ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces speculation in design, research methodology and teaching. Situating the speculative methods and pedagogies of this book within a growing body of speculative research and scholarship of teaching and learning, it discusses the temporal, epistemological and performative qualities of speculative approaches. These function within a complex interplay of past, present and future. They are overtly constitutive of the problems, topics and questions they engage with, which makes them epistemologically challenging. And, they centre engagement and audience in a way that adds to the unpredictability of their effects. Grappling with these speculative qualities involves researchers in attempting to attune to different sensibilities – of participants, of data, of the process of making futures. In speculative teaching methods, questions about the nature of learning, but also about the structures, spaces and processes of education, are overtly addressed.
