Speculative Education Approaches Series

Antero Garcia & Nicole Mirra, editors

The purpose of the Speculative Education Approaches (SEA) Series is to offer researchers, practitioners, and community members radically new models of teaching, learning, organizing, and dreaming that reach beyond established horizons of educational possibility. Starting from the premise that structural inequity—across lines of race, gender, language, ability, and more— is the stubborn bedrock of existing educational institutions, the SEA Series is committed to curating texts that offer rigorous and creative design blueprints for alternative and re-imagined systems committed to equity and freedom. The series does not look to a distant future but instead amplifies the voices, experiences, and ideas of those who are building speculative and hopeful educational pathways in the here and now.

Antero Garcia is an Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University and the incoming vice president of the National Council of Teachers of English. His research explores the possibilities of speculative imagination and healing in educational research. Prior to completing his Ph.D., Garcia was an English teacher at a public high school in South Central Los Angeles. He has authored or edited more than a dozen books about the possibilities of literacies, play, and civics in transforming schooling in America.  Antero currently co-edits La Cuenta, an online publication centering the voices and perspectives of individuals labeled undocumented in the U.S. Antero received his Ph.D. in the Urban Schooling division of the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. 

Nicole Mirra is an Associate Professor of Urban Teacher Education in the Department of Learning & Teaching at the Rutgers University Graduate School of Education. Her research utilizes participatory design methods in classroom, community, and digital spaces to collaboratively create civic learning environments with youth and educators that disrupt discourses and structures of racial injustice and creatively compose liberatory social futures. She is a newly elected member to the Board of Directors of the Literacy Research Association (2023–2026). She previously taught secondary literacy and debate in Brooklyn, New York and Los Angeles, California. Her books include Educating for Empathy: Literacy Learning and Civic Engagement (Teachers College Press, 2018), Doing Youth Participatory Action Research: Transforming Inquiry with Researchers, Educators, and Students (Routledge, 2015), and Civics for the World to Come: Committing to Democracy in Every Classroom (Norton, 2023). Her work appears in peer-reviewed journals including American Educational Research Journal, Harvard Educational Review, Review of Research in Education, Journal of Teacher Education, and more.

Board Members: 

Kris Gutiérrez, University of California Berkeley
Leigh Patel, University of Pittsburgh
Jonathan Rosa, Stanford University
Amanda Tachine, Arizona State University
Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, University of Michigan
Shirin Vossoughi, Northwestern University