A strong tradition of thought in philosophy and politics of education is that education needs to take into account past and present experiences of their students in order to create as meaningful learning conditions as possible. At present, education operates in a “post-truth” and ”post-normal” space where many, if not all, remaining eco-social challenges (see United Nations Sustainable Development Goals) are  “wicked” (Pryshlakivsky & Searcy 2013), i.e. characterized by fragmentary and uncertain knowledge not lending themselves to consensual measurement, prediction and control according to established standards of disciplinary scientific expertise and traditional decision-making routines (Latour 2004). Hence, there is a strong demand from coming future generations to learn how to deal with wicked problems and govern temporary yet effective solutions to these problems. In fact, for many, learning how to proactively adapt to such insecurities is a question of survival.

In this wicked space, many of the world´s young draw their experiences from fiction (poetry, face book, internet porn, prose, music, songs, storytelling, nursery rhymes, art, movies, graffiti, crafts, motorcycling, etc.). Popularly, fiction is often separated from the Real. In fact, according to traditions such as outdoor education and eco-criticism, some real (i.e. non-fictive) experiences are even more Real (i.e. authentic) than others. Accordingly, experiencing a dialogue with a cartoon character is less Real than experiencing human-to-human dialogue and experiencing human-to-human dialogue in man-made environments such as in a bar in the city is considered less Real than experiencing human-to-human dialogue in the “wild”. In this paper, we argue that such demarcations between fiction and the Real and between Real and the more Real is part of a destructive narrative that does not enable, and at worst hinders, the kind of moral and political transgressive learning that wicked situations require. Hence, if education does not employ a new narrative of the relationship between fiction and the Real we risk missing out on what influences young people, that stuff that makes their world meaningful and constitutes the hotbed of the emergence of new and unorthodox knowledge, skills and values needed to navigate the future.

We will argue in line with resent ESE-research (see Hansson 2014), and aim to show, that it is paramount that education takes student’s experiences of/in fiction serious. Moreover, the paper argues against an a priori hierarchical order between different forms and kinds of experiences as relevant for learning. The paper embraces a scholarly experience of the paradox that resides in that popular fiction narratives such as those accounted for above are regarded to be less valid compared to so called evidence based narratives provided by research, while at the same time fictive narratives often are regarded as the faculty that can inform us about the deep existential truths of what it means to be human. The paper provides personal anecdotal, i.e. fictive, evidence for the claim that it is impossible and even undesirable to draw an impenetrable line between the factious, or, Real, and the fictive. This evidence is in itself a curdled, vibrant, emergent and mutative confusion of professional and private experiences of being and acting as ESE-scholars.

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