I really connected with the quote from our reading this week by Saunders "science fiction is the genre of the unknown, but imaginable." (p. 151). Pop culture has been used to imagine future world and to mirror and bring forward social and political issues for a long time. The best example I can come up with is Shakespeare plays. Many of Shakespeare's characters and plots seek to undermine various political decisions such as imperialism and the mass slaughter of the Caribs in the "new world" or west indies in the Tempest.
In the present day science fiction offers us a grapho-visual sense into social issues. As Saunders points out millennials have become great readers of visual images and the underlying message of those images. I think that if you are going to use science fiction to teach in the elementary classroom you might find it useful to the historical event that the sf was explicitly trying to exploit AND also how it parallels with current issues. By talking about the present day relationships to the sf you are choosing topics to discuss that are relevant in those students life as well as getting them to relate what is going on now with what was going on then. Using science fiction as an allegory can help the students engage with political language that they can relate too by imagining the content as if it were set in another world.
References
Robert Saunders. “Imperial Imaginaries: Employing Science Fiction to Talk About Geopolitics.” Popular Culture and World Politics: Theories, Methods, and Pedagogies. Caso and Hamilton, Eds. Pp. 149-159.
In the present day science fiction offers us a grapho-visual sense into social issues. As Saunders points out millennials have become great readers of visual images and the underlying message of those images. I think that if you are going to use science fiction to teach in the elementary classroom you might find it useful to the historical event that the sf was explicitly trying to exploit AND also how it parallels with current issues. By talking about the present day relationships to the sf you are choosing topics to discuss that are relevant in those students life as well as getting them to relate what is going on now with what was going on then. Using science fiction as an allegory can help the students engage with political language that they can relate too by imagining the content as if it were set in another world.
References
Robert Saunders. “Imperial Imaginaries: Employing Science Fiction to Talk About Geopolitics.” Popular Culture and World Politics: Theories, Methods, and Pedagogies. Caso and Hamilton, Eds. Pp. 149-159.