life. Further, Butler provides no sense that such alienation will cease as Lynn moves ahead. However, Butler does show us how Lynn can resist self-alienation by taking actions instead of letting some prescribed future run her down. In the end, the story’s examination of medical advancement and the human toll of such research help lead students to make the interdisciplinary connections between literature, history, and contemporary social issues.

In “Speech Sounds,” Butler examines another disturbing mixture of alienation and self-alienation. Here, the loss of the self is experienced through the loss of language. In

“Speech Sounds” we are shown a future where the powers of speech and literacy have

109 been lost, replaced by powers more brutal and primal. The protagonist is Rye, a woman who had “lost reading and writing, She had taught history at UCLA…She had a house full of books she could neither read nor bring herself to use as fuel” (Butler, “Bloodchild”

98). Although the comparison to Bradbury’s 451 is striking here, Butler has more on her mind than the extinction of one form of literacy. As we follow the seemingly speechless

Rye on a violent journey across the Los Angeles metropolis, Butler uses the “silences” of speech and diminished memory to investigate how essential language is to both our sense of self and our sense of community. As Rye’s memory has receded, her self-knowledge slipped away as well. And in watching the inability of others to communicate successfully, she is witness to how confusion and violence can replace patience and understanding.

As in the two earlier short stories, there is however a glimmer of hope at the end.

Rye comes across two children who are apparently immune from the plague of speechlessness. In these children Rye finds hope: “What if children of three or fewer years were safe and able to learn language? What if all they needed were teachers?...She had been a teacher. A good one” (Butler, “Bloodchild” 107). I hope you can forgive a biased moment of appreciation for such a professionally inspiring moment. Although I am sure some students might groan a bit at first at my excitement at this particular passage, they will notice as well how Butler focuses the hope for a better future as lying in the hands of the young. Equally, the story’s overall power lies in the poignancy of how vital multiple forms of literacy are to our society.

The parallels between Butler’s story of literacy and the slave narratives of

Frederick Douglass are worth noting here. The role literacy and communication play in

110 freedom and hope is profound in both texts. At the beginning of “Speech Sounds” Rye has been made a “brute” much like Douglass had. However, it is through a hope in part inspired by literacy and knowledge that both Rye and Douglass reclaim their humanity.

In addition, Butler’s Rye experiences a reclaiming of self-knowledge akin to what we see in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. And although we must be careful to let Butler’s work exists on its own, these connections with more canonical African American texts are many and provide yet another way to expand such work into spaces “speculative fiction” has not gone before. Regardless, the hope Butler leaves us with in “Speech Sounds” is one based on Rye’s continuing belief that a damaged society can be (re)transformed through communication.

In Parable of the Sower, Butler again examines the dystopian future. This time however it is in ways more familiar perhaps to the casual science fiction viewer. For example, the recent film, The Book of Eli could be used as a contemporary link for students to envision the future Butler creates in her 1993 novel. Not only are they similar in portraying an African American protagonist as a savior of humanity, both “texts” present widespread illiteracy as an element of dystopia as well as a central theme of redemption through religion. Although the overt religious discussions in the text (along with several passages of graphic violence) make the use of Butler’s novel difficult, it has been used in high schools already (Oakland Unified School District).

As the novel opens, the year is 2024 and the United States is ravaged by pollution, rampant and senseless crime, and widespread scarcity. Walled communities exist as the only hope for what passes as safety in this horrific setting. In one such community lives

Lauren Olamina, the novel’s narrator. Lauren is afflicted with a condition called

111 hyperempathy. Essentially, if she witnesses another in pain, Lauren too experiences that pain. Here, Butler establishes the complexities of empathy as an essential theme. Such complexities can encourage teachers and students can discuss how these difficulties manifest themselves in real life. This discussion would be a place to revisit how Butler’s

“Bloodchild” similarly complicated essential human emotions.

After her gated community is attacked and her family is killed, Lauren must search for safety alone. Soon however, Lauren is able to use her leadership skills to attract a number of followers and the novel becomes a quest tale through a society literally burning itself to death. As the leader of this band of survivors and as the originator of a new religion, called “Earthseed,” Lauren is Butler’s most “transformative” figure yet. Like Rye before her, Lauren is able to find the hope necessary to keep moving forward. She travels the roadways with her band fighting off those who have given up their humanity in hopes of survival. Much like the recently adaptation of Cormac

McCarthy’s novel The Road, Butler’s novel details the struggle of those who wish to survive but remain truly human. As seemingly common as this dystopian setting has become within the genre of futuristic visions, Butler’s Lauren is unique within this space as a young African-American woman. In this way, she is the change her new religion envisions.

Clearly, all students will benefit from such a representation that pushes back against the absences so often unseen in science fiction literature and film. Thus, Butler’s characters and themes allow for fascinating discussions centered on race, gender, and class too often overlooked when we use material we call “Science Fiction.” A close study of such work will enable all students, but especially students of color to see how a future

112 told can be transformed into a future made. An essential part of such a study would be to discuss with the students how the issues Butler addresses can be solved in ways small and large. Moreover, Butler’s other novels also make possible the further expansion of this curriculum into other school disciplines.

The last group of materials I would like to discuss emphasizes how multicultural science fiction can be much more than merely fiction. Such non-fiction materials would help teachers apply more concrete concerns to what was too often a repetitious circling around philosophical questions in Mr. Rain’s classroom. The first author I offer here is

Walter Mosley. Although more recognized for his detective novels featuring Easy

Rawlins, Mosley has entered into the speculative fiction genre as both author and essayist. In addition to the previously mentioned collection of short stories, Futureland,

Mosley has published Blue Light, 47, and The Wave. However, for my more immediate curricular purposes, Mosley’s essay "Black to the Future," serves as the students’ introduction to this author. The essay acts similarly to Butler’s “The Monophobic

Response.” In the essay, Mosley states, "The power of science fiction is that it can tear down the walls and windows, the artifice and laws by changing the logic, empowering the disenfranchised, or simply by asking, What if?” (Thomas, Century 407). Here,

Mosley credits the potential of the genre and by moving this “power” into the classroom,

I intend to make full use of it. Simply, the essay is yet another text that offers a way for the CM teacher to discuss “unequal power relations” in both the real and imaginative realm. In returning once more to his essay, it seems Mosley envisioned such an effort already:

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The tale could unfold in a world where power is based upon the uses of the imagination, where the strongest voices rise to control the destiny of the nation and the world. Maybe, in this make-believe world, a group is being held back by limits placed on their ability to imagine; their dreams have been infiltrated by the dominant group making even the idea of dissent impossible. The metaphor of this speculative and revolutionary tale could be language as power –the hero, a disembodied choir that disrupts the statue quo. ‘Jazz in the Machine’ could be the title. Black letters on a white page would suffice for the jacket design (Ibid).

In terms inspiration, there is nothing more responsible for what I am now writing than

Mosley’s words above. One day I hope this passage will, in the words of Harry Allen, be

“weaponized.” I envision the passage placed at the beginning of a course introduction or perhaps the front cover of my very own book jacket (with accompanying attestations by esteemed academics on the back of course).

The other two essays, “Racism and Science Fiction” by Samuel R. Delany and

“Why Blacks Should Read (and Write) Science Fiction” by Charles R. Saunders more specifically “talk back” against the simplistic notion that students of color aren’t interested in science fiction. Both could be described as similar to the declarations of

African American literary independence by such essential authors as Langston Hughes and Richard Wright. Written in 1999, Delany’s essay details his exclusion from and eventually success within the science fiction literary field. Since he is often credited as the first successful African American writer of science fiction, Delany’s first hand account here is essential history. In addition, Delany looks further behind him to acknowledge those African American writers who had entered into such imaginings before him: authors like the earlier mentioned Martin Delany, Sutton G. Griggs, Edward

Johnson, and Harlan Ellison. Equally instructive to these histories, is Delany’s more pointed discussion of racism and how science fiction can be an agent of anti-racism work.

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Here, Delany speaks in language familiar to the critical qualitative researcher:

“Racism for me has always appeared to be first and foremost a system, largely supported by material and economic conditions at work in a field of social traditions” (Thomas,

Century 383). Delany’s use of “system” fits nicely with how I see the “Science Fiction” curriculum as often limiting the imagination of students, particularly students of color. It should also be clear that one of the material conditions Delany could be speaking of is our schools. And is there a larger “social tradition” at work inside these classrooms than the claims of canon preservation? Such efforts in the name of “tradition” infect the work of a multicultural education. But what can science fiction do about all this? Delany offers some ideas when he picks up the “racism as a system” idea later on in the same essay. He writes that racism is

whatever acclimates people, of all colors, to become comfortable with the isolation and segregation of the races, on a visual, social, or economic level – which in turn supports and is supported by socioeconomic discrimination…Because we still live in a racist society, the only way to combat it in any systematic way is to establish -and repeatedly revamp anti-racist institutions and traditions (Thomas, Century 394).

Multicultural educators are making such efforts everyday in our schools. Although I understand revamping entire schools as anti-racist institutions is indeed a difficult task, I see the integration of such material as taking care of at least one room.

As for Charles R. Saunders, author of the Imaro series, his 2000 essay “Why

Blacks Should Read (and Write) Science Fiction” is a follow-up to his essay from 1977 called “Why Blacks Don’t Read Science Fiction. Apparently in the intervening 23 years,

Saunders has seen some reasons for a more positive outlook. One of these reasons is

Octavia Butler. He writes, “Like [Toni] Morrison, Butler writes from a black perspective,

115 creating stories that envision a multicultural world…her themes are universal…If there were only one reason why blacks should read science fiction, it would be the writings of

Octavia Butler” (Thomas, Century 400). And although Saunders names other authors such as Steven Barnes, LeVar Burton, and Butler’s “true literary child,” Nalo Hopkinson, he justly gives Butler her due.

Saunders then complicates this “multicultural world” of science fiction by adding in the work of white writers. He writes, “Even as new black writers emerged during the

1980’s and 1990’s, white writers were including more black characters in their stories and writing novels with black-oriented themes. Thankfully, few of them have echoed the shortcomings of their predecessors” (Thomas, Century 401). After detailing some of the positives, Saunders details the work of Mike Resnick, a white science fiction writer of many books set in Africa. Saunders portrays Resnick’s work thusly: “It is either admired or despised…he is either a bold visionary or the reincarnation of Edgar Rice Burroughs, whose racially incorrect Tarzan novels defined Africa’s place in the world of the imagination for most of the century” (Thomas, Century 402). All of this focus on Resnick leads Saunders back to his essay’s topic.

Saunders says that writers of African decent must be the ones to tell their stories, especially if they feel white science fiction writers employ stereotypes of Africa as primitive. Saunders’ critique of Resnick works as a valuable counter-narrative against depictions that continue a legacy of use and abuse of the African American body and soul. At the end of the essay, Saunders asserts why this reclaiming is so vital. He writes,

We need to contribute to our culture’s overall mythology as well, and provide alternatives to the stereotypes that continue to plague us within that

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mythology…The onus is on us. We have to bring some to get some in outer space and otherspace, as we have done here on Earth. Just as our ancestors sang their songs in a strange land when they were kidnapped and sold from Africa, we must, now and in the future, continue to sing our songs under strange stars (404).

By connecting the genre back into this history, leading up to “contributions of people from Duke Ellington to Alice Walker,” Saunders declares the time has come for

Afrofuturism.

In addition to non-fiction texts, science fiction films can continue to expand the discussions these classrooms have around the difference between the future we want and the future we tend to imaginatively envision. Although the adult content of such films can make their use in public schools problematic, understanding the visual representations of science fiction as mediated within our culture is crucial. Simply, the films of science fiction are cultural productions that exist as three-dimensional conversations about what we think of when we think about the future. In this effort I am indebted to Prof. Adilfu

Nama’s work Black Space: Imagining Race in Science Fiction Film. In this text, Nama places

black racial formation at the center…As a result, a more complex and provocative picture emerges of how SF cinema, in imaging new worlds and addressing a broad range of social topics, has confronted and retreated from the color line, one of the most troubling and turbulent social issues present in American society (4).

Further, Nama sees the discourse of bad versus good representation as “shortsighted in the ideological implications one can assert” (5). In these “either or” conversations the inevitable outcome is either a defense of the “negative” representation or an attack on the

“positive” one. This move into the critique of film as a mirror onto larger societal forms of representation brings an essential interdisciplinary quality to this work. Indeed, this is

117 the profound shift towards the perspective of the many that so many advocates of multicultural education call for. For example, Banks’ desire to see “students…pursue projects and activities that allow them to take personal, social, and civic actions” continues to be the goal of any continuation of this kind of work.

Such cinematic representations can be used in the classroom environment to discuss concepts of race in American society. These representations, embedded in so much of our visual culture, can be integrated just as teachers so often do with representations within literature. The fact that these images are so accessible to students makes them even more useful as a way to introduce them to the patterns of characterization that swirl around them. Thus, these movies are used as “cultural models” to scaffold the more complex notions of representation for students (Lee, Culture). Then after recognizing these representations, we can teach, and learn ourselves, what they say about our society. For instance, one way to extend such a critique is to take this way of seeing into the today’s news media. A lesson could consider how depictions of “heroes” and “villains” are presented in various media platforms. The question becomes, is there a similar limitation, or representation to how African American heroism is depicted in these “real” places? Next, the “final frontier” would be to not only critique such images, but also to view them alongside the representations of African American heroes (both male and female) presented within the literature of authors like Butler and Mosley.

Perhaps the quickest way such an understanding can be gained is to remain focused on the hero as a character in film and literature. Students could simply be asked to gather examples of “limited” heroes from a wider range of raced and gendered representations. For example, students could discuss how women’s courage and heroism

118 is defined and limited on film. The curricular inclusion here would certainly be a powerful way to underscore how the pattern of limited representation cuts across so- called borders of race, gender, and sexuality. Moreover, in film and literature, the future is often depicted as the privilege and property of whites. And so the limited space granted people of color, as a harbinger of dystopia, must be fought against as well. These white fears, expressed through various cultural forms, that equate the future with the “rising tide of minority populations in America” infect adolescent whites as well. This generational fear passed down lessens the white students’ potential to be a part of any solutions in the present or the future.

In order to offer a sense of how such work can be accomplished, I will discuss how the limited African American hero representation is seen in a few contemporary speculative films. The first one I would like to discuss is “Morpheus” played by

Lawrence Fishburne in The Matrix films. Although The Matrix trilogy defies summation, the films revolve around the most standard of all science fiction conflicts: man versus machine. The first film begins with humans already conquered and put to use as batteries to power some never defined machine civilization. But wait; there’s hope. And his name isn’t Morpheus. Or maybe his hope is our hope. Either way, with Morpheus we have an

African American character as the one who believes in “The One” (also know as Neo) played by Keanu Reeves. Morpheus believes that Neo is the one destined to help free the humans from their captivity by the machines. He believes this so fervently that he offers his “life” up in order to prove it to Neo.

This is the “Magical Negro” representation: the African American character is present only to help the white character understand his hero-ness. And although

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Morpheus offers more to the trilogy than his potential death, this tendency towards sacrifice is his primary characteristic. In addition to Morpheus, the “Oracle,” played by two African American actresses (Gloria Foster and Mary Alice), is another “Magical

Negro” character whose role is to help Neo be the hero. The discussion of this particular representation brings in notions of how heroism is gendered in film and Kimberly

Crenshaw’s thinking on the “intersectionality” of race and gender.

To further this point, I would like to discuss Halle Berry’s portrayal of Storm from the X-Men films. The X-Men story began in the 1960’s and has grown to involve toys, comics, television cartoons, and most recently, a series of successful big-budget movies. Instead of military and pro-establishment bluster, the X-Men are called

“mutants” more often than superheroes, especially in the earlier plotlines. Even further, writers of the comics and the films have made a direct connection between the hostility and prejudice faced by the “mutants” and other oppressed groups. The most prominent of these “othered” groups to be referenced has been the Jewish people. In fact, the first re- boot movie from 2000 opens with a scene depicting the Nazi Germany in order to provide back-story for the X-Men’s chief antagonist, Magneto. However, my focus here is still on Halle Berry’s Storm. Granted, little about the representation of Storm in the three X-Men movies is overtly racist. But this is more removal of race than anything resembling a fully developed African American representation. On the other hand, her comic book storyline is much fuller. For example, her powers of controlling the weather lead to her being worshipped as an African Goddess on the Serengeti. She also marries

“Black Panther,” another African turned superhero in the Marvel Comic universe.

Although I understand the time constraints with a movie focusing on an entire superhero

120 team, the change in her representation from comic to movie is another sad example of the absence of race.

Granted, the comic book representation of Storm is worthy of critique as well.

Her character along with the African people is made primitive in obvious ways. But this absence on film is more distressing to me as Storm is “whitewashed” as an African

American superhero. As you might expect, her gender is not similarly “man-washed.”

Berry’s costume is sexualized in the “usual” ways of the superhero genre. Her

“hypervisibility” is as a sexual object. The need to show her cleavage to entice young males into the movie brings up the question of how such representation through objectification is any different from how white female super-heroes are depicted in similar Hollywood fare. In addition to sexuality, Storm is also predictably presented as the mother of this group of “mutants.” She soothes male egos endlessly as if she wouldn’t have anything to do without running back and forth between the brooding Wolverine and the jealous Cyclops. Such critiques would certainly be a place to expand into a more focused examination of the “intersections” between race and gender. Although Storm could be discussed within the “Magical Negro” stereotype in both the comics and movies, it is her “intersectionality” as an African American woman that makes her so valuable to any discussion of the complexities of racial and gendered representation.

In terms then of positive visual representations of the African American hero/character, I offer here the work of Milestone Media. Milestone Media was formed by a group of African American writers and artists in the early 1990’s who wanted to provide the story (with visuals of course) they saw absent from the mainstream comic book industry. By offering these representations, the students have a way to see how an

121 effort at a positive change can be made (or drawn). Comic books and graphic novels also exist as a way to reach not only reluctant readers, but also as a way for all students to creatively express their own ideas on how to change society. This inclusion of this literature is also a way to break down those troublesome barriers between school subjects, in this case English and Art.

The title most easily included into the classroom would be Icon. Essentially, Icon is a re-imaging of Superman. The key difference is that the character, Icon/Augustus

Freeman, is represented clearly as an African American. This strength is perhaps undercut by the fact that Icon isn’t really African American, just as Superman wasn’t really human. Both are basically stranded aliens. However, his “illegal alien” status didn’t stop Americans from turning Superman into a symbol (or icon) of American values. Perhaps, Icon’s “otherness” could be discussed in class as way to talk about what it means to be an “authentic” American, or “authentically” African American. Both these questions have most recently come up in regards to President Barack Obama. Examples are sadly plentiful of those who have questioned the authenticity of his birth certificate as well as his “blackness.” Such discussions on what and who is real (or who and what is keeping it real) are a way to break down another subject barrier, this time between

English and Social Studies.

In returning to the imaginative, Icon is a superhero with no white helpers.

Interestingly, in the beginning of the story Augustus Freeman is a cooperate lawyer who quotes Rush Limbaugh. However, after a run-in with a teenager named Raquel, Freeman experiences a sorely needed epiphany in regards to his role on earth. In the first issue

Raquel and three friends attempt to rob Freeman’s mansion. After he survives a few

122 gunshots and flies around a bit, Freeman convinces the burglars to leave. However, the next day, Raquel returns to challenge Freeman to set an example, to be an “icon.” With this, Augustus Freeman becomes Icon. He is self-determined and heroic through his own choices. Although he uses violence, his intelligence is an equal part to his influence over events within the created world. He has a sidekick, but Rocket/Raquel is a valuable (and unique) addition as a representation of an African American woman hero/character. Her

“creators” even referred to her, as “the first single-parent super-hero.” Her pregnancy and criminal activity in the first issue, represents a character given much more depth than a character like Storm. Unfortunately, Rocket’s costume objectifies her sexually in much the same way as does Storm’s. But instead of trying to look past such problems, these issues serve to bring back the “intersectionality” discussions.

The second Milestone title I want to briefly describe is Hardware. Much like the

Icon/Superman comparison, Hardware can be seen as another take on the Iron Man hero currently being re-booted. But in critiquing Hardware as a representation of the African

American superhero, we see a man driven to revenge and then heroism. The driving force here is a white patriarch figure who first adopts and then betrays Hardware, also known as Curtis Metcalf. His realization that his “father” is out to steal his inventions and sell them to terrorists causes Curtis to shed his cooperate allegiances. Transforming into

Hardware, he becomes a technologically enhanced Afrofuturist superhero. Although such a reactive stance might make it harder to see real agency in Hardware’s actions, the difference between him and a character like Smith’s Hancock are vast. The first issue’s cover declares: “A cog in the cooperate machine is about to strip some gears.” And so

123 here again, we again have a place to discuss “intersectionality,” this time involving race and class.

Although Hardware operates from a site of violence, it would be essential clarify to students what the violence is directed towards. For Hardware, it is not a matter of the un-dead, but of capitalist greed and corruption run amuck. In terms of classroom use,

Hardware is informative as a contrast to the highly successful Iron-Man movies. With

Iron-Man’s current re-boot, we have Tony Stark, the white capitalist experiencing his own epiphany while in the hands of the stereotypical Islamic terrorists. The two superheroes also fight from different sides of the establishment. While Hardware is located in a space emphasizing the complexities of wealth, Tony Stark remains a symbol of the values of capitalism. In addition, the sequel involves African American Don

Cheadle as Iron-Man’s sidekick, “War Machine.” In these ways, Hardware makes an interesting alternative to such problematic, but nonetheless standard Hollywood habits of racial hierarchies.

Lastly, we have Static, the African American teenage boy as a re-envisioning of

Spiderman. Before becoming Static, Virgil Ovid Hawkins is an African American adolescent struggling with school and girls. But once Virgil is subjected to a poisonous dose of radioactive chemicals (by the police no less), he becomes Static. With this character we see a way to begin these discussions of representations with even younger students. Interestingly enough, Static is the hero/character who has enjoyed the longest life of these Milestone creations. He can be seen currently on Cartoon Network in his own animated show called Static Shock. This latest version differs from the original 90’s

Static in that the material is more orientated towards young children. But even this more

124 present-day version offers another way to discuss representations of the African

American hero/character. Perhaps, such discussions could involve talking about another form of intersectionality: race and age. Either way, Static remains an African American hero/character, much like Rocket, who may excite reluctant readers to engage with issues of how characters are created and how such creations can be critiqued and possibly transformed through the students own re-envisioning.

By viewing and critiquing the representations above, students and teachers will be able to discuss the complexity of the visual image in a way few curriculums allow.

Notions of “invisibility” and “hypervisibility” can then be moved out from these sample media images and into the larger visual culture we all exist within. Such discussions within the classroom around a transformative visual narrative are an essential aspect of where this work needs to continue. Such re-envisioning can offer a counter to the limitations much of American culture has placed upon African American representation.

Through this work with contemporary film and the words and images of Milestone

Media, students, and especially students of color may see their future free from the limitations offered by racialized representations. Further, the counter-narratives the students create, as a response to such limited representations, will help them to envision their own counter-futures, even if they all don’t get to have superpowers.

And no discussion of where this work can be taken would be complete without mentioning the original: the P-Funk Mothership constructed as both literal stage-piece and lyrical metaphor by George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic. For me, the most striking elements Clinton’s Mothership concept brings into my work here are the performative images themselves and how certain song lyrics can be read as the poetry of

125 this multicultural science fiction. For example, in terms of images, excerpts from the concert performances and even the album artwork, could be folded into the above study of African American representation. These images, both moving and still, can offer an alternative to the visual of the future where people of color are often absent or marginalized. Moreover, the inventive playfulness of such images will aid students’ engagement with the broader concepts discussed in the previous section.

Clearly, using music lyrics as poetry in the classroom is not a new idea. However,

I am willing to bet that such work has yet to include this poetry: “Swing down, sweet chariot/ Stop and let me ride” combined with the uniqueness of the George Clinton’s performative delivery. With this one line from “Mothership Connection (Star Child),” teachers and students can discuss not only the intersection of words and images, but also the history of African American spirituals and the appropriation of such music by artists like Elvis Presley. In this way, the act of learning poetry becomes activated by other literacies through discussions of music and history. Going even further, such an expansion into poetry will include the both the lyrics and the visual images used by artists like Sun Ra, Africa Bambaataa, Digable Planets, and Outkast. This last group, made up of Andre Benjamin and Antwan Patton, is the one that may well be the most recognizable among high students and serve as a way to connect the older Clinton/Parliament music into a more contemporary sound.

Finally, although much of the above offers ideas towards replication best suitable for the high school grades, the curricular intervention of multicultural science fiction can succeed within middle schools as well. And since this genre (and its subgenres) are already a popular one for these younger readers, all that needs to be done is looking more

126 closely at the books making the leap between the bookstore and middle school reading lists. This centering of more multicultural themes and concepts can be achieved most readily through the literature of the late Virginia Hamilton (1934-2002). In a literary career that spanned more than forty years, Ms. Hamilton’s writing for young adults remains some of the best multicultural literature schools can hope to offer all students.

Although it is common to see her books in school libraries and on middle school reading lists, my own work has convinced me that Hamilton’s work can accomplish much more than curricular inclusion. Specifically, Hamilton’s speculative fiction, such as her

“Justice Trilogy” (Justice and Her Brothers, Dustland, and The Gathering) and the

“Jahdu” trickster stories can intervene within a middle school English classroom in the same way as Butler’s does in the high school elective. The work can start earlier to ensure all students see the future as a place where diversity is present.

IV. SO WHAT(‘S NEXT)?

Whether we call them fatalistic, “externally centered,” or present oriented, students of color are often labeled as failing their future. It is these students who stand in the way of the goal of our “race to the top,” which of course means, “winning the future.”

But just as the “winning the west” narrative hides the true nature of American history, so does the “winning the future” notion hide social, political, and educational realities regarding both our present and the future we are attempting to win. Too often we determine the state of students of color by simply noticing that they don’t care about school in the ways that we expect. We believe that if you care about your future, you will care about school. Thus, if a student doesn’t care about school, we fear for their future.

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And when we think of that student’s future, we rest easy in the knowledge that at least we tried with such exclamations as “But think about your future!” But what is really occurring here is that these students are refusing to adhere to a middle-class notion of future-orientation. We engage in a kind of “white talk” or perhaps white privilege talk that means little for students who encounter both today and tomorrow as something more complex than a matter of motivation and meritocracy.

So how can we shift away from this culture of a poor future? A good way to start is instead of asking students to think about their future, which really means “think about my present as your teacher,” we need to ask ourselves to think about our future. We can then imagine conversations with young people that might encourage a different (but perhaps not new) way of considering what we should demand of ourselves today and tomorrow. One simple way to begin such a shift is to get in the habit of asking students

“to think about our future.”

Please allow me one anecdote that will help (I hope) situate my personal experiences within the above questions. It involves my first day of teaching a summer enrichment program for traditionally underserved high-school students on a large

Midwestern campus. I was all set to introduce my students to my dissertation ideas in order to basically use my students to help me think about my research questions. And so in the first ten minutes of that first class, I asked the students to think about the word

“orientation” and to write about what came to mind for them. Here, I assumed that this term would evoke ideas having to do with a person’s sexual orientation. I figured that this thinking would help launch us into other considerations of how a person is oriented and how such orientations are determined and valued in society.

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But of course that’s not what happened, at least not at first. Instead of fulfilling my assumption, the majority of the students wrote and then shared thoughts of

‘orientation’ as something that occurred to them as they were being introduced to high school two years ago or presently on the university campus. For them, it was student orientation, not sexual orientation. But such an assumption underscored for me how, even though I want to constantly question my teacher orientation, I am always thinking from it.

Such an orientation is always busy making assumptions about what students think.

Although making assumptions about what students will think is not as bad as assumptions about what they should think, the line between the two is fine enough to bother me.

As for what I learned, it is that we need to let students be in charge of orienting themselves more. We need to stop fearing this process, especially for students of color who feel these kinds of fears directed at them in so many ways. For me, this work continues with the teacher education students in my Multicultural Education classes. I discuss with them what they think of words like past, present, and future. I want to ask them why teachers worry if students of color are “present-oriented” and what those fears may say about our society. We consider how schools encourage certain students to become “future-oriented” while other students are not similarly futured upon. We discuss how such an orientation is seen as gatekeeper in schools and society at large. We question the validity of this belief and what kind of attitude about the present it supports. For example, who benefits from this particular visioning and who does not? Why does society privilege those people who think about the future as a space to hide from both the past and the present?

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Taking these concerns into the science fiction elective is the next step. Simply put, we must do a better job of structuring this curriculum so it does not continue to exclude students of color. We need to see the notion that “students of color just aren’t interested in this material” for what it is: a self-serving (and perhaps self-fulfilling) excuse for allowing yet another place within our schools to be racially segregated. The difference this effort can have then is continuing to push against the inequities within our schools. Although not as common as Calculus or AP Literature classes, the segregation we see in the Science Fiction elective must not be allowed to continue.

In looking ahead at renewing these efforts for myself, I must continue to strive towards a broader inclusiveness of “other” futurisms. This “multiculturalized” expansion has a responsibility to live up to Banks’ belief that multicultural education must be constructed for every student. Although the exclusion of both African-American authors and students from content and classroom were my main focus through this research, I seek an inclusion of all authors and students of color as I move this work into the future.

This “fade-to-white” depiction of the future leaves many students looking for themselves on the page or on the screen. Thus, not only must I include a wide variety of imaginings from African-American and African Diaspora writers and artists, but also, the work of other people of color from around the world (including those in America).

In terms of turning theory into practice then, Prof. Catherine Ramirez’s development of “Chicanafuturism” is central to making my “gloriously inclusive” mission. Her current work is unique in its efforts to bring together different strands of futurisms. In the Spring 2008 issue of Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, she makes a cogent case for linking Afrofuturism with what she calls “Chicanafuturism.” Aptly

130 named, “Afrofuturism/Chicanafuturism: Fictive Kin,” Ramirez’s essay works as an argument for intervening in the construction of her own course on “Black Speculative

Fiction.” She describes her rationale for taking “a more comparative and polycultural approach” (192). Her crucial expansion of Afrofuturist study has been to notice how the common themes of alien abduction and colonialization bring in other futurisms of color.

Ramirez’s “Chicanafuturism”

…explores the ways that new and everyday technologies, including their detritus, transform Mexican American life and culture. It questions the promises of science, technology, and humanism for Chicanas, Chicanos, and other people of color. And like Afrofuturism, which reflects diasporic experience, Chicanafuturism articulates colonial and postcolonial histories if indigenismo, mestizaje, hegemony, and survival (Ramirez 187)

Here, Ramirez describes an essential link that can be used to further expand my intervention. Adding in this “other” futurism will ensure that many different perspectives are presented and students of color see themselves within the syllabus.

Such expansion must of course continue to bring a wide range of speculative voices like the Hernandez Brothers, Sherman Alexie, Karen Tei Yamashita, and Gene

Luen Yang. As my work on what the Science Fiction elective can become continues, texts like So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasy and Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction must be included. The diasporic quality of this speculative literature provides a way for teachers and students to see the interconnectivity of peoples as essential to the future they will experience. Simply,

Ramirez’s approach is to build a stronger Afrofuturism through the inclusion of other writers of color working with speculative fiction.

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Her course at UC-Santa Cruz includes “science fiction from the so-called developing world, a site of booming offshore industrialization and technological experimentation” (192). She “maintain[s] hope that the course’s new focus will highlight the importance and expanding influence of Afrofuturism and the ties that bind the peoples of the aptly named New and Old Worlds” (193). It is in Ramirez’s classroom where Science Fiction as a genre is being pushed forward as an advanced instructional tool. My own understanding of this kind of literature can work in the schools has been affected greatly by the connections Prof. Ramirez makes. Her research shows one more way the “other” must be hacked into Science Fiction curricula.

More than simply additive, such inclusion transforms the curriculum to encompass the world students are always encouraged to perceive. In taking Afrofuturism global in this way, I am placing it alongside the idea that “if multiculturalism is to be something more than recognition of difference and harmonization of competing interests within the nation-state, it must go global” (Buras and Motter). But instead of merely settling for global, we can take multicultural education galaxy-wide.

The African American author Samuel R. Delany said, “We need images of tomorrow, and our people need them more than most” (Dery 190). Reflecting on such truth, it is my contention that all students, but particularly students of color benefit from a curriculum and pedagogy that evokes their “visions of the future.” Such classroom work can help students of color push back against a future presented to them in many ways as limited. A curricular shift towards a language of possibility counters the metanarrative of

American exceptionalism often at the symbolic center of most of literature students read in school. The concepts of “reclaiming” and “renarrating” within this literature helps

132 students resist the “alienation” of mainstream culture and envision a future of their own making. These students can construct the future as well as themselves. All we can do is help. We can start by not fearing them, especially adolescents of color who feel that fear in so many ways day to day.

On my first page, “a place far far away” it seems, I spoke to the question of “So what?” This question lingers still. I hear you asking: So what difference does this make?

And I remain intimidated by all the difference that indeed must be made that lies out in front of me. Simply, it is a galaxy of work to be done. Although you may accuse me of wandering, I keep coming back to how my time in Mr. Rain’s classes impacts my current teaching. Simply, it is in grappling with the white resistance of high-school students, I have been able to situate the white resistance I see from many students in my

Multicultural Education classes. In stepping back from the moments when such resistance flashes during class discussions for example, I now better understand what King’s dysconsciousness looks like in practice. With this in mind, I started this current slew of classes emphasizing the importance of critical thinking as an essential disposition for a teacher to possess. To do so, I tell students they will need to “talk back” to me, to one another, to the texts, but at the same time be sure to give their own thinking “a second thought.” By centering both these concepts at once, I hopefully create a place to for these students to unlearn that “uncritical habit in mind” that infects so many of us.

In this way, considerations of whiteness and white resistance become an important way for me to respond to the “So what?” question. This is not all that surprising given my own race and the whiteness of Mr. Rain, his curriculum, and his students. Nonetheless, this revelation is somewhat disappointing to me now. (A white

133 person talking about whiteness? So what?) I very much want to be a part of something larger than “Whiteness Studies” and I had thought my research was positioned in a way to do that. That so much of this work speaks to whiteness to a degree I did not intend, tells me I need to take this work more directly to schools with higher percentages of students of color if I want to seek deeper answers to my own initial research questions. In a sense the research went where it went and I am left at the beginning again.

At different points in this dissertation I have taken questions asked by scholars and rephrased them to better fit my research goals. So now, as I type myself ever closer to being a scholar myself, please allow me to rephrase my own research questions:

1. Since the future is constructed in Science Fiction curricula & classrooms and

this representation excludes students of color as well as substantive and

productive discussions surrounding race and racism, what is to be done about it?

2. Since a “multiculturalized” speculative fiction course can interrogate the race-

erased classroom and the future it constructs, and thus could help enable students

of color to envision their own futures, who benefits, in the present and the future,

from our continued inability to integrate these classroom spaces?

For me, considering these “new” questions above is what’s next. I hope you all have some ideas as how to go move forward.

Here though, I begin the end by rephrasing again, this time using the following from James Baldwin: “There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.” I am not sure if there will be a time in the future when we will need yet another book on multicultural

134 education written by a middle-class heterosexual white male, but just in case, here’s what mine looks like now.

Thank you.

Jim Hollar

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EPILOGUE: REFLECTION FROM COOPERATING TEACHER, MR. RAIN

I first taught our Science Fiction course 11 years ago. The elective had been sidelined with the retirement of one our English teachers a few years before my arrival at the school. But after its dissolution, students were asking about the class, and there was clearly demand to bring it back. So I said I’d teach it.

My first instinct in putting together the curriculum for a survey class was to seek out the canonical authors. I figured that any student who takes a Sci Fi course should be exposed to the likes of Isaac Asimov and Hugo Gernsback and Philip K. Dick. The school owned quite a library of Sci Fi novels and anthologies, and I leaned heavily on compilations with titles like Science Fiction: A Historical Anthology and The Mammoth

Book of Modern Science Fiction. The chronological approach made for an easy framework for the class, but, as one might predict, the students found the earlier stuff

(what Eric Rabkin calls “proto science fiction”) a bit dry. So I began mixing in some more modern fare with the older works. For example, I found an early Wolverine comic book that fit well with the themes the philosophical proto-SF. And James Tiptree

Junior’s “Slow Music” gave us plenty to discuss with regard to the role technology plays in defining our humanity.

Every time I taught the course anew, I found myself seeking out more cohesive thematic unity and consequently branching out from the strict chronological outline. I began to change my whole approach a bit: the goal, after all, was not to explore Science

Fiction as a historical phenomenon but rather to explore the thematic concerns of the genre. The early stories expressed fear of technology and questioned what such rapid

136 advancement was doing to humanity. The more current postmodern stuff questioned the nature of reality. It was the most canonical section, the so-called “Golden Years,” that gave me trouble. Eventually, though, I saw a common thematic thread of cultural clashes and exploitation of marginalized groups. I gave my students a primer on Cultural

Anthropology and we began to examine the meaning of progress and how the moneyed class uses technology to exploit lower classes, a theme that was pretty apparent in stories like Clifford Simak’s “Desertion” and Isaac Asimov’s “Robbie.”

In my daily lesson planning, I began paying closer attention to current events and stories relevant to cultural clashes. And I soon found it imperative to face issues of race.

The birthers came out in 2008, attempting to decry Obama as an alien. District 9 (in

2009) provided a pretty clear metaphor for apartheid. And Rebecca Skloot’s book The

Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2010) explored how modern medicine has benefitted from the exploitation of black Americans. These are just a few of the many examples I began seeing everywhere; in my classes, race became an undercurrent that I occasionally addressed directly, though it certainly remained a subset of the larger oppression we were examining.

Into this context came Jim Hollar. He observed a few of my classes in the spring of 2011 and talked with me about a more in-depth period of observation and involvement with my Sci-Fi classes the following year. Given the evolution of the course in the previous decade of my teaching it, I was eager to work with Jim on diversifying both the curriculum and the student population in Science Fiction. Despite my having included race and class in many of the discussions, I had done a pretty poor job of incorporating authors of color. I believe Octavia Butler was my only non-white author. Similarly, with

137 gender, I paid attention to and often brought up in discussion the recurrent misogyny we saw throughout the course, but I only had three female authors on the syllabus.

Over the years, I’d seen classes with only one or two female students; I noticed that when we reached a critical mass of about six or seven girls, discussions were often better—certainly when it came to issues of sexism. For whatever reason, discussions of racism often don’t seem to go the same way. In the spring of 2011, the year before Jim came to do his work with my classes, I had one class in particular that was fairly diverse

(10 of 25 students were students of color; 8 were girls), and one particular student (of color) who was very good at articulating how invisible oppression and racial injustice operate in our society. That student had the respect of his peers, and once or twice his impassioned contributions to class discussion were the only thing that convinced (or maybe just silenced) the naysayers.

I felt ambivalent about that, though. On the one hand, I hate to put any one student in the position of representing his race or gender—even if I do so inadvertently.

On the other hand, there are few things as powerful as having students express their personal experiences with injustice, and such students can have a profound effect if they speak up. Perhaps classes with a critical mass of girls were better precisely because the girls felt more empowered (with numbers) to speak about sexism and misogyny. I don’t know. But I theorize that meaningful discussions of race can only take place when there is a critical mass of students of color willing to speak about race.

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But, of course, it’s asking a lot of such students to convey their (mostly clearer1) views on racial dynamics. In the context of a high school classroom, if there are students who deny that, for instance, whites have privileges that others don’t, it can be quite uncomfortable for students of color to jump into the debate, especially if they’re not very confident in their ability to articulate their viewpoints. It can be equally uncomfortable for students benefitting from cultural hegemony to deal with what may feel like accusations.

Jim and I definitely met with some resistance to our discussions of race. We met with less resistance to discussions of gender because, I think, our school district does a pretty good job examining issues surrounding sexism and because students feel a bit more confident jumping into, say, debates about reproductive rights or the gender income gap. Our district does not do a very good job preparing students to think about or discuss race.

Of course, our district has been talking a lot about the achievement gap in recent years. And for good reason. In 2011, I had a total of 49 students in my Science Fiction classes, 14 of whom were students of color. That year, 10 students got Ds or Fs for the semester (2 Fs, 8 Ds), and of those, 5 were students of color (including both Fs). The

2012 breakdown was similar; 16 of 54 students were students of color. There were 9 Ds or Fs (4 Fs, 5 Ds), 8 of which were students of color (3 of 4 Fs).

1 Assuming that those who benefit from hegemony often don’t recognize it as well as those who are disadvantaged by it, just as the team favored by a biased referee tends to believe there is no problem.

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At the end of the semester, I overheard a conversation between two students of color in one of my classes that went something like this:

Student A: This was actually a pretty interesting class.

Student B: Yeah. I’m not going to lie. It was pretty captivating2.

Unfortunately, interest and achievement don’t always go hand in hand. Those two students were in the F range for most of the semester; one of them just barely passed; the other didn’t. I felt that Jim and I both had good relationships with those two. They were pretty consistently engaged in class discussions, but they were sporadic at best with work completion, and they were frequently late to class. Ultimately, it was their failure to turn in work that earned them such low grades.

Such frustrations were common in the 2012 sections of the course. We good- naturedly nagged students for work; we gave frequent updates on what was missing; we met with them outside of class to help them through essays; we contacted support staff on some occasions to provide additional resources and encouragement. But we were battling attendance records that in several cases were upwards of 30 tardies for the semester and for some students, total absences numbered in the 20s. It’s very difficult in our current system of education to help students who miss one out of every three or four days.

I fear I’m coming off a bit like the Thernstroms here; “students have to do their part.” Here’s how I see it. We did some things in this year’s Science Fiction classes that

2 I thanked student B for not lying about that.

140 may be exactly the sort of changes that need to occur in our district to help students of color achieve. We included more authors of color, we made the curriculum more relevant, we tackled discussions of race, and we gave students one-on-one attention and encouragement. I’m not saying we did everything right, but I wonder what would happen if all teachers made efforts similar to ours. Would students of color then find school a more welcoming place?

The problem with “hacking” into one class in one semester is that there’s still a larger system to battle. In my class, for instance, I might focus less on the middle-class motivator that goes something like this: “You should do this well so that you know how to do it well in your future schooling.” But if counselors and case managers and assistant principals and other teachers aren’t following suit, the student is not going to change his attitude toward school.

It’s my impression that we engaged students of color quite well. And I think we challenged all our students to be more cognizant of racial issues and to see Science

Fiction as a metaphor for the inequities and alienation and exploitation that have resulted from our nation’s dysfunctional relationships with people in the minority. But on paper we really did nothing to close the achievement gap.

This is not to say that the individual teacher in the individual classroom should give up on changing the status quo. On the contrary, I feel that despite the fact that true multicultural education is a bit like swimming upstream, system-wide change needs to start in the classroom. But teachers’ potential frustrations need to be recognized. Our district recently mandated tracking, having caved to pressure from an influential parent

141 group that claims the schools are failing their talented and gifted children. We now have separate sections of “honors” English 9 and 10. This year, when parents of honors students felt their children were not being adequately challenged, they complained and got the teacher reassigned to a non-honors classroom for next year.

In a district that purports to be concerned about the achievement gap, it’s alarming that nobody in a position of power recognizes the inequities of such tracking and teacher shuffling. But it’s precisely because of such unfair doling out of privilege and advantage that the work Jim was doing this past semester is important. We need to attract more students of color to classes in which they’re underrepresented; we need to make changes to the curriculum such that minority voices are heard and studied; we need to confront issues of race as effectively as we have confronted gender issues; we need those in power

(whether now or in the future) to recognize the dynamics of power and privilege.

In coming years, I will definitely continue the efforts we put forth this past semester. Of that I’m sure. What I’m less clear about is assessment and evaluation. Jim’s assignments for the students tended to be more personal/reflective; mine tended toward philosophical/academic. Do I err in emphasizing argumentation and essay writing? I’m not sure. Clearly, unmotivated students often regard such work as impractical. I see it otherwise: I see the type of critical thinking necessary for such work as being crucial not only to academic success but also to empowerment within society. But of course, students can learn such critical thinking skills and be empowered by them without actually passing the class. I do a lot of anti-racism work in the media literacy classes I teach, and I can’t tell you how often a student who has failed the class has told me he got a lot out of it and really enjoyed it. Ultimately, most assessments measure not what a

142 student has learned but rather how well she can express or demonstrate what she’s learned. Which is, by definition, academic.

So I go forward with some uncertainties, but the experience of the past semester has definitely reinforced for me the importance of being more racially conscious in all my classes.

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SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIALS

RESEARCH OBSERVATION JOURNAL North High School, Mr. Rain’s “Science Fiction” Class (Periods 1 &6)

Stage 1: Monological Data Collection for Days 1-5

Course Description: This is an intermediate level literature course for students who enjoy or want to learn more about science fiction. Students will primarily read Eric Rabkin’s Science Fiction: A Historical Anthology and several short stories from various other anthologies, tracing science fiction's historical development, its various types and its commentary on humanity and society. The course will examine science-based essays as well as some artwork which comments on science's role in society. Additionally, students may view one or more films (Blade Runner and/or The Matrix).

Textbook(s)/Required Reading: Students will be exposed to several authors, including DeBergerac, Swift, Voltaire, Mary Shelley, Poe, Hawthorne, Wells, Gernsback, Asimov, Bradbury, Heinlein, Einstein, Sagan, Gould, Dick, Budnitz, Garnder, Crichton and others. Tests, quizzes for nearly all reading assignments, and several papers are required. (Taken From Class Syllabus)

Day- 1/30/12 (Monday of Week 1)

• Course Introduction

• Free-Write and Follow-Up Class Discussion on “What is Science Fiction?”

• 1st Hour: 7 females; 20 males. 3 African-American males; 1 Asian-American male. Need to figure out a way to make these figures more precise?

• 6th Hour: 8 females; 18 males. 3 A.A. males; 4 Asian-Americans (2 males/

2 females); 2 Latino/Chicano males.

Both classes had a good discussion (w/ teacher and amongst themselves) on this question of defining science fiction. Nice way to start w/ prior knowledge by letting students form & share their own opinions on what this genre of literature really is.

1st hour is less diverse. Had a nice interaction with Dizzy (AAm) about staying in the class. He ended up dropping the class though L.

6th hour had a more lively discussion & has more diversity. Connection? Will need to consider how these two aspects have a cause and effect relationship or not.

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Day 2- 1/31/12

• Class Discussion of Definition Packet (Homework from Yesterday)

• Handout: Warm-Up Writing & Genesis from Homework

• 1st Hour: Lost 1 AAm, but gained 1. Another AAm absent (?) Seems like there might have been one or two girls drop but not sure at this point.

Good discussion on Asimov and Chisholm. Pretty good participation by 2 girls in 1st hour class. 6th hour again is a great discussion. Students talking to one another and bringing in own “knowledges” and capital. Diversity of students participating. Teacher brought up population control, global warming, and nuclear weapons as examples of the effects of technology in discussing Asimov’s theory on CHANGE. Also, interesting topics like SF’s salvation theme according to Asimov, his idea that we exclude through definition of SF and F as cuddly vs. SF as subversive were discussed. I also handed out the past/present/future questions and discussed this thread of the course briefly.

Day 3- 2/1/12

• Quick Quiz on Genesis Reading from Yesterday’s Homework Assignment

• Class Discussion on Le Guin’s article on Defining SF

• Watched “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”

• Asked Students to Consider Clip as Metaphor; Representation of What?

• 1st Hour: Larry returned. Jake here. Jabari here, but still switching to 6th

• 6th Hour: All 3 AAm in class.

Discussion in first hour started off rather slowly; kids still asleep, hump day effect perhaps. Talked about films/books as examples of pessimism in SF and debated whether or not Le Guin’s assertion was accurate. Future as a metaphor to describe the present day reality. A place to ask “What ifs?” Missed a good opportunity to bring in race w/ asking, “What if the South had won the Civil War?” or gender with “What if women had never been granted the right to vote in 1920?” The Civil War especially, brings in a difficult topic, but it does begin to bring in race where it is too often avoided.

Discussion was better 6th hour. Just a better group maybe; or fueled up post-lunch. Brought in DVD of C.S.A mockumentary and Mr. Rain used it as a “What If” example. See below for an assignment idea on this point of “What If” questions.

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Day 4- 2/2/12

• Discuss metaphor’s in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”

o Power: Who deserves it?

o Power thru Knowledge (Good place to return w/ Crit Multi focus!)

o Violence against workers

• What If Activity-Day 1 (See Assignments Section)

o If continents never separated? If world developed a single language?

o If developed a worldwide government? If Africa had colonized world?

Day 5- 2/3/12

• Small group work on Genesis reading

• Class Discussion on 2 Questions: As a metaphor…& Connection to SF?

o Good discussion on knowledge as both good & bad (Power?)

Stage 2: Preliminary Reconstructive Analysis for Days 1-5

1. Where are the African-American or the Latina/Chicana girls?

Although it is certainly not a surprise that females and students of color are underrepresented in these two sections, especially in the 6th hour there does seem to more diversity than expected. However, aside from 2 Asian-American girls, there seems to be no girls of color. This is equally unsurprising, but it may be a question to consider more deeply in shaping any curricula that hopes to further diversify such a course. Are these girls of color doubly excluded based on their race and gender? How can such a course be changed to lessen this exclusion? How much self-exclusion is going on here and why? What are these girls of color taking instead and how may that impact their academic experience and overall achievement? What is it about race perhaps that affects the girls more than the boys?

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Clearly SF is thought of as a boys-club, but there are enough white girls (and perhaps Asian-American girls) to consider that the exclusion that other girls of color are experiencing is raced in some way. More than changing the course title to “Speculative Fiction” would need to be done to break down this elective-based exclusion, but that might be an easy change to make. What does the course catalog say about this course? Does it mention themes like gender and race? What would a “Multicultural Science Fiction” course description look like and what effect might such a description have on the level of diversity of students who sign up for the class?

2. How does Science Fiction allow for students to bring in prior knowledge, particularly their own “cultural capital,” by discussing current cultural artifacts like SF/F movies and literature?

So far course discussions have been excellent. Specifically, students are consistently asked to consider what they know about current issues, films and literature and how this knowledge interacts with the definitions of SF & F that are being discussed. Thus, their knowledge or cultural capital is privileged and used as a way to think critically about the new knowledge being placed in front of them. Can this be emphasized more? Can this extend into music somehow? Is this being done in other SF classes?

3. Why are the African-American boys dropping the class?

In addition to Dizzy, one other AAm did not attend the first hour class. They remain on the class roll however. Another AAm did join, but seems to be heading to 6th hour which may leave a single AAm in 1st hour. AS for 6th hour, two AAm were not in class today, but were still on the roster. So not sure of how far to take these questions, but if these absences turn into drops, it is a problematic turn for not only my research, but more importantly, perhaps shows even more how this SF course turns off certain students.

4. Find Out: What other classes are segregated around race and gender?

I would need to research this one w/in the school somehow, but this would be an interesting bit of information. I am wondering if there are other classes that seem to be off the radar for girls of color, particularly AA and Latina.

5. African American males came back, so we’ll see if my “dropping out” concern was simply an over-reaction. As of now, only Izzy has dropped the class.

6. Assignment Idea.

Step 1/ Come up with 5 What Ifs that deal with the past and 5 more that deal with the future. Focus your Ifs around the following topics:

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Technology, Government, Science, Medicine, Population, Environment, Race, Language, Biology, Sexuality, & Gender.

Examples:

What if the South had won the Civil War? (past/race)

What if women developed the ability to reproduce w/o men? (future/biology)

Step2/ Once you have your list of ten, select a few to try to answer in some way. Discuss what would be the outcome of what Le Guin called a “thought-experiment.”

Step 3/ Finally, in following Le Guin’s point about the purpose of these experiments, discuss how a couple of the ones you wrote “describe reality, the present world” in some way.

Might this type of questioning lead to a “safe” way to discuss issues surrounding race, gender, and inequality?

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LESSON PLANS FOR THREE-DAY UNIT ON RAY BRADBURY’S “THE PEDESTRIAN” (1951) Themes: Surveillance vs. Freedom, Progress vs. Change

Day 1

Opening Activity (10 minutes)

1. Look at Article on Next Generation of Drones Being Built at John Hopkins University

2. Look at NYT’s “Room for Debate:” Drones in Afghanistan, Drones in … Akron?”

3. Read Two or Three Mini-OpEds

Hollar Prompt #1 (In their notebooks; won’t be asked to share or turn in) (10)

1. Write about your experiences being monitored or interacted with by police and/or other figures of authority outside of the home. Who was it? Where? Why? Outcome?

Post-Hollar Question for Students (Hand out four questions and copy of story) (5)

1. Why would our answers be different? (Write down ideas & then share w/ classmate)

Read Story (Ask for volunteers to help read) (15)

Time to Answer Questions (10)

1. Why is hyper-surveillance such a common trope in science fiction? Although this answer is perhaps obvious, try to delve beneath it a bit.

2. Other than this concern with surveillance, what do you think Bradbury is warning us about here? How does he draw our attention to these issues? With what specific language?

3. How is Leonard Mead marked as different in this society? What about him does the robot-cop consider as aberrant behavior and/or choices? What do you think Bradbury has in mind by choosing these things in particular?

Day 2

Take Out Copy of Story, Handout w/ Questions, & Open to Hollar Prompt #1

Discuss Questions on “The Pedestrian” (10)

2. Why is hyper-surveillance such a common trope in science fiction? Although this answer is perhaps obvious, try to delve beneath it a bit.

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1. Do you think your response to the prompt is different from your classmates? Why?

Hollar Prompt #2 (10)

What are the markers to your identity? How many of these markers are in your control? How many are outside of your control? How many of them would you classify as individual and how many would you say are more attributed to a group you are seen as a member of?

Small Group Work (15)

1. What markers of difference spur more monitoring in our society?

2. How do different people experience being monitored differently? For example, how do women experience monitoring differently than men do?

3. As a group, come up with a list of statements that state these differences:

A. The majority of people who monitor tend to be male.

B. Poor people tend to be monitored more than rich people.

C. Youth tend to be monitored more than old.

D. People of color tend to be monitored more than white.

4. Could technological advancements in how society monitors people (i.e. police mini- drones, motion sensitive street cameras) lessen such differences in how people are monitored? Why or why not?

Ray Bradbury’s “The Pedestrian” (Day 3)

Reading: “Why is the NYPD after me?” by Nicholas K. Peart (10)

Answer Question on Back of Day 2 Handout

5. How would more advancement surveillance impact this kind of monitoring?

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Return to Last Questions on Handout & Then Discuss #5

3. As a group, come up with a list of statements that state these differences:

A. The majority of people who monitor tend to be male.

B. Poor people tend to be monitored more than rich people.

C. Youth tend to be monitored more than old.

D. People of color tend to be monitored more than white.

-How are these differences in monitoring structured?

-Are these differences different?

4. Could technological advancements in how society monitors people (i.e. police mini- drones, motion sensitive street cameras) lessen such differences in how people are monitored? Why or why not?

5. How would more advancement surveillance impact this kind of monitoring?

6. What about the Trayvon Martin killing? How about surveillance helping us to know what really happened? Example: hotel parking lot cameras in Mississippi murder case.

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Science Fiction Name:______

Ray Bradbury’s “The Pedestrian”

Post-Prompt Question:

1. Do you think your response to the prompt is different from your classmates? Why?

(Write down ideas & then share w/ classmate)

Pre-Reading Question:

2. Why is hyper-surveillance such a common trope in science fiction? Although this answer is perhaps obvious, try to delve beneath it a bit.

Post-Reading Questions:

3. Other than this concern with surveillance, what is Bradbury warning us about here? How does he draw our attention to these issues? With what specific language?

4. How is Leonard Mead marked as different in this society? What about him does the robot-cop consider as aberrant behavior and/or choices? What do you think Bradbury has in mind by choosing these things in particular?

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Day 3

Small Group Work

1. What markers of difference spur more monitoring in our society? Think both locally and then more broadly.

2. How do different people experience monitoring differently? For example, how do women experience monitoring differently than men do?

3. As a group, come up with a list of statements that state these differences:

Example: Young people are monitored more than older people.

4. Could technological advancements in how society monitors people (i.e. police drones, motion sensitive street cameras) lessen such differences in how people are monitored? Why or why not?

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LESSON PLANS FOR MULTICULTURAL SCIENCE FICTION UNIT

Monday, April 23rd

Pre-Bell: Video of Janelle Monae’s “Too Many Moons” as Students Arrive

I. Take Out “Blade Runner: A Critique of Neo-Nativism” by Charles Ramirez Berg

-Write name on back; collect at start of class tomorrow

1. How is this future depicted in the film? What is there? What do you see? Who do you see? What do you hear?

2. What isn’t there? What don’t you see? Who don’t you see?

II. Show Cybrachero Website & Promotional Video

III. Discussion Questions:

-What is the point of this website and video? What is the theme?

-How might this comment compare or contrast to the themes of Blade Runner?

IV. Hollar #4 (In Notebooks)

-What do you think our country’s immigration policy should be? How should we protect our border with Mexico? How do you feel about people who cross the border illegally? What is the impact of illegal immigration for our country?

V. Returning to Article

3. What is nativism? What is neo-nativism?

VI. Reading Back Thru Article with Partner(s)

4. List Unknown Terms or Allusions You Are Unfamiliar With

5. List Key Ideas (Use Language from Article or Rephrase in Your Own Words)

VII. Put Up on Chalkboard & Discuss

Unknown?

Key Ideas

VIII. Last Key Idea: Alternative Spaces

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6. What might be behind the reason behind these inclusions and exclusions?

7. What is the alternative mentioned at the end of the article?

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Lesson Plan for Tuesday, April 24th

I. Hand Out Copies of Larissa Lai’s “Rachel” (Read 1st Half for Homework)

-Discuss Briefly Narrative Perspective & Creative Writing Assignment

II. Show “Illegal Alien” Video by Genesis

-Different from Monae’s “Many Moons”? (Lyrics, Point of View, Theme)

III. Hollar #4 (In Notebooks)

-What do you think our country’ policy toward illegal immigration should be? How should we protect our border with Mexico? How do you feel about people who cross the border illegally? What do you think is the impact of illegal immigration for our country? What should be done with children born in the U.S. but to illegal immigrants?

IV. Take Out “Blade Runner: A Critique of Neo-Nativism” by Charles Ramirez Berg

1. How is this future depicted in the film? What is there? What do you see? Who do you see? What do you hear?

2. What isn’t there? What don’t you see? Who don’t you see?

3. What is nativism? What is neo-nativism?

4. List Unknown Terms or Allusions You Are Unfamiliar With

5. List Key Ideas (Use Language from Article or Rephrase in Your Own Words)

V. Put Up on Chalkboard & Discuss

Unknown? - Alien Other (When a monster isn’t just a monster?)

Bracheros & Marielitos

Open Door vs. Isolationism Key Ideas -

VI. Show Cybrachero Website, Promotional Video, & Movie Trailer

6. What is the point of this website and video? What is the theme?

How might this comment compare or contrast to the themes of Blade Runner?

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Lesson Plan for Wednesday, April 25th

I. Finish with “Neo-Nativism” Article & Questions (Collect)

5. List Key Ideas (Use Language from Article or Rephrase in Your Own Words)

6. What is the point of this website and video? What is the theme?

How might this comment compare or contrast to the themes of Blade Runner?

II. Take Out Copies of Larissa Lai’s “Rachel” & “Neo-Nativism” Article

-Intro Author; Mention Poem, Watch Portion of Vimeo Reading

-Why do you think Lai felt the Rachel character had something left to say?

-What is this something do you think? Why Rachel and not another character?

-What is her purpose behind offering this counter-narrative?

III. Discussion of 1st Half

-Page 53 “Blade” Too much?

Why is she Chinese?

-Page 54 Memories as “vivid,” “selective”

Not valuing “creativity and imagination”

-Page 55 Plot & Dialogue from BR: What’s different, new? Why? Purpose?

Mother died. Significance?

Piano, Picture of Mom

Mother in catalogue, “seen” by Father, arranged marriage

Sepia photographs. Significance?

-Page 56 Brother died at same time as Mother. Significance?

More pictures, family photos, “certain memories”

Tears

IV. Creative Writing Assignment (Due Tomorrow; Also, Finish Reading “Rachel”)

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-One Full Hand Written Page in Class

-Pick a Character (Pris, Zhora, Leon, Gaff, Chew, JF / Just Not Roy or Deckard)

-Try to Mimic Lai’s Method in Story:

Steal Plot & Dialogue, But Add Some New Element to Characterization

Start at a Point in the Actual Film, Or Before/After

-If you really hate assignments like this, answer the four questions under II above

Due Tomorrow, 1½ page written,

V. Time to Write or Read

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Lesson Plan for Thursday, April 26th

I. Review Creative Writing Assignment (Due Tomorrow; One Full Page Written)

-Pick a Character (Pris, Zhora, Leon, Gaff, Chew, JF / Just Not Roy or Deckard)

-Try to Mimic Lai’s Method in Story:

Steal Plot & Dialogue, But Add Some New Element to Characterization

Start at a Point in the Actual Film, Or Before/After

-Time to Share Ideas or to Write Later in Class

II. Take Out Copies of Larissa Lai’s “Rachel” & Fill in Gaps Below

-Page 55 Plot & Dialogue from BR: What’s different, new? Why? Purpose?

Mother died. Significance?

Piano, Picture of Mom

Mother in catalogue, “seen” by Father, arranged marriage

Sepia photographs. Significance?

-Page 56 Brother died at same time as Mother. Significance?

More pictures, family photos, “certain memories”

Tears

-Page 57

-Page 58

-Page 59

-Page 60

III. Group Work: 3 Questions (Answer One Set of Three)

1. Why do you think Lai felt the Rachel character had something left to say?

2. What is this something do you think?

3. What is her purpose behind offering this counter-narrative?

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1. Why do you think your character had something left to say?

2. What is this something do you think?

3. What is your purpose behind offering this counter-narrative?

IV. Defend or Refute this Thesis Statement (At least four sentences w/ evidence)

In Larissa Lai’s “Rachel,” a replicant’s attempt to understand her implanted memories racializes that neutral but somehow always white construction.

V. Handout: Afrofuturism & Chicanafuturism (Read & Mark-Up; Discussion to Follow)

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Lesson Plan for Thursday, April 26th Name:

I. Technology in Medicine: A Drug to Reduce Racism

“Researchers found that people who took propranolol scored significantly lower on a standard test used to detect subconscious racial attitudes, than those who took a placebo.”

1. What’s your reaction to the study? Is it a good thing? If not, what does it mean?

II. Review Creative Writing Assignment (Due Tomorrow; One Full Page Written)

-Pick a Character (Pris, Zhora, Leon, Gaff, Chew, JF / Just Not Roy or Deckard)

-Try to Mimic Lai’s Method in Story:

Steal Plot & Dialogue, But Add Some New Element to Characterization

Start at a Point in the Actual Film, Or Before/After

-Time to Share Ideas or to Write Later in Class

III. Take Out Copies of Larissa Lai’s “Rachel” & Fill in Gaps Below on Your Own

-Page 55 Plot & Dialogue from BR: What’s different, new? Why? Purpose?

Mother died. Significance?

Mother in catalogue, “seen” by Father, arranged marriage

-Page 56 Brother died at same time as Mother. Significance?

More pictures, family photos, “certain memories”

Tears

-Page 57

-Page 58

-Page 59

-Page 60

IV. Group Work: 3 Questions (Answer One Set of Three)

1. Why do you think Lai felt the Rachel character had something left to say?

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2. What is this something do you think?

3. What is her purpose behind offering this counter-narrative?

1. Why do you think your character had something left to say?

2. What is this something do you think?

3. What is your purpose behind offering this counter-narrative?

V. Defend or Refute this Thesis Statement (At least four sentences w/ evidence)

In Larissa Lai’s “Rachel,” a replicant’s attempt to understand her implanted memories racializes that neutral but somehow always white construction.

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Lesson Plan for Friday, April 27th

I. Look at FoundersFund.org: “We wanted flying cars, but we got 140 characters.”

II. Discuss Assignments for Monday

-Review Core Course Questions

1. What does it mean to be human?

2. What is technology?

3. What rights do we have in constructing society?

-Task #1: Come Up w/ a Fourth & Fifth Question (Write on Sheet of Paper)

Think about literature so far; then, maybe class assignments and discussions.

Consider questions you think could be explored but haven’t.

Write #4 for the Class

What have we discussed but maybe not enough?

Have we glossed over something important?

Write #5 for Yourself

What have you thought about in class/during readings that we haven’t discussed?

Example: What is the difference between change and progress?

-Task #2: Everything is Text

-Find a cultural or media artifact (song, poem, film, television show, advertisement, news story, etc.) something that discusses or depicts the future in terms of sexuality, language, race, age, beauty, class, gender, etc.

-Examples: Article on drug to cure racism, Cybracero, Sex Robots.

-Be able to bring this “something” into class Monday or be able to show it to the class online. You will be asked what you think it “says” about the future.

III. Take Out Yesterday’s Agenda & “Rachel” Short Story

-Defend or Refute the Following Assertion (Three Sentences w/ Evidence)

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-Write Response in Space Provided on Yesterday’s Agenda & Collect

IV. Discuss/Collect Creative Writing Assignment

1. Why do you think your character had something left to say?

2. What is this something do you think?

3. What is your purpose behind offering this counter-narrative?

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Lesson Plan for Monday, April 30th

I. Assignments to Collect?

1. Questions from “Neo-Nativism” 2. Agenda Worksheet 3. Creative Writing Task

II. Hollar #5: Please respond with your reactions to both the prompt and question below.

“Racism is not historical. It’s futuristic. It is not going away. It is being refined.

It is weaponized through deceit, secrecy, and violence, in that order.

Its chief tools are not clubs, bullets, or nooses, but words.” -Harry Allen

Since many of you were skeptical about finding a pharmaceutical “cure” for subconscious racism, I was curious to have you consider what might some ways to reduce racism in the future. Any ideas?

III. Read New Story in Class: “The Magical Negro” by Nnedi Okorafor

IV. Introduce Author, Visit Website, & Discuss “Magical Negro” Trope in Fiction

-An African American character stereotype in film. This “magical Negro” is a character who is present primarily to aid in the growth of the white protagonist. Often this African American character is sacrificed in order for this growth to take place. Regardless of whether or not the “magical Negro” literally survives till the end of the work, this character is present only as in service to the white lead.

-Examples?

V. Discussion Questions (or Answer on Agenda)

1. What is Okorafor up to here? What is the point of the story?

2. What similarities exist between this story and Lai’s in terms of what they say regarding race and/or racism? If you see none, please explain why.

VI. Handout: Afrofuturism & Chicanafuturism (Read & Mark-Up; Discuss Tomorrow)

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Lesson Plan for Tuesday, May 1st

I. Assignments to Collect? Agendas/Worksheets & Creative Writing Pieces

II. Share Some Excellent Responses to Thesis Statement & Return Agenda Worksheet

In “Rachel,” author Larissa Lai diversifies that neutral but somehow always white construction, the android. Lai gives Rachel not only a race, but racialized memories as well, in order to offer a counter-narrative to the film’s depiction of the future.

III. Revisit Set of Questions from Agenda

1. Why do you think Lai felt the Rachel character had something left to say?

2. What is this something do you think?

3. What is her purpose behind offering this counter-narrative?

-How does “Rachel” compare/contrast to “The Magical Negro” story?

-What do you think motivated Okorafor and Lai to write their respective stories?

-Consider the moment in “Blade Runner” when Roy evokes an Asian stereotype?

IV. Handout: Two Best (In My Opinion) Examples (& Return Those Turned in Friday)

-Why are these so awesome?

V. Discuss/Collect Weekend Homework

-Task #1: Come Up w/ a Fourth & Fifth Question (Write on Sheet of Paper)

Write #4 for the Class: What have we discussed but maybe not enough?

Write #5 for Yourself: What have you thought about during class/readings that we haven’t discussed?

-Task #2: Everything is Text: Find something that discusses or depicts the future in terms of sexuality, language, race, age, beauty, class, gender, etc. You will be asked what you think it “says” about the future.

VI. Return to “The Magical Negro” (Tomorrow if We Run Out of Time)

-Discussion Questions

1. What is Okorafor up to here? What is the point of the story?

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2. What similarities exist between this story and Lai’s in terms of what they say regarding race and/or racism? If you see none, please explain why.

VII. Handout: Read Octavia Butler’s “Speech Sounds” for Thursday

VIII. Reminder: Afrofuturism & Chicanafuturism (Discussion Tomorrow)

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Lesson Plan for Wednesday, May 2nd

I. Assignments to Collect?

II. “The Magical Negro” by Nnedi Okorafor as Counter-Narrative

-Writer and Character Speaking Back Against a Stereotype

-Look at Some of Okorafor’s Essay Online

1. Whether or not you see this stereotype as a problem within speculative fiction specifically, or fiction in general, consider for a few moments why it exists. Think of stereotypes in general, in fiction, in film. Why do we use them, why do we consume them?

2. What could be the reason this specific kind of stereotype exists in speculative fiction? Again, you can believe it doesn’t, but just consider the other side of this for right now.

Why is it repeated? What about this particular genre? Why might some writers and/or directors envision the future or alternate worlds with this kind of character?

(Consider Your Task #2: Everything is Text: A thing that discusses or depicts the future in terms of sexuality, language, race, age, beauty, class, gender, etc. What did your thing “say” about the future of difference.)

III. Afrofuturism & Chicanafuturism Handout

3. What other kind of futurisms have been left out here? Is that a problem for envisioning a more diverse kind of speculative fiction class? How big of a problem? Why?

4. What is your overall response to this way of thinking race in this genre? What could be beneficial about? If you don’t think there could be, explain why please.

IV. Time to Read Octavia Butler’s “Speech Sounds” for Tomorrow (Storm-Like Quiz)

5. How do you think our use of language will be different far into the future? How might the increasing use of technology change how we communicate? What about the way we talk, our speech? Will this be changed? How?

V. Collect Five Answers on a Separate Sheet Before the End of Class

Science Fiction (6th hour) Wednesday, May 2nd Name:

I. Assignments to Collect?

II. “The Magical Negro” by Nnedi Okorafor as Counter-Narrative

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-Writer and Character Speaking Back Against a Stereotype

1. For a few moments consider why stereotypes exist. Think of stereotypes in life in general, in fiction, in film. Why do we use them? Why do we consume them?

2. What could be the reason this specific stereotype exists in speculative fiction? Again, you can believe it doesn’t, but just consider the other side of this for right now.

Why would it be repeated? Why repeated in this particular genre? Why might some writers and/or directors envision a future or alternate worlds with this kind of character?

III. Time to Read Octavia Butler’s “Speech Sounds” for Tomorrow (Storm-Like Quiz)

3. How do you think our use of language will be different far into the future? How might the increasing use of technology change how we communicate? What about the way we talk, our speech? Will this be changed? How?

V. Collect Three Answers on Agenda or a Separate Sheet Before the End of Class

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Lesson Plan for Thursday, May 3rd

I. Quiz on Octavia Butler’s “Speech Sounds”

1. What contemporary issues or problems is the story taking to an extreme? (1-2)

2. In taking them to an extreme, what do you think is Butler point here concerning those present-day issues? What is she trying to tell us about them? (3-4)

3. Write three questions you could ask about the decisions Butler makes in writing the story the way she does? Consider how these decisions may lead us to her themes.

-Example: Why does she have left-handed people be less affected by the illness?

II. Take Out Separate Sheet with Answers from Yesterday (Graded Assignment)

“The Magical Negro” by Nnedi Okorafor as Counter-Narrative

2. What could be the reason this specific kind of stereotype exists in speculative fiction? Again, you can believe it doesn’t, but just consider the other side of this for right now. Why is it repeated? What about this particular genre? Why might some writers and/or directors envision the future or alternate worlds with this kind of character?

III. Discuss Afrofuturism & Chicanafuturism Handout

3. What other kind of futurisms have been left out here? Is that a problem for envisioning a more diverse kind of speculative fiction class? How big of a problem? Why?

4. What is your overall response to this way of thinking race in this genre? What could be beneficial about? If you don’t think there could be, explain why please.

IV. Returning to “Speech Sounds”

6. Flip with Quiz #3 (Tomorrow if We Run Out of Time)

IV. Homework: Read Butler’s Short Essay “The Monophobic Response” for Tomorrow

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Lesson Plan for Friday, May 4th

I. Check Off on Any “Take-Home” Quiz on Octavia Butler’s “Speech Sounds”

II. Hollar #6 on Butler’s “The Monophobic Response”

-This two-page essay highlights Butler’s conception of the alien as a conveniently and repeatedly constructed “other.” She writes, “No wonder we’re so good at creating aliens…And yet we are unable to get along with those aliens who are closest to us, those aliens who are of course ourselves.” In true speculative fiction fashion, Butler ends the essay with a visioning of the future that includes “real” aliens. She ponders what might follow our knowledge of “other” life forms. Butler asks our future selves, “What will we feel? What will be born of that brief, strange, ironic reunion?”

-How do you think such a discovery would change (or not change) how humans interact with one another? What would be born? Anything? Why or why not?

III. In Groups of Three to Four Discuss “Speech Sounds” & Select Three Questions

-Return Ungraded Quizzes & Collect Again Afterwards, Including “Take-Home”

1. How do you think our use of language will be different far into the future? How might the increasing use of technology change how we communicate? What about the way we talk, our speech? Will this be changed? How?

2. What contemporary issues or problems is the story taking to an extreme?

3. In taking them to an extreme, what do you think is Butler point here concerning those present-day issues? What is she trying to tell us about them?

4. Ask one another the three questions each of you wrote about the decisions Butler makes in writing the story the way she does? Consider how these decisions lead us to her themes.

Example: Why does she have left-handed people be less affected by the illness?

5. As a group & on a separate sheet of paper, write out the 3 questions you think are the most insightful in how their answers might lead another student to understanding something of the story’s themes. (Collect w/ Names)

-When Finished, Collect Your Answers (#1-5) from Last Two Agendas

IV. Time to Start Homework for Monday: Read Butler’s “Bloodchild” (Packet)

-Then, Take Yesterday’s Quiz Again, But For “Bloodchild” on Bottom of Agenda

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1. What contemporary issues or problems is the story taking to an extreme? (1-2)

2. In taking them to an extreme, what do you think is Butler point here concerning those present-day issues? What is she trying to tell us about them? (3-4)

3. Write three questions you could ask about the decisions Butler makes in writing the story the way she does? Consider how these decisions lead us to her themes. Example: Why does she have the eggs be a narcotic for humans?

-This Assignment is Due Tuesday! (Finish the Story for Monday Though)

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Lesson Plan for Monday, May 7th

I. Return Quiz (Any Late/Missing Work to Turn in? Five Answers from W/R Agenda’s?)

II. Finish w/ “Speech Sounds”: Discuss Good Questions from Group Work on Friday

1. Why did the disease affect men more than women? (SSN)

2. Why did the disease affect speech differently than reading and writing? (MIOO)

3. Why did the disease debilitate people’s most valued core abilities? (JDA)

-Questions above lead to Butler’s theme(s); try for that w/ “Bloodchild” Ones

III. Write Formal Paragraph in Class: Speak For or Against

-Read two paragraphs on back of agenda

1. What is left out here that you think is still important about the story?

2. What do you disagree with in these paragraphs?

-Decide which of the two questions you want to answer in a formal paragraph.

-Write formal paragraph on separate sheet of paper.

Topic sentence, evidence from story to support position, 5 sentences.

-Ways to Begin:

“Another one of Butler’s messages in the story centers around issues of…”

“However, what the above paragraphs fail to consider is …”

IV. Listen to Butler’s “Bloodchild” & Work on Tomorrow’s Assignment in Class

1. What contemporary issues or problems is the story taking to an extreme? (1-2)

2. In taking them to an extreme, what do you think is Butler point here concerning

those present-day issues? What is she trying to tell us about them? (3-4)

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Lesson Plan for Tuesday, May 8th

I. Return to Hollar #6 on Butler’s “The Monophobic Response”

-How do you think such a discovery would change (or not change) how humans interact with one another? What would be born? Anything? Why or why not?

-Is this “response” something Butler could be exploring in “Bloodchild”?

-How has human-to-human interaction been affected by the Tilc presence?

-Or what if Butler’s using the Tilcs as stand-ins for humans?

II. Ideas for #1 on “Bloodchild” Assignment

1. What contemporary issues or problems is the story taking to an extreme? (1-2)

-Review some of these issues/problems from “Speech Sounds” discussion

Language as gendered, as violent, as power, as hope, as diseased.

-What are some words (like “language”) that we can see Butler playing with?

2. In taking them to an extreme, what do you think is Butler point here concerning

those present-day issues? What is she trying to tell us about them? (3-4)

IV. Hand Out Worksheet (Complete Part 1 Together; Part 2 is Homework)

V. Listen to End of “Bloodchild” on iTunes

VI. Trade “Bloodchild” Quiz with Another Student

-Grade #1 & #2: Two Points Each

-Answer Three Questions for #3 in 1-2 Sentences Each

-Finish for Homework

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Lesson Plan for Monday, May 14th

I. Recalling Our Discussion on Ray Bradbury’s “The Pedestrian” & Hollar #1

Write about your experiences being monitored or interacted with by police and/or other figures of authority outside of the home. Who was it? Where? Why?

-Post Hollar Questions

1. What markers of difference spur more monitoring in our society? How do different people experience being monitored differently?

2. Why is hyper-surveillance such a common trope in science fiction? Although this answer is perhaps obvious, try to delve beneath it a bit.

3. Could technological advancements in how society monitors people lessen such differences in how people are monitored? Why or why not?

II. Hollar #7

1. Do you have Internet access in your home? In your room?

2. Do you have a computer & printer in your home? In your room?

3. How often do you use this technology to help you with homework?

4. How often do you use these things for work or to earn money?

5. How did this technology get there? Why do you have them? To do what?

6. If you don’t have this technology, why don’t you have them?

7. Is technological inequality important? Why or why not?

III. Watch Opening of Sleep Dealer as Chicanafuturism Text (Cybrachero Website)

-Post Hollar Questions

1. How does this film “question the promises of science and technology”? Does it do so differently than other science fiction we have read? Explain why or why not.

2. Why is technological inequality such a common trope in science fiction? Although this answer is perhaps obvious, try to delve beneath it a bit.

3. Could a decrease in technological inequality lessen other societal inequalities in our society? Why or why not?

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Mr. Rain’s Science Fiction Class Spring 2012

In-Class Assignment: Characterization of Peachthief as the Other

Literal Questions:

1. How is Peachthief described physically? Look on pages 4, 5, 9, and 46.

2. How is this physical description different from that of Jakko?

Interpretive Questions:

3. In what other ways is Peachthief marked as different from Jakko?

(Hint: How does Jakko see her as different from himself?)

4. What function might these differences serve in the themes of the story?

Mr. Rain’s Science Fiction Class Spring 2012

In-Class Assignment: Characterization of Peachthief as the Other

Literal Questions:

1. How is Peachthief described physically? Look on pages 4, 5, 9, and 46.

2. How is this physical description different from that of Jakko?

Interpretive Questions:

3. In what other ways is Peachthief marked as different from Jakko?

(Hint: How does Jakko see her as different from himself?)

4. What function might these differences serve in the themes of the story?

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DEFINING TERMS I. Afrofuturism

Although its literary ancestry can be traced back for more than 150 years, the term “Afrofuturism” was first used in 1993 by cultural critic Mark Dery. (Martin Delany’s 1857 novel Blake, or The Huts in America, is generally considered the first work by an African-American which included science fiction elements.) Dery, in an introduction to a collection of interviews with the African-American science-fiction writer, Samuel R. Delany, and cultural scholars Tricia Rose and Greg Tate, writes

…speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of 20th century technoculture-- and more generally, African American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future –might, for want of a better term, be called Afrofuturism (Barr 8).

Since Dery writes mainly on cyberculture, it is not surprising that this first conception of Afrofuturism focuses on how African-American writers might consider technology’s impact on their future selves. Dery’s larger considerations then infuse his definition of Afrofuturism with a heavy dose of computer hackers and artificial intelligences. However, to Dery’s credit, he locates Afrofuturism as existing simultaneously in the past and present. He writes, “technology, be it branding, forced sterilization, the Tuskegee experiment, or tasers, is too often brought to bear on black bodies” (Barr 8) Further, technology’s impact on African-Americans (and the African Diaspora) is an essential theme for Afrofuturist authors in exploring our future. Although a thematic interrogation of technological advancement is significant within much science fiction, Afrofuturism allows a perspective, both historical and contemporary, which is often absent within the curriculum.

Still, other scholars have worked to reshape Dery’s initial Afrofuturism concept and have succeeded in including thematic elements beyond what Prof. Lavender III called the “intersections of black experience and technology” (Lavender 192). For instance, Lisa Yaszek writes, “Afrofuturism is not just about reclaiming the history of the past, but about reclaiming the history of the future as well” (Yaszek 300). And finally, at least for my purposes, Catherine Ramirez (who teaches a class involving Afrofuturist

185 literature and film at the University of California in Santa Cruz) writes that Afrofuturist texts “use science fiction themes, such as abduction, slavery, displacement, and alienation, to renarrate the past, present, and the future of the African diaspora” (Ramirez 186).

III. Defining Terms: Chicanafuturism

In looking ahead once again, my Afrofuturist intervention must continue to strive towards a multicultural inclusiveness. This “multiculturalized” expansion will continue to blend Afrofuturism with other futurisms in response to Banks’ belief that multicultural education must be constructed for every student. In terms of theory then, I return to Ramirez’s work with Afrofuturism and her development of “Chicanafuturism.” Such work is central to the “gloriously inclusive” effort. Ramirez’s “Chicanafuturism”

explores the ways that new and everyday technologies, including their detritus, transform Mexican American life and culture. It questions the promises of science, technology, and humanism for Chicanas, Chicanos, and other people of color. And like Afrofuturism, which reflects diasporic experience, Chicanafuturism articulates colonial and postcolonial histories if indigenismo, mestizaje, hegemony, and survival (Ramirez 187)

Here, Ramirez describes an essential link that can be used to further expand my intervention. Combining my Afrofuturist curriculum with this “other” futurism will ensure that many different perspectives are presented and students of color see themselves within the syllabus. Such expansion will bring a wide range of speculative voices like the Hernandez Brothers, Sherman Alexie, Karen Tei Yamashita, and Gene Luen Yang, into this work.

The diasporic quality of this speculative literature provides a way for teachers and students to see the interconnectivity of peoples as essential to the future they will experience. More than simply additive, such inclusion transforms the curriculum to encompass the world students are always encouraged to perceive. In taking Afrofuturism global in this way, I am placing it alongside the idea that “if multiculturalism is to be something more than recognition of difference and harmonization of competing interests within the nation-state, it must go global” (Buras and Motter).

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REVIEW OF RESEARCH & SURVEY/QUESTIONNAIRE

What is a Multicultural Curriculum?

“A multicultural curriculum strives to present more than one perspective of a cultural phenomenon or an historical event…Adherents of multicultural educational theory believe that the idea that students should be Americanized, in reality, assumed they should conform to a white, Eurocentric cultural model. In its place, multiculturalists believe school curricula should embrace a whole host of voices that exist in multicultural U.S. society…They believe this is increasingly important because of the changing population mix in the United States.”

-Source: Gale Encyclopedia of Children's Health: Multicultural Education/Curriculum

Four Approaches to Multicultural Education

1. Contributions

-Least amount of involvement in multicultural education.

-Selecting books and activities that celebrate holidays, heroes, and special events from various cultures is the standard practice here.

2. Additive

-Content, concepts, themes, and perspectives are added to the curriculum without changing its basic structure. Incorporating literature by and about people from diverse cultures without changing the focus of the curriculum.

3. Transformative

-Changes the structure of the curriculum and encourages students to view concepts, issues, themes, and problems from several ethnic perspectives and points of view.

-Involves critical thinking and a consideration of diversity as a basic premise.

4. Social Action

-Combines the transformation approach with activities to strive for social change. -Students are not only instructed to understand and question social issues, but to also do something about important about it.

-Source: Banks, J.A. (1999). An Introduction to Multicultural Education (2nd ed.)

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Science Fiction, Fantasy, & Speculative Fiction

1. Science Fiction, by relying on science, is possible

2. Fantasy, with no such requirement, is more often than not, impossible.

-The definitional tension between science fiction and fantasy has led many to adopt the term “speculative fiction” as a more inclusive genre.

3. Speculative Fiction: An element of social commentary is more central to this work.

-The inclusion of social commentary can transform how such literature is used within the schools.

-The move away from science fiction and fantasy towards speculative fiction is the best place to begin a curricular intervention.

Ideas Before/During Research:

Centering Quote

“Racism is not historical. It’s futuristic. It is not going away. It is being refined. It is weaponized through deceit, secrecy, and violence, in that order. Its chief tools are not clubs, bullets, or nooses, but words.” -Harry Allen

Key Assertions

1. When Science Fiction appears in the literature textbooks used in Language Arts & English courses white men are invariably the authors.

2. Science Fiction electives are too often a collection of material from these textbooks. It is no wonder we see so few young women and students of color in these school spaces.

3. Moreover, these electives are specifically structured in such a way that plans for present and future segregation within the school.

Original Research Questions

1. How is the future constructed in Science Fiction curricula & classrooms to exclude discussion of race and racism?

2. How is the future constructed in Science Fiction curricula & classrooms to exclude students of color?

3. To what extent can “multiculturalized” speculative fiction course material critique this structuring of both the race-erased classroom and curriculum and help reconstruct these spaces to be more inclusive for students of color?

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Possible Solutions Via Multicultural Approaches

1. Contributions and/or Additive

-More readings by women & authors of color (“Magical Negro” by Okorafor)

2. Transformative

-Change the name of course to and increase focus on “Speculative Fiction”

-More discussions of difference, esp. on race and racism, in stories by the canonical white authors (Ray Bradbury’s “The Pedestrian” & Blade Runner film)

-More of these kinds of discussions of difference in stories by authors of color.

3. Social Action

-Identifying “future” problems in society and discuss possible solutions.

-Once possible solutions are named, teacher and students consider ways of actually attempting to put them into practice as a part of the course.

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Survey & Questionnaire

Directions: For each statement, circle (or write in and then circle) the number that corresponds to your opinion and 2) providing a brief explanation of your reasoning.

1. Little can be done to increase the number of young women taking this course.

1 2 3 4 5

Strongly Disagree Neutral Strongly Agree

Please explain your reasoning:

2. Little can be done to increase the number of students of color taking this course.

1 2 3 4 5

Strongly Disagree Neutral Strongly Agree

Please explain your reasoning:

3. Changing the title of the course to “Speculative Fiction” and focusing more on this kind of literature would help increase the diversity of students taking the class.

1 2 3 4 5

Strongly Disagree Neutral Strongly Agree

Please explain your reasoning:

4. Including more stories from women and writers of colors would help increase the diversity of students in the class.

1 2 3 4 5

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Strongly Disagree Neutral Strongly Agree

Please explain your reasoning:

5. A “Science Fiction” course that makes use of mostly white male authors is not a problem.

1 2 3 4 5

Strongly Disagree Neutral Strongly Agree

Please explain your reasoning:

6. In order to have productive conversations about the future, a diverse classroom (students and curriculum) is essential.

1 2 3 4 5

Strongly Disagree Neutral Strongly Agree

Please explain your reasoning:

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INTERVIEW DOCUMENT

Dear Sci-Fi Student,

Congratulations! I have identified you as someone I am hoping to interview for my research study. This is of course completely voluntary and is not a part of the class. uch an interview would need to take place after final grades are posted. One way to do this would be to meet at Victor Allen’s on Monroe Street in the week or so after the school year finishes. We could set up a time to interview a couple students at the same time or just meet individually.

The questions I plan to ask are similar to the questionnaire from last week. I am hoping to get more in-depth with your responses and ask a few questions that I didn’t have room for on the original survey.

If you would be interested, please email me: [email protected]. Or, if you’d rather, you can return this sheet to me with your name and email address and I can contact you.

Thanks,

Jim Hollar

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INTERVIEW QUESTIONS

1. Why did you decide to take the Science Fiction elective?

2. What is your interest level in this genre? What aspects of it interest you? Why?

3. What was your overall impression of the class? What did you like? What didn’t you like and why?

4. Why do you think more females don’t take this class?

5. Do you think having a woman teaching makes a difference? Why?

6. Would you like to have discussed gender issues more? Why?

7. How much hope do you have in the future in general? Why?

8. What do you think are the most important issues facing us as a country and as a human race in the next 50 years?

9. Do you think these issues were dealt with enough in the course?

10. What did you think of the class discussions?

11. Why did you speak when you did? Why did you decide not to speak during class?

12. Did you ever feel excluded from the class discussions? Why?

13. What were your favorite parts of the class? Why?

14. What was your least favorite? Why?

15. Was there something you wanted to do more of? Why?

16. What was your overall impression of the material I presented to the class?

17. Should this class adopt more of this kind of material next semester? Why?

18. Any comments to add from my survey questions?

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Questions for Principal Watson

North H.S. 2011-12

Gender: Males (50.7%) Females (49.3%)

Race: White (55%) Students of Color -including more than one (45%)

Totals of Four Science Fiction Classes (107 Students)

Gender (28 Females, 26%)

Race (26 Students of Color, 24%)

Findings in Four SF sections:

Gender (23.3% lower than expectations based on school-wide percentages)

Race (- 21% than expectations based on school-wide percentages)

1. Why do you think more students of color aren’t taking the Science Fiction elective?

2. Are there unique reasons for distinct racial groups (i.e. African-American and Latino) that such a question might gloss over?

3. How about female students of color? The four SF sections had very low numbers of African-American female and Latina students. Majority of them were white female students with a few Asian American females included.)

4. Are there other classes where we see this kind of in-class segregation?

5. Are the reasons for this segregation the same or different from the ones above?

6. What do you think is the school’s role in increasing the diversity of such courses?

7. What might be some ways to decrease such cases of in-school segregation?

8. How might school guidance counselors impact the number of diverse students in classes like Science Fiction?

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9. The Science Fiction curriculum is a place of relative freedom for the assigned teachers; thus, teachers could update the material to include more diversity without much difficulty. Ironically however, teachers don’t seem to be taking advantage of this curricular freedom. What could be done to encourage more use of this space to include more multicultural material?

10. Another problem seems to be how the science fiction material used English and Language Arts textbooks and curriculum is very white and very male. Do you think there’s anything the school can do to make sure we aren’t creating this particular brand of exclusion in the earlier grades?

11. What would you say is the state of multicultural education today in the public high school like West? Are teachers becoming more or less willing to engage in this type of thinking about their practice?

12. Could you discuss the genesis of the “Rising Up” class here at West? How did it start? Has it been successful and how might you define that success? Could it serve as a model for diversifying a course like Science Fiction?

13. Lastly, what must new teachers know before entering classrooms with racial and economic diversities? What would you tell white teachers in training about teaching diverse learners?

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UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON Research Participant Information and Assent Form

(Form for Participants Under 18 Years of Age)

Title of the Study: Afrofuturism in the Secondary Science Fiction Classroom

Principal Investigator: Professor Gloria Ladson-Billings (phone: (608) 263-1006)

Student Researcher: Jim Hollar (phone: (608) 263-4654)

DESCRIPTION OF THE RESEARCH

You are invited to participate in a research study about how Science Fiction classrooms can be a place to integrate more multicultural literature as a catalyst to discuss how issues of race affect both the future and the present. You have been asked to participate because you have enrolled in this elective and been placed into this particular section of Science Fiction.

The purpose of the research is to further broaden the curricular content used in the Science Fiction classroom and to understand how such integration can influence discussions involving race.

This study will include all the students enrolled in these two sections of Science Fiction. The research to take place is limited to the time your Science Fiction course meets this semester.

Specifically, this research will take the form of observing the class on a daily basis and taking notes. A copy of my classroom observation protocol will be made available to you if you wish. Additionally, in consultation with the classroom teacher, I will be acting as a “guest lecturer” several times during the semester in order to integrate more multicultural science fiction materials.

WHAT WILL MY PARTICIPATION INVOLVE?

If you decide to participate in this research you will be asked to do nothing more than what is normally expected of you as a student in an English elective classroom. Your participation will take place each time you attend class and last for however long you remain enrolled in the course.

If you decide not to participate in this research your decision will be kept confidential and you will not be used in this study in any way. Although the integration to this semester’s curriculum mentioned above will move forward, absolutely no data, including but not limited to, your classroom comments or work product, will be used in the study. My

196 observations will treat you as if you were not present in the classroom. There is no penalty for not participating.

ARE THERE ANY RISKS TO ME?

We don't anticipate any risks to you from participation in this study.

ARE THERE ANY BENEFITS TO ME?

There are no direct benefits for participating in this research.

HOW WILL MY CONFIDENTIALITY BE PROTECTED?

This study is confidential. Your name will not be recorded.

If you participate in this study, we would like to be able to quote you directly without using your name. If you agree to allow us to quote you in publications, please initial the statement at the bottom of this form.

WHOM SHOULD I CONTACT IF I HAVE QUESTIONS? You may ask any questions about the research at any time. If you have questions about the research after you leave today you should contact the Principal Investigator Professor Gloria Ladson-Billings at (608) 263-1006. You may also call the student researcher, Jim Hollar at (608) 263-4654.

If you are not satisfied with a response from the research team, have more questions, or want to talk with someone about your rights as a research participant, you should contact the Education Research and Social & Behavioral Science IRB Office at 608-263-2320.

Your participation is completely voluntary. If you decide not to participate or to withdraw from the study it will have no effect on your grade in this class.

Your signature indicates that you have read this consent form, had an opportunity to ask any questions about your participation in this research and voluntarily consent to participate. You will receive a copy of this form for your records.

Name of Participant (please print):______

______I give my permission to be quoted directly in publications without using my name.

______

Signature Date

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Notice of Action

University of Wisconsin–Madison Institutional Review Board (IRB)

Principal Investigator: Gloria J Ladson-Billings

Department: Curriculum and Instruction

Co-Investigator: James Hollar

Point of Contact: James Hollar

Protocol Title: Afrofuturism in the Secondary Science Fiction Classroom

Protocol Number: SE-2011-0831

IRB: Education Research IRB (Contact: 263-2320)

Committee Action: Approved on: February 27, 2012 Expires: February 26, 2013

We have received the information you sent regarding the above named protocol. This information complies with the modifications required by the Institutional Review Board, and your protocol is now approved. You may begin collecting data at any time.

Thank you for your cooperation.

Special Notes or Instructions: This protocol was conditionally approved, pending receipt of approval from MMSD. Site approval has been obtained from MMSD ERC; therefore, this protocol is now approved per 45.CFR.46.110(b)(1)(7) as a minimal risk study of group characteristics. The IRB has determined that minors may be included as participants in the study per 45 CFR, 46.404. Risk is considered minimal and parental consent as well as the assent of the minor participants is being obtained. ______

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INVESTIGATOR RESPONSIBILITIES:

Unless this protocol is exempt, or the IRB specifically waived the use of written consent, an approved consent form that is stamped with approval and expiration dates can be found on IRB WebKit. To find the stamped consent form, go to IRB WebKit at https://rcr.gradsch.wisc.edu/irbwebkit/Login.asp. Login and open this protocol number. The link to the consent form can be found on the left side of the page. All copies of the form must be made from this original. Any changes to the consent form must be approved in advance by the IRB.

Any changes to the protocol must be approved by the IRB before they are implemented.

Any new information that would affect potential risks to subjects, any problems or adverse reactions must be reported immediately to the IRB contact listed above.

If the research will continue beyond the expiration date indicated above, a request for renewal/continuing review must be submitted to the IRB. You must obtain approval before the current expiration date. If you do not obtain approval by the expiration date noted above, you are not authorized to collect any data until the IRB re-approves your protocol.

Signed consent forms must be retained on campus for seven years following the end of the project. If you are continuing to analyze data, even though you are no longer collecting data, you should keep this protocol active.