Fortunately, the politics of accountability in this case lead us into richer areas of inquiry—often about inquiry itself—as educational leaders undergo the wages of the changes they have touched off, welcomed and defended.
Inquiry has been a central pillar of Growing Innovation, and here we see it playing out in diverse, often community- and project-based and cross-disciplinary initiatives whose pedagogies also become innovative, adventurous and bold.
Moreover, the new modes of collaboration, new forms of assessment, new community connections and new opportunities for student leadership are just the surface of developments that have ensued – where, as we shall also soon see, these are only some of the ‘educational’ components of what has ensued in Growing Innovation. Here through curricular innovation, once education moves out of schooling, it enters a vast space indeed…
…where we may follow educators talking in specifics about innovative practice, in terms of pedagogy, of assessment, of collaboration and especially what innovation, or an innovative disposition (or ethical praxis), can make of curriculum in practice, as well as its mechanics and some of the resources and new partnerships required of educators in curricular innovation.
In this slightly longer video, two superintendents of schools, a school principal, three school vice-principals/teachers, four teachers and one student consider their experiences of finding and enacting new forms of responsibility and new pedagogies via curricular innovation, which can have the ‘surprising’ results of coming to broaden their view of what education is – into one in full engagement with what education could become (and what we, separately and together, may become through it).
They live and work in six rural school districts in British Columbia, in the province’s Kootenay and Peace river regions, as well as on Lasqueti and Haida Gwaii. The interviews took place from 2012 to 2016.
Some questions to consider (we recommend brief small group discussions that can each then ‘compare notes’ about the different directions opened in how such ‘complicated’ conversations can go):
How do you respond to this video?
What does it bring to mind for you?
What questions do you have upon viewing this video?
What can an “inquiry format” provide that a more traditional “transmissive” one does not? For what are each important (i.e. if education is transformative regardless, into what do such different approaches transform students? Their educators?)
From where do outcomes come in an inquiry format?
To what degree is teacher’s inquiry requisite to students’?
How can deliberately departing from what seems to make a teacher’s job ‘important’ make it even more so?
Through what is documented here, how do you see schooling changing? When you answer this question, do you find a new formula emerging, or rather something that could never be formalized (and is this a benefit or disadvantage to curricular change as you would like to see it)?
In what specifically in this video may surprise be seen as a significant curricular force in education? What does it connect (that may have been otherwise unconnected), and how do you see this as important?
What surprised you in this video documentation?
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