ERIC Number: EJ1470230
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2025
Pages: 26
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1071-4413
EISSN: EISSN-1556-3022
Available Date: 0000-00-00
"What Is the Truth?": On Teaching Paradoxes, Race, Family, and the Self with Octavia Butler's "Kindred"
Review of Education, Pedagogy & Cultural Studies, v47 n2 p255-280 2025
This article investigates the pedagogical power of teaching and learning alongside Octavia Butler's "Kindred." I examine the stories of students enrolled in a special topics undergraduate honors seminar centered on personal discovery, race, and family using grounded theory and narrative textual analysis. Students' narratives reveal the ways "Kindred" and science fiction more generally offer opportunities for substantive "culturally disruptive pedagogy" (San Pedro, 2018) through sustained engagement with the mechanics of time travel, contending with impossible choices, and wrestling with contradictions and paradoxes. Learning from this course demonstrates the usefulness of Black feminist speculative pedagogy for building students' capacity for "naming what is" (Ohman, 2021) and by extension disrupting and confronting the historical and contemporary legacies of racism and heteropatriarchy.
Descriptors: Ethics, Novels, Personal Narratives, Cultural Differences, Teaching Methods, Course Descriptions, Racism, Power Structure, Feminism, African Americans, Undergraduate Students, Honors Curriculum, Seminars, Grounded Theory, Student Attitudes, Family Relationship, LGBTQ People, Student Characteristics, Slavery, United States History
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: Higher Education; Postsecondary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Author Affiliations: N/A