This week has emphasized that now is the time for reimagining what critical AI education might look like in the coming months and years, an education that eschews industry-captured AI literacy lessons for an expansive, interdisciplinary civics education with an emphasis on digital degrowth and data center resistance.

I've been thinking about Alpha School and yet another article - this time it's "Parents Fell in Love with Alpha School's Promise. Then They Wanted Out" by Todd Feathers published today in Wired at https://lnkd.in/gNCAx47s - detailing the school leaders' saviorism and their vision of education as a dystopian surveillance hellscape. What other visions of education should we pursue with teachers, students, and caregivers? A few years ago, I read, "Impossible Dreaming: On Speculative Education Fiction and Hopeful Learning Futures" by Shandell Houlden and George Veletsianos. They challenge speculative education researchers to shift focus away from apocalyptic futures and instead engage students in hope because "Imagining these hopeful education futures is necessary, to avoid reinforcing structures of injustice and inequality such as settler colonialism and to invite more radical imagination into our work as a means to seed the worlds we want to create and live in." You can read their excellent article at: https://lnkd.in/gKUGVjzc I took inspiration from Houlden and Veletsianos for one of my dissertation studies. I challenged a group of high school students to design a speculative educational technology for collective thriving at their school. We discussed how Mariame Kaba, Ruha Benjamin, Seamus Heaney, and others conceive of hope. We watched sava saheli singhs' short film on speculative ed-tech #tresdancing. (Watch and teach the film at: https://lnkd.in/gNiCNXHJ). We prototyped, provided feedback, and revised. What emerged were projects that align with previous research findings that students often reproduce existing hierarchies in their speculative technologies - and powerful possibilities for civic action in the here and now grounded in community and justice. Anyway, I reject Alpha School and its profiteering, dehumanizing education. Instead, I'll be working with teachers, students, and caregivers to imagine - and enact - otherwises "as a means to seed the worlds we want to create and live in."