Dreaming and Creating Our Shared Futures
“I was dreamin' when I wrote this, forgive me if it goes astray.” Prince, "1999"
Each day students of all ages enter our classrooms still harboring dreams from the night before as well as dreams to which they may cling throughout their lives. As humans, we hold on to and cherish dreams because we know their potency and their potential—to inspire, to guide, sometimes to frighten. To give voice to our dreams is an act of literacy.
The greatest moments of social change and human innovation are born out of dreams. From the latest technical advances to the ancient stories that bind us together, it is individual and collective imagination that powers our society. Through voicing dreams for and with each other, equity and justice incubate. Sometimes warping and bending our past experiences, our dreams elucidate and instruct. In similar fashion, we can teach and learn alongside dreams in our classrooms today, if we so choose.
Providing space for our students to learn alongside each other’s dreams is an act of teaching. Collaborating to create what once wasn’t from the threads of our own imaginations: that is an act of learning. The waking world’s reams and rubrics drive much of what we do as English teachers, but we do not need to drown in a deluge of disconnected assessment. Instead, in the spirit of shared imagination, I invite us to take our and our students’ dreams seriously. For the 2025 NCTE Annual Convention, let’s embrace the idyllic possibilities of play, of storytelling, of asking what if and what if and what if.
Have we asked our students what if lately? Have we asked ourselves?
A quarter of a century deep into this 21st century, we can no longer look back on the “21st Century” skills that have brought us, somnambulistically, to this moment. What if we named the 22nd century skills enfolded in the dreams of our students? Given our shared lessons of flexibility and ingenuity learned through and beyond the pandemic, we must pursue ideas unhindered by what once was. Too, our work with words and stories might be footholds for equity, cultivating democratic surefootedness in even the most uncertain of political terrain.
What if we began our professional day listening to our dreams and those of our students? What if those dreams served as the foundation for a bold and oneirological praxis in our classrooms?
Cultivating dreams, together, at the NCTE Convention, three questions guide our shared space
What are we dreaming about?
Consider the primary obstacles in our past and in the present moment for which we might dream solutions, alternatives, and synergies. We invite proposals that name and seek dreaming practices for addressing the present, waking world.
What are we dreaming for?
As stewards of the teaching profession and of the broader domain of the English language arts, our dreams must be resolutely purposeful. We must engage in social dreaming that advocates for the needs of the varied, marginalized communities whom we serve. Consider the dreams for and of varied and diverse learners and how our pedagogies are intertwined with laboratory dreaming.
Whom are we dreaming with?
Our dreams are networked to a broader, more-than-human world. As teachers, who are we in conversation with as we support speculative, dreaming practices in our classrooms and in our communities? We invite co-presented sessions that invite in the voices and dreams of our students and the network of individuals we learn alongside.
To be clear, we are taking dreams seriously because, as English teachers, we know the power of literacy to spark change from individual academic growth to widespread social movements. Let us revel in the fact that dreams are small gifts of liberatory abundance. They make us who we are—as individuals and as a civic collective. In the words of none other than William Shakespeare, “We are such stuff as dreams are made on” and, in the spirit, the whole of our futures depends on our ability to dream, imagine, and take flight on the wings of such fancy.