ABSTRACT
For me, science fiction is more than a metaphor for curriculum: it is an isomorph. I take science fiction’s premise that the present is a history of possible futures. This might be an excellent definition for “curriculum” as well: the preset of a host of imagined potential futures. Curriculum theory and curriculum work is in my conception a play of signs shifting in meaning, an enactive symbolic politics, even as the context for curriculum is constructed in an ongoing contextualization of similar ambiguity and praxis. I agree with William Pinar (2004: 127) that “only the future provides access to a reconfigured present,” and that curriculum theory might work to “produce the effects of education, in the present case, a movement of the ego toward the futural as that future is imagined in the present” (p. 126). Simply, “by imagining the future, the future becomes the present” (126); our reading of children’s literature as curriculum theory text, and in this chapter, as we broaden out notion of “literature” to include narratives of youth culture, we do so in a common project with Pinar to dissolve what blocks us from moving “forward” toward a future not yet present, a present opened out to the not-yet. I want to evoke with Pinar the ideas of Deleuze, who sees this sort of future as an inside folded into the outside. “In this way, the outside is always an opening on to a future: nothing ends, since nothing has begun, but everything is transformed” (Deleuze 1986: 89).
