Welcome to Teacher’s live chat. I’m Rich Shea, executive editor of the magazine, and today we’re chatting with Paul Watkins, author of eight novels and two memoirs and teacher of history and creative ...

Science-fiction television shows, despite their strangeness -- or perhaps because of it -- can help teach valuable lessons about society, writes Walter R. Jacobs III, a professor of social science at ...

Science fiction is, by its very nature, a dangerous and subversive sport. Few people take it very seriously—yet how can we not? Alvin Toffler writes in Future Shock, "Our children should be studying ...

I see what is, and ask: why? I dream of what could be, and ask: why not? That might be called critical daydreaming. -- (SF writer, July 1979) The following reflections address some fundamental ...

Margaret Atwood thinks anyone can write good fiction — if they have the right motivation. Whether just anyone can write like Atwood, though, or have the same level of success she’s enjoyed over her ...

There’s an old saw from Mark Twain about how truth is stranger than fiction, and I think it’s fair to say we’ve lived through a very strange reality this past year. With all the chaos and change, ...

What prompted the idea for the course? After reading many fiction books that featured themes of climate change, I felt compelled to create a course that would allow students to do the same. The idea ...

A skilled fiction writer can take a reader into an unfamiliar mind. I can’t speak for everyone who reads fiction, but many of us who love reading want to explore minds — and through them, worlds — ...

Teaching Sociology, Vol. 50, No. 4, Special Issue: Teaching Horror, Dystopia, and the Postapocalypse (OCTOBER 2022), pp. 384-391 (8 pages) The Alien Worlds project teaches ethnographic skills using ...

A skilled fiction writer can take a reader into an unfamiliar mind. I can’t speak for everyone who reads fiction, but many of us who love reading want to explore minds — and through them, worlds — ...