Ecofiction as Didactic Tool

Shared Anticipations and Agency Towards Possible and Desirable Futures

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6239-760-6_11How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Ecofiction; ecocriticism; climate pedagogy; anticipatory governance; imaginary politics; sustainability education; pedagogies of hope

Abstract

This paper explores how ecofiction can serve as a didactic tool for cultivating anticipatory thinking, agency, and shared imagination toward sustainable futures in educational contexts. Drawing on the concepts of anticipation, anticipatory governance, and pedagogies of hope, it situates literature and storytelling as performative practices that shape how we envision and act upon uncertain futures. Anticipation, understood as the capacity to imagine and prepare for what may come, has become an increasingly vital framework in times of ecological crisis, technological transformation, and planetary uncertainty. The paper combines theoretical perspectives from anticipatory governance and climate pedagogy (Ahlberg, 2021, 2024; Huoponen, 2023) with ecocritical and narrative inquiry (Bina et al., 2017; Milkoreit, 2017) to examine how educators and learners may employ ecofiction in the classroom. Through examples from Nordic and international contexts and pedagogical initiatives inspired by EarthEd (Assadourian, 2017), the paper argues that working with ecofictional narratives can transform climate anxiety into collective reflection and creative agency. Scientific reports on climate changes are equally important: facts are necessary as well as fiction (Cheng et al., 2024; Gartler et al., 2025). The article argues that narrative imagination functions as a form of anticipatory knowledge production that can foster empathy, ethical deliberation, and resilience. The article concludes that by integrating ecofiction into education, combined with scientific research, teachers can nurture future literacy and solidarity, empowering the next generation with knowledge and imagination, to act with hope rather than despair in the face of environmental change.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Britt Johanne Farstad
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/08/23
TI  - Ecofiction as Didactic Tool
BT  - Proceedings of the Conference of Growing up the Future: Education for Sustainability (GROUFES 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 121
EP  - 135
SN  - 2667-128X
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6239-760-6_11
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6239-760-6_11
ID  - Farstad2026
ER  -