By Meaghan Dougherty, Douglas College faculty in the Department of Child and Youth Care and Gillian Judson, Simon Fraser University Faculty of Education
This experience of exploring imagination, leadership, and social justice with all of you has been a gift. We are so grateful to have had the opportunity to share space and dialogue with so many amazing, inspiring, and passionate leaders, educators, activists, and scholars. In these 12 podcasts, all available at www.cultivateimagination.ca, we asked experts with varied perspectives and experiences to enter conversation with one another, allowing their ideas to build off and bounce off of one another in generative ways. These discussions have been—and continue to be—transformative for us and our thinking. There are so many integral ideas shared that we keep re-listening and re-thinking what it means to enact imagination for social justice. We have been thinking with the ideas shared, raising the ideas in our encounters, and integrating these ideas into our teaching. We have been walking through the world made different by our intra-actions and we are so grateful for these connections. In addition to using the podcasts in our Educational Leadership courses, we have found the 18 blog posts helpful in introducing students to new ideas and encouraging their own exploration of imagination. To help you continue to cultivate your own imaginative leadership, or to encourage cultivation in your classrooms or amongst your colleagues and collectives, we have questions corresponding to each podcast that encourage reflection and discussion. These materials—and other information on using the cognitive tools and sharing leadership stories—are all available under the Resources tab of www.cultivateimagination.ca.
We are so grateful to our community of contributors and those who have made these conversations possible. A million thank yous to Sarah Anderson and Stephen Hurley for all of your work in producing the blogs and podcasts! We are so glad these resources will continue to be available through the website.
For us, the connections we have forged throughout this knowledge mobilization project have been extremely inspiring. In a world that often leaves us feeling depleted and stretched too thin, the time spent in dialogue exploring our longing for a different educational system and a different future filled us with energy. With hope. With a sense of belonging and connection. We left these conversations with ideas swirling, pages of feverishly scribbled notes, and the energy to continue enacting imagination and building a collective of leaders who recognize the need to ‘what if’ new potentialities. We wanted to produce podcasts that could be used in leadership education, to share ideas of imagination’s integral role in enacting leadership justly, but that could also bring others into the shared conversation.
We are grateful to all of our co-conspirators who joined our virtual roundtable to explore how we might take that energy, inspiration, and longing into collective action. Our focus in our work on imagination has been to keep things practical – grounded, rooted – like soil that keeps us connected to the eco-system and allows for growth and wellness. So, our culminating roundtable event focused on how might we keep this energy, enthusiasm, passion, and hope moving us forward in our individual, relational, institutional, and ideological spheres of influence. What might it look like to continue to build an imaginative community? What could we offer one another? What might our responsibilities be and who might we be responsible to? As Dr. Vidya Shah encouraged us to consider – how do we sit in the tension of cynicism and idealism and allow that tension to propel us to action, rather than indifference and defeat?
Our community – all of you! – had many suggestions of what our community could look like and how we might connect and continue to support one another. A walk in the forest with our more-than-human companions. An arts-based session working with potatoes as the medium. A virtual connection to share our practices. Shared space to support one another through the challenges of enacting imagination and fighting for social justice. A community of practice to reflect on what is working and what might be done differently. A diverse group to push our perspectives beyond our own experiences and to check our privilege. We are requesting more information from you about where you are and how you are hoping to engage, including determining who might be interested in hosting/facilitating virtual or in-person events. We hope to have a common virtual space where we can share these events/discussions/get togethers and people can choose to participate in ways that work best for them. We are very excited to continue to think, work, and play together to imagine new possibilities for a more just and equitable world! Thank you for this community!
Hear more from our leaders in the Cultivating Imagination podcast series.
