Educational visionaries have told us that we need to understand who today’s students are, and then develop curricula and teaching MO based on present realities.
This seems especially true during times of a media and communications revolution when the generations born into the new tech world assimilate the new environments as the basis for their persons. Older generations are then challenged to “get” how different the new generations are. How can that be done?
We might have overlooked the deep immersion into possible futures that our culture has provided, going back perhaps say, as far as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein of 1818, whose theme of strange new life forms being created and the aftermath certainly foreshadows a world with CRISPR capabilities.
Dr. Jeckyll Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson in 1886 is another exploration of profound changes possible through chemicals, which foreshadows use of so called mind expanding drugs, and other profound chemical changes to our perception and realities.
Both of those works were based on actual life events, Here’s a link for Frankenstein origins. Here’s one Dr. Jeckyll “dig deeper” link.
One might also include miracle stories in sacred texts like the Bible, and the narratives found throughout our shared world mythologies, as preparing us for alternate realities. Super-heroes have been with us long before the advent of Superman and the Marvel Universe…much of which borrows from older sagas such as Norse tails and Greco-Roman gods. Much of renaissance painting depicts events found in Roman and Greek mythology, as well as biblical characters at peak moments. Angels and Devils abound.
Literature has provided many more experiences of the strange, weird, and out of this world futures. We might say that H.G. Wells and Jules Verne got there first in many imaginations of the future, as did Aldous Huxley, and George Orwell, who warned us of how things might run amok.
Our current invasions of privacy online, have been presaged often enough in sci-fi fantasy worlds, perhaps most famously in “The Body Snatchers”, a story in Colliers 1954 by Jack Finney, later made into several movies as “The Invasion of the Body Snatchers’. There’s a whole genre of being “invaded and taken over by aliens” in literature and film, and TV, as well as certain cults of UFOs who claim to have been personally invaded in hovering alien spaceships.
HG Wells has inspired a style called “SteamPunk” that reached back to his time period for clothing, and then added a punk element to it. Perhaps a similar motivation for changing personas might be found in the role playing game Dungeons and Dragons, and then developed later into changed personas IRL, as with Cosplay.
In his sociological and political tracts, Wells discussed nationalism, religious bigotry and xenophobia — all the dilemmas of the following century, and the one after that, i.e, ours.
Somewhere in here Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings influence should be noted, as the takeaway from his trilogy might be summarized as “Power Corrupts, Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely”… which is good wisdom for any age, but which might particularly apply in a world of mutually assured destruction and totalitarian dictatorships run amok. Those are realities which impact the psyches of everyone living in such “black clouds of evil emanating from Mordor” predicaments, and that impacts students today as well as those who read them in previous generations, (or watched the films.)
Also preparing us for the future are the seemingly unending series of StarTrek and StarWars adventures with the alternate realities they conjure up. As we currently try to “grok” immersion in virtual realities, some of us are already comfortable with the concept and experience, having watched numerous episode of StarTrek featuring the “holodeck” virtual spaces.
Other visionary aids preparing us for today might well include the worlds of Douglas Adams, and his “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, which contains such ideas as instantaneous travel to any point anywhere, and ChatGPT lookalike tools. He’s the one who came up with the “koan” foreshadowing the conundrum of depending on AI for answers, with the super duper computer “Deep Thought” taking millions of years to answer the ultimate question, and coming up with “42”.
All of which is to say, older generations of educators have perhaps plenty of experiences with alternate conceptions and experiences of “normal reality” that can and should go a long way in helping us understand where the younger student generations “are coming from”.