Phased Approach

The research strategy is to begin on a small scale in schools and classrooms that exemplify the challenges to be addressed, and later expand, in the last 2 years of the Project, to involve a greater range of schools and teachers. It would not be feasible to begin on a large scale for several reasons. One is that culturally inclusive imaginative education entails a considerable amount of original curriculum development that draws on the traditions and resources of particular communities, and in which teachers must be directly involved. Small numbers of highly committed teachers offer the best conditions for carrying out this work. Another reason is that this approach, being experimental, carries with it a number of uncertainties about what will be most effective in a given setting. The proposed strategy will allow us to develop exemplary classrooms and curricula before embarking on large-scale implementation. It will also provide us with trained and experienced teachers to lead the large-scale process in Years 4 and 5.

Our initial focus across all the sites will be in grades 4-7. These are the years in which children come face-to-face with the demands of the academic curriculum, with its characteristic and often alienating forms of oral and textual performance, abstract reasoning and symbolic manipulation. The disciplinary boundaries between subjects are not as rigid in elementary schools, allowing greater scope for innovative curricula and teaching practices. We will work in two schools in each district and in a range of adjacent grades. In Haida Gwaii we will seek additional funding to include the 2 high schools in the Project, allowing us to follow children through the elementary-secondary transition and begin to address the problem of student retention in grades 8-10 (see later discussion). In each district, a Project Leader will be hired to coordinate teachers’ involvement and liaise between the three partners in the research alliance. The Project Leader will be an accredited teacher from the district, preferably with strong ties to the First Nation community and with experience in curriculum development. In all the sites, potential candidates for this position have been identified.

Phase One

Professional transformation

In Year 1 of the Project, up to the beginning of the school year in September 2004, we will focus on training Project Leaders and teachers in the concepts and methods of culturally inclusive imaginative education. The capstone event of this phase will be an intensive collaborative curriculum development workshop held at SFU in the summer of 2004, attended by Project Leaders and teachers from all three districts. By the end of this workshop we expect teachers to be confident in working with the imaginative education framework, to have developed imaginative unit plans covering 30- 50% of the curriculum in grades 4-7, and to have acquired new skills of assessment and classroom observation that will form the basis for collecting action-research data in the next phase of the Project.

Research in this initial phase will focus primarily on the nature of the professional transformation that teachers undergo as they acquire new ways of thinking about their practice and about children’s access to curricular knowledge, building on a preliminary study by McKenzie and Fettes (2002). Teachers will be engaged in self-reflection through journal writing, peer-group discussions, and interviews. Questions will be open-ended, for instance “Can you briefly describe your understanding of imaginative education?”, “Can you describe one lesson or unit in which you think your class was imaginatively engaged?”, and “How do you know what the children in your class are learning?” Data from across the sites will be combined and subjected to qualitative analysis for common themes, derived in part from prior research and theory and in part from the data themselves. This research will continue through the subsequent phases of the Project, yielding a valuable set of portraits that will contribute to the literature on teachers’ professional growth and the ways in which universities can foster it. We also expect this research to yield direct benefits for SFU’s professional programs and for the teachers and school districts involved.

Phase Two

Working Models

Years 2 and 3 of the Project will entail intensive research aimed at developing working models of culturally inclusive imaginative education that fit the circumstances of each school and community. Project Leaders and teachers will be trained as co-researchers in assessing the nature and quality of children’s learning, in collaboration with faculty and students from SFU. A Project-wide evaluation will be carried out in January-March, 2005, and the entire Project team will meet at a retreat hosted by one of the districts to discuss the findings and draft a research plan for the following year. Team members will also attend and present findings from the Project in the 2 nd International Conference on Imagination and Education at SFU in the summer of 2005. The 2005-2006 school year will see a continuation and expansion of the work done in the previous year; by this time teachers will be expected to have developed a high level of mastery and to be able to draw on a wide array of unit plans and materials developed across the sites. Team members will also be engaged in planning for the third phase of the Project, to begin in the summer of 2006. A second Project-wide evaluation will take place in January-March, 2006, followed by a retreat designed to facilitate the transition to the third phase.

Research in this second phase will focus on curriculum and pedagogy. Because imaginative education actively engages learners in making sense of the curriculum, individually and collectively, it requires considerable skills of observation and responsiveness on the part of the teacher: no two children and no two classes follow exactly the same path to understanding. For this reason, teachers will be trained in methods of ethnographic observation and authentic assessment that will help them find out more about their learners and the ways in which they respond to the classroom experience. Some preliminary research in Year 1 will be conducted by SFU faculty in collaboration with teachers and First Nation educators, yielding baseline knowledge about learners, pedagogy, classroom environment, and barriers to learning that will inform the interventions planned in Years 2 and 3. The following list is not intended to be exhaustive, but to give an idea of the kinds of procedures that will be used.

• Content and skills assessment. This is the kind of assessment that is most prevalent in schools, whether imposed as a system-wide requirement or used by individual teachers to test learners’ abilities in a particular area of the curriculum. Such tests can be useful, particularly to indicate areas where many learners have difficulty, but they usually yield little information on the quality of children’s understanding, and they are of no help in developing alternative teaching strategies. Because of their widespread use, findings from such assessments will be included in the data collected for the Project, but the emphasis will be on developing and applying alternative approaches to assessment.
• Authentic assessment. Substantially better information on children’s learning is available through the various methodologies grouped under this label, all of which are based on performance samples. Open-ended questions, short projects, portfolios and self-assessment are all used to engage children in thinking more deeply about the topic, about the teacher’s expectations, and about displaying, using and extending their own knowledge. Taken together, these techniques can yield a great deal of insight into children’s understanding and possible teaching strategies to overcome barriers to learning. Training in authentic assessment will thus form part of the core pedagogy of the Project.
• Dynamic assessment. The Vygotskian tradition of psychological research has yielded some powerful strategies for assessing and improving children’s learning abilities. Typically this involves setting a task for a child and progressively offering hints as to how the problem could be solved, or providing a symbolic language that makes the solution easier to find. The Israeli psychologist Reuven Feuerstein has developed a classroom program of this kind (Feuerstein et al., 1980; cf. Kozulin, 2003) which has been used to diagnose and overcome learning difficulties of at-risk children and adolescents in many countries, including Aboriginal children in Vancouver schools (Marcuse and Williams, 1995; Williams, 2000). Because of the strong affinities between Vygotskian psychology and the theory of imaginative development that underpins the pedagogy of imaginative education, and because preliminary conversations with teachers indicate that many children in these communities share the difficulties identified by Feuerstein, we anticipate training all Project participants in these techniques.
• Classroom observation / Connoisseurship. Educational assessment in recent years has been influenced by the rise of qualitative research methodologies, and by reappraisals of the nature of professional knowledge in teaching (Eisner, 1994; 1998). It is increasingly recognized that children respond to the entire learning environment, including social interactions, communication patterns, use of space, channels of authority and responsibility, and other factors which were traditionally considered unproblematic for teachers. Culturally inclusive imaginative education is expected to lead to substantial changes in many or all of these aspects of the environment, as children become more engaged in bringing their ideas, interests and abilities to bear on the curriculum. We will track these changes using a combination of direct observation (by teachers, faculty, and graduate students), video analysis, and interviews and discussion groups with the children themselves. This work will form the basis for a set of ethnographic case studies (that provide an integrated picture of how imaginative education works in these classrooms and allow comparisons to be made across the sites.
• Critical ethnography. In the earlier section on site design, we alluded to the potential impact of factors outside the school on the success of this approach to educational reform. To address this issue, the classroom ethnographies just described will be set within the historical and social context of their communities. Interviews and documentary records will be used to trace the development of the present school system and related to what takes place in classrooms using the methodology described by Carspecken (1996). For each district, then, the Project will yield a historically grounded, ethnographically rich description of the struggle to make school an enriching educational experience for all children.

The research undertaken in this central phase of the Project is expected to be of great interest to educators working in multicultural contexts around the world. It will also contribute to substantially increasing the professional capacity and knowledge base of the school districts and First Nation educational institutions involved.

Phase Three

Institutionalization

This final phase, comprising Years 4 and 5, addresses the most challenging aspect of educational change: institutionalization. Our objective is to create a professional community in each district, sufficient in numbers and in depth of expertise to sustain culturally inclusive imaginative education in both discourse and practice. To accomplish this we will draw on the Faculty of Education’s expertise in designing and delivering community-based programs in teacher education and professional development. We foresee adapting the existing two-year Graduate Diploma in Supporting Diverse Learners, recently created by Field Programs in collaboration with the B.C. First Nations Education Steering Committee and the First Nations Schools Association, to focus on the knowledge and practices developed in the first 3 years of the Project. Our objective will be to recruit the minimum of 25 teachers in each district that are required for this program to be self-supporting. Where sufficient demand exists, we will also design and deliver a one-year professional certificate program for student teachers, based on the SFU Professional Development Program and on ongoing research into teacher education within the Imaginative Education Research Group. Recruitment for these programs will emphasize a long-term commitment to working in the district and in schools with significant proportions of First Nations learners.

The nature of the research in this final phase will be distinct from either of the preceding phases. By this stage the Project should have developed a substantial base of knowledge both in professional development and in implementation of culturally inclusive imaginative education in selected classrooms. Still untested, however, will be the question of whether this approach can shape routine teaching practice across several grades within a school or a group of schools. Beyond the transformation of individual teachers and the development of additional curriculum units, therefore, our concern will be with the quality of the communities of practice that can be created through this approach. The partnership with both school districts and First Nations will be essential to embed these communities within a broader professional and social context. Summer institutes in 2006, 2007 and 2008 will help to catalyze these communities’ formation and development; the 2007 institute will be co-located with the 3 rd International Conference on Imagination and Education at SFU, and the final institute in 2008 will form part of a summary evaluation and celebration of the project that includes SFU faculty and staff, teachers, students and community members.

Teacher communities constitute a relatively new area of research (e.g. Grossman, Wineburg and Woolworth, 2001; McLaughlin and Talbert, 2001). Methodologies include participant observation, interviews, focus groups, and discourse analysis of e-mail exchanges and other group interactions. We shall be concerned with such questions as “How do you think your colleagues think about imagination in education?”, “Has your teaching been influenced by conversations or collaboration with other teachers?”, and “Where do you turn for help with problems you encounter in your teaching?” We shall be looking for evidence of the development of a common language for talking about teaching and learning, how this language incorporates the ideas and methods of culturally inclusive imaginative education, and what its consequences are for teacher practice and collaboration. The Project’s design will enable us to compare the process of professional development in the initial small, self-selected groups of teachers with the much larger group process in Years 4 and 5. It is this phase of the research that will contribute most centrally to the literature on educational change.