This startling phrase was a part of the submission for Growing Innovation grant support by the Project Based Learning initiative in British Columbia School District #59 (Dawson Creek). In this first New Pathways instalment of the Exploring Engagement series, we may see in the statements of some of the students, educators and administrators from a number of BC school districts that a major part of what gave rise to their sense that strong commitments to transformation in education are called for has been the visibility of students’ increasingly ambivalent relationship to their schooling.
Throughout Growing Innovation-supported projects, a focus on students whom schools have not ‘traditionally’ served well has been prevalent, but the beginning of our exploration of engagement in education finds educators and administrators reflective about a more systemic pathology. Again and again, the willingness to open the educational discussion to uncomfortable and difficult questions—like the insufficiencies, parochialisms, and failings of educational institution—has been the basis of a kind of searching courage characteristic of almost all of the projects Growing Innovation has been privileged to support. We hope it may inspire you as well…to the kinds of commitments and transformations we have seen and been able to document in Growing Innovation in Rural Sites of Learning.
This brief video starts us Exploring Engagement with the comments of a superintendent of schools, three school principals, a vice-principal, three teachers and seven students. They work and live in four school districts in British Columbia from the Province’s Central Interior, Kootenay and Peace River regions. The interviews took place from 2012 to 2016.
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