Speculative Design Toward Inclusive Futures: Leveraging Voices and Future Imaginations of the School Community to Transform a System of Punishment and Exclusion

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Pentious

A research article explores how speculative design can transform oppressive school discipline systems by centering the voices and future imaginations of local school community members. The Indigenous Learning Lab was implemented in a rural high school to explicitly redress racism, ableism, and interlocking oppression affecting American Indian students and families. Using a community-led systemic design process, participants produced decolonizing, inclusive knowledge and dismantled settler-colonial discipline through collective future-making, everyday resistance, and cultural assets.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages23

Reading Time58 min

AccessFree to download

Background and Rationale

Speculative design and expansive learning experiences

Indigenous Learning Lab Methodology

Community-led systemic design process

Design Tools and Collective Future-Making

Decolonizing inclusive support system

Implications and Research Gap

AERA Open January-December 2025, Vol. 11, No. 1, pp. 1–23 DOI: 10. 1177/23328584251324152 Article reuse guidelines: [sagepub.com/journals-permissions](sagepub.com/journals-permissions)[ ](sagepub.com/journals-permissions)© The Author(s) 2025. [https://journals.sagepub.com/home/ero](https://journals.sagepub.com/home/ero) Speculative Design Toward Inclusive Futures: Leveraging Voices and Future Imaginations ofthe School Community to Transform a System of Punishment and Exclusion Dosun Ko Santa Clara University Aydin Bal University of Wisconsin-Madison Aaron Bird Bear University of Wisconsin-Madison Education researchers have increasingly used speculative design approaches to elevate the transformative agency of local stakeholders to re-mediate oppressive systems constituting harmful contexts of human learning and development. To explicitly redress racism, ableism, and other forms of interlocking oppression, the Indigenous Learning Lab was implemented in a rural high school struggling with persistent racial injustice in school discipline, profoundly affecting American Indian students and families. The Learning Lab methodology is a community-led systemic design process that leveraged local school community members’histories, cultural assets, and sociopolitical future imaginations toward transformative knowledge production. This article examines how school community members collectively engaged in speculative future-making, amplifying their historicity, everyday resistance, cultural assets, and sociopolitical future imaginations to design a decolonizing, inclusive support system to dismantle a rural high school’s oppressive settler-colonial discipline system. Keywords: cultural historical activity theory, disproportionality, equity, qualitative research, race, racial disproportionality, school discipline, settler colonialism, social justice, speculation, systemic transformation Speculative design has been increasingly used to reorganize learning spaces, centering equity, inclusion, and justice to drive social change (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016; Gutiérrez & Jurow, 2016) . Speculative design employs “speculation”about possible futures to envision alternative stories and worlds that do not yet exist (Garcia & Mirra, 2023) . In U.S. schooling, the normalized, hence invisible, infrastructure is grounded in settler-colonialism, racism, ableism, neoliberal meritocracy, and other forms of subjugation. This foundation has profoundly shaped the institutional cultures and how learning and teaching activities are organized and embodied to constitute intersectional power and privilege (Apple, 2012; Gutiérrez, 2016) . Speculative design explicitly attends social, historical, political, and economic contexts and the role of race, class, dis/ability, language, gender expressions, and other markers of difference in shaping learning opportunities (Artiles, 2019; Gutiérrez & Jurow, 2016) . To reimagine alternative worlds, systems, and stories, this transformative design approach aims to organize expansive learning experiences (Engeström, 2016; Garcia & Mirra, 2023) . Expansive learning experiences involve breaking away from taken-for-granted practices, rules, assumptions, artifacts, and identities, leveraging everyday dilemmas and resistance and galvanizing future imaginations as speculative design tools to reshape alternative social relations and material arrangements (Engeström, 2016) . Although still in its early stages, speculative design approaches have been utilized in civic education, higher education (e.g., Rogers et al., 2023), teacher education (Lizárraga, 2023), STEM (Arada et al., 2023), and literacy education (Toliver, 2020) to reorganize transformative learning environments with an emancipatory purpose. However, their potential to bring about systemic change to address racial injustice has not yet been empirically explored. The Learning Lab methodology was developed as a speculative design approach to explici

FAQs

What is the core mechanism of the Learning Lab methodology?

It is a community-led systemic design process that leverages participants’ histories, cultural assets, and sociopolitical future imaginations to produce transformative knowledge and help dismantle the oppressive discipline system.

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Pentious