World building: Creating alternate worlds as meaningful making in undergraduate education

Abstract

In this article, we offer a description of and reflection on our 2019 ‘creating alternate worlds’ course as a model for critical making in twenty-first-century higher education. Open to arts and humanities undergraduate students interested in creative research, our course used world building as a central approach to imagining alternatives. We found that explicitly centring Black and Indigenous perspectives helped support non-dominant students in their striving to realize possibilities beyond settler colonial visions of the future. We share our position in relation to decolonization and decolonizing pedagogies before describing the course at a high level and through an in-depth case study of an author’s research project. Our analysis of the course is presented via three axiological allegiances and three performative pragmatics. By discussing our political stance and a conceptual innovation that we term, ‘transcosmic potentials’, we conclude with insights for fellow educators. This pluriversal learning community opened a multiplicity of ‘portals’ to heterogeneous worlds, each with the power to fundamentally and forever alter all who pass through.