Reflexive Futures Literacies: Using Story Completion Methods with Youth to Envision Diverse Education Futures

Recent years have seen a substantial growth in the interest in higher education futures, with much of the work of imagining these futures coming from scholars, professional organizations, and policymakers. In this chapter we used a story completion method to gather brief stories about the future of higher education from youth ages 18–25 from Canada (n=88). We prompted these youth to describe a scenario in which a young father sits down for his first class of university, twenty years into the future after climate disaster has become a global reality. We present a number of these stories in the service of contributing to futures of higher education as an expression of what we call ‘multiplicative carrier bag stories’. Our framework is built from the literary author Ursula Le Guin’s theory of carrier bag stories, as well as Mancuso’s critique of hopepunk and turn toward multiplicative speculative fiction. By combining these two frameworks, the chapter seeks to better understand and practice reflexive futures literacies in education futures research.