Abstract The postdigital future of society has become an area of highly controversial debate and, consequently, growing scholarly engagement also in the field of education. Particularly amongst critical education research, speculative methods are hereby discussed as promising approach to empower teachers or students to imagine alternative futures that challenge the status quo, and that instead reinforce values such as justice, sustainability, or human care. However, over the past years, scholars also developed growing awareness for the many challenges and ambiguous dynamics when putting speculative methods into practice. This includes people’s (in)ability to imagine something other than the currently possible, scholars’ own normative positionality, but also the performativities of speculative setups that themselves become increasingly postdigital in nature. With this paper, we contribute to this expanding scholarship by providing insights into a postdigital speculative dialogue on schooling futures between teachers, students and researchers from Germany and Switzerland in 2025. We discuss the visions of schooling futures which were developed by students and teachers, including their critical relation towards the status quo, and disentangle how the postdigital nature of the setup and the research herein impacted the dynamics of the process. The paper concludes with discussing the implications of our findings for the field of speculative postdigital methods, but also for the broader field of postdigital school and classroom development.
Hartong et al. (Sat,) studied this question.