Seeing as very little recent critical work has been done on teaching science fiction, both Andy Sawyer and Peter Wright’s Teaching Science Fiction (2011) and Farah Mendelsohn’s The Intergalactic Playground (2009) provide essential insight into the way SF and pedagogy intersect in contemporary contexts otherwise hard to find. While Sawyer and Wright’s collection of essays and course outlines refer predominantly to the development of undergraduate courses (which admittedly there seems to be more discourse concerning), Mendelsohn’s text stands out as a unique project. Looking specifically at children’s and teen’s SF, Mendelsohn considers the development of both the ‘juveniles’ of the 1950s and 1960s and the subgenre of ‘Young Adult’ (YA) SF that followed, and how markets and curriculums have shifted leading into the twenty-first century, before doing foundational work with hundreds of texts and considering what a current educator should seek in a YASF novel based on varying intent. Because of the limited critical discussion surrounding SF specifically as it relates to pedagogical practice, reading these texts in conjunction with work on more general educational theory would allow one to consider how the ideas proposed by Sawyer, Wright and Mendelsohn could apply to the classroom in practical ways. However, in this blog post I will deal primarily with these two texts.
Teaching Science Fiction consists of a collection of essays from practicing post-secondary educators who run their own science fiction courses. This text summarizes various approaches one could take when considering starting an undergraduate SF course, including historical and ‘issue’-based approaches, and interdisciplinary projects involving using SF to provide science students with well-rounded skills. The collection begins with a brief history of SF, followed by a consideration of genre terminology, including information on terms like Darko Suvin’s cognitive estrangement and the concept of the novum. What follows are essays on historical periods in SF’s development and how to teach these periods in the context of cultural history. In the essays concerned with an ‘issues’ based approach to teaching science fiction, all contributors include reading lists, activities they do with their classes, and specific issues involved in their approach. For example, in “Postmodernism, Postmodernity and the Postmodern: Telling Local Stories at the End of Time”, Andrew M. Butler discusses the issue many students have with understanding the general idea of postmodernity as it relates to chronological conceptualization. Butler expresses skepticism regarding typically ‘postmodern’ expressions only occurring after the period generally considered the ‘modern era’; In this sense, Butler suggests that in any SF course concerned with postmodernity, it is crucial that work be done thinking through preconceived notions students may have regarding the postmodern and what kinds of work that label is typically attributed to. The final section provides practical suggestions, although nothing in great detail, for possible assignments and essay evaluation depending on the course intent and the instructor’s approach to the genre.
Many of the contributors to Teaching Science Fiction opted for more discussion-based approaches to teaching SF, including various forms of assessment. All approaches included some form of diagnostic assessment, where the professor gathered information concerning the class experience with the genre. However, through providing multiple approaches for the potential SF educator, Teaching Science Fiction suggests that a course on SF does not need a rigid structure, and that the genre can be ‘entered into’ by many different directions. By beginning the course with a discussion, any SF course, whether based in cultural history, genre history, or a specific issue, has the potential to embody Bell hooks’ model of democratic education (to be explored elsewhere in this blog). Focused on discussion and an understanding of student experience with the genre, all contributors suggest a course on SF can be critical and interactive. As an example, in the final chapter Sawyer and Wright suggest even in a larger classroom a ‘student conference’ could take the place of an essay, where work could be done in groups if necessary. Like a conference, students would present their findings on a topic of their choosing from the course material while having the freedom to draw from outside sources and personal interests, and would have to participate in a question and answer period where other classmates could look critically at their findings. In The Intergalactic Playground, Mendelsohn similarly adopts a democratic education model, although not as explicitly, in her observation of children and their reading habits and expectations. Surprisingly, by considering children’s voices and what children state they want in a text, Mendelsohn honours their voice in a way that many pedagogical theorists fail to do.
In The Intergalactic Playground, Mendelsohn uses a mixture of educational research on student learning, the history of educational practices between 1950-2001, firsthand accounts from children on reading, and informal surveys done through her blog to consider the significance of over four-hundred SF texts marketed to child and teen readers. She begins by establishing the criteria she uses to categorize a text as SF, stating that the “full sf novel might be summarized, to use Clute’s style, as DISSONANCE, RUPTURE, RESOLUTION, CONSEQUENCE” (Mendelsohn, 10). Using this criteria throughout her work, Mendelsohn comes to the conclusion that a large majority of children’s and teen’s ‘SF’ does not follow this definition, but rather only contain science fictional elements that are not used to their full potential. Throughout The Intergalactic Playground, Mendelsohn pushes against what she establishes as truisms which most critical works on children and reading assume:
- Children are not a market.
- Boys don’t read.
- Didactic fiction is poor fiction.
- Children don’t want to be lectured/preached to.
- Children cannot handle narrative complexity.
- Children want books about people like them.
- Teen fiction should be about personal and interpersonal growth.
- Fiction should be about character.
- Children want relevance. (23)
This alongside her interest in SF texts for children and teens that work like adult SF (thus inviting young readers to turn into adult readers of SF) determines her approach for the rest of the text. While Mendelsohn focuses heavily on specific texts and how they work in the context of her SF criteria, she also listens to children’s interests both through direct accounts and psychological studies that directly disprove many of the previously mentioned truisms. What emerges throughout the book is essentially that children love science, very few texts are too hard for the average child reader, and that very few children are the ‘reluctant reader’ who much of pedagogical studies regarding readers seem to consider. For Mendelsohn, SF fills a gap which exists for many readers who desire texts that differ from what they are typically ‘expected’ to read.
Works Cited
Mendlesohn, F. (2009). The Inter-Galactic Playground: A Critical Study of Children’s and Teen’s Science Fiction. Ed. Donald E. Palumbo and C.W. Sullivan III. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
Sawyer, A., & Wright, P. (eds). (2011). Teaching Science Fiction. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
