Beyond the fossil era: transformative pedagogy for sustainability

Abstract: Society faces multiple and interconnected crises that require transformation. Education has long been theorized as key to transformation, yet an important driver of transformation, imagination, is marginalised within pedagogical approaches to sustainability. This thesis examines Beyond the Fossil Era (BFE), a pedagogy that invites learners to become co-creators of a speculative museum looking back at a sustainable transformation from year 2053. By bridging literature on pedagogy, futures and transformation and analysing BFE, this thesis explores the transformative potential of imagined futures as pedagogy. Through observation, surveys and interviews, it finds that BFE positively impacts pupils’ perceived agency, affective relationship with the future and ecological, sociological and utopian imagination. By materialising the future in everyday objects, set in an imagined future, BFE defamiliarizes the present and opens the future for deliberation. Its transformative potential lies in its utopian and critical method and can be strengthened by constructing infrastructures of the imagination.