By Christina Velasco, Leadership Coach, San Francisco Unified School District This blog is an extension of Episode 7 of the Cultivating Imagination podcast.   Educational leaders who actively work for equity, excellence and social justice experience work-related stress and require spaces and strategies to support themselves and others. We need systems and structures to support educational leaders’ stamina to stay in the equity work of social justice leadership. Let’s engage our inner rebel and reimagine what professional development is for educational leaders so that they can take care of ..read more

By Mark Fettes, Director of Centre for Imagination in Research, Culture and Education This blog is an extension of Episode 6 of the Cultivating Imagination podcast.   For twenty years, as a faculty member in Education at Simon Fraser University, I ran fairly large scale, community-based research projects with schools and school districts around British Columbia, Canada’s westernmost province. The school system can be hospitable to innovation if you put a lot of energy into it, and ideally, energy with some money attached, as I could do in the context of these research projects. Always I c ..read more

by George Theoharis, Professor of Educational Leadership and Inclusive Elementary Education in the School of Education, Syracuse University This blog is an extension of Episode 6 of the Cultivating Imagination podcast. Think about Rosa Parks, Ed Nixon, Joanne Robinson, and the many Black community members of Montgomery, Alabama who imagined a bus system that was not segregated. Think about Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress who imagined creating a South Africa they had never lived in. Think about LaMarcus Adna Thompson who imagined the thrill and excitement people young and old c ..read more

By Lori Driussi, independent education consultant and Faculty Associate at Simon Fraser University This blog is an extension of Episode 7 of the Cultivating Imagination podcast.   Imagination is a way of being, a door opener, an invitation for all to enter and contribute to the world we seek but have not yet realized. One might say the same of education. To move from performative to transformative teaching and leading we need to imagine. Imagine education as an endeavour to create a more just world. Imagine that a relational and radical acceptance is our priority and context for policy m ..read more

By Michael Dé Danann Datura, principal of Cortes Island School   This blog is an extension of Episode 5 of the Cultivating Imagination podcast.   As an “academic” it can be frustrating to have every lecture or big idea followed up by questions of: “…but what do we do now? …what are the practical implications? …how and why will this matter to my students on Monday morning?” As if having courageous conversations about important ideas or philosophies or, for example, the role that worldview plays on complex matters such as the climate catastrophe are “doing nothing.” On the other h ..read more

By Moraima Machado, San Lorenzo Unified School District and Myra Quadros Meis, San Francisco Unified School District     This blog is an extension of Episode 4 of the Cultivating Imagination podcast. In education, imagination is essential. Imagination is the capacity we have as humans to imagine new possibilities. To create and re-create is to re-construct reality.  As a site leader, there is consistently a set of demands to maintain the system. Principals are accountable to many stakeholders and usually get stuck in the bureaucracy of the organizational system. This b ..read more

By Sean Blenkinsop,  professor in the faculty of education at Simon Fraser University   Last Tuesday I had the opportunity to be part of a dialogue with Andy Hargreaves where we explored ideas connected to educational leadership and the imagination.  And, thanks to all present, it was an interesting and engaging hour though we might have needed a touch more time to solve all the world’s problems. Happily, once we signed-off I still had a couple of things to mull over.  The most pertinent to this blog had to do with uncertainty. Both a recognition of its ubiquitous presence ..read more

By Andy Hargreaves, Visiting Professor at the University of Ottawa and Research Professor at Boston College Note: This blog is an extension of the Cultivating Imagination podcast Episode 2: Shared Spaces, Multiple Voices- Imagining Inclusive and Sustainable Educational Ecosystems with Sean Blenkinsop and Andy Hargreaves     A few years ago, I was elected President of an international conference organization. With the preceding president, I interviewed 10% of the membership, to learn more about the organization. The interviewees liked the organization (otherwise they wouldn’t sti ..read more

by Vidya Shah, Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Education at York University   I’m so very grateful for the opportunity to have been in conversation with Jacqueline Lawrence, Stephen Hurley, and Meaghan Dougherty in Episode 1 of the Cultivating Imagination podcast. What a life-giving conversation that was! Below I share some thoughts on imagination since that conversation, drawing on inspiration from the Finding Our Way podcast hosted by Prentis Hemphill, the Emergent Strategies Series curated by adrienne marie brown, and my own learning from TheThe UnLeading Project.    Im ..read more

We are pleased to share that our latest adventure—the Cultivating Imagination in Leadership for Social and Ecological Justice Project—received SSHRC Connections Grant funding! Following the publication of our book earlier this year entitled Cultivating Imagination in Leadership: Transforming Schools and Communities (Teachers College Press, 2023), we have been looking for additional ways to get people thinking about the importance of imagination in responding to today’s educational challenges—among them, addressing students’ wide-ranging physical, emotional, social, and academic needs, and faci ..read more