Abstract
This paper, based upon our experiences starting a school, is part dialogue and part theory. The three authors have all played important roles in the design, creation, and ongoing support of an innovative public elementary school. The first part of the paper describes the impetus behind the creation of this “buildingless,” environmentally focused school with a mandate toward cultural change. There follows a discussion of the kinds of policy that have appeared over the lifespan of the school and includes the identification of those that hindered and those that helped. The final section uses some recent work in social innovation policy to inform a discussion with regard to our policy recommendations for those interested in supporting the kinds of local, place- and community-based educational innovations described here.
Introduction
This paper, situated in a real case of quite radical public school development, follows, in many ways, the great tradition of a recorded dialogue. Here it is not a conversation between several famous educators like Paulo Freire and Myles Horton (Horton and Freire, 1990) but rather the outcome of the discussions of the three authors, all of whom played significant roles in the development of an unconventional, place-based school, as they sat together to consider the influences, challenges, and possibilities of policy as it impacted, and continues to impact, the creation and continuation of the Maple Ridge Environmental School Project (MRESP). Thus the paper begins with a substantial exposition of the school itself, its vision, mandate, and goals in order to give the reader a clear understanding of the school and a sense of how it differs from the conventional British Columbian public school. In turn this will allow us to explore together how the provincial education policy challenged, hindered, and yet ultimately offered less resistance than expected to the school itself. The paper will then explore four different kinds of “policy” (explicit (real), implicit (assumed), tradition-based, and imaginatively self-limiting) that arose as themes in our discussions and that had clear implications, in various ways, for the creation and ongoing maintenance of the school. Each of the four forms of policy will be explained and illustrated by examples. The paper ends, using some recent social innovation policy work as a backdrop, with a series of policy recommendations that administrators and public school policymakers might consider if they are interested in supporting the kinds of substantive educational innovations described here.
The Maple Ridge Environmental School Project
Mainstream or conventional public education, at least in North America, is in a state of quite significant flux. The Green Schools movement in the United States grew by leaps and bounds in 2013, while the number of forest schools in Canada doubled in those same 12 months and appears to have repeated that increase each year thereafter (Gershon, 2013). At the same time the province of British Columbia was re-thinking its curriculum to focus on big ideas and good thinking rather than particular content knowledge (British Columbia Ministry of Education, 2013). Moreover, many teachers, parents and students are reacting to the perceived obsolescence of an educational project designed more than a century ago to prepare learners for a world that was dramatically different from today’s. They are also responding to the challenges regarding global interconnection and environmental degradation by actively seeking alternatives to the mainstream formal education system. It is to these demands and to our understanding that public education, or at least the North American version, is in dire need of a complete overhaul, if it is going to respond successfully to the environmental challenges and our human relationship with nature, that the three authors responded and began a journey which led to the creation of the MRESP (see: http://es.sd42.ca/).
In 2010, the three of us (the administrator, the talented teacher and doctoral student, and the professor), along with several other colleagues and allies, first met on the grass at Simon Fraser University and began to discuss the inability of education in its current state to respond either to the needs of many children or to the obvious environmental challenges facing us. As explored elsewhere (Blenkinsop, 2012), our discussions led us to determine that the required change needed to be more radical and theory-based than a simple tinkering with the practical and attempting to add green to an otherwise very un-green system. This response needed to focus on the boundaries imposed by culture, the philosophical limits inherent in the worldview of the Western industrial nations and, germane to this discussion, on the difficulties of creating a more radical solution within a policy environment that had not even imagined the change we were to propose, never mind considering and approving it.
Philosophically, is has been argued that the environmental challenges of today are a product of modernity and, if there is to be change, then it needs to happen at the cultural level. The eco-feminists (Merchant, 1980; Plumwood, 2002), for example, situate the problem in patriarchy and its constant marginalization and oppression of the non-male and non-human. White (1967) suggested that Christianity is responsible while, according to Bowers (1997), the problem lies in the very root metaphors upon which Western culture is built. Whatever the reason, each theory leads to the conclusion that there needs to be seismic cultural change, from a worldview which is non-environmental in its practices and its structural underpinnings (e.g., axiology, ontology, cosmology, etc.), to one that is ecologically grounded. It is in response to the need for a cultural change that our project was undertaken; we wanted to know if it would be possible to change our society and culture by means of a radically different educational approach.
It quickly became clear to us that this question and our subsequent response needed to be substantive, innovative and well “outside the box.” This latter cliché was to become literally part of the eventual school, as the reader will see shortly. It was clear to us that we were actually interested in whether education in the form of a radically re-conceptualized public school might become part of this process of cultural transformation. Thus, the underlying intention of our school was to create an environment where the natural world and its denizens were much more present in the educational process, and where the accompanying research sought to determine how, or indeed whether, the prevailing colonial culture of consumption, anthropocentrism, and alienation from the natural world could be transformed through public schooling. Could a single public elementary school become the locus of cultural change from an underlying anti-environmental, economically exploitative view of the world to a more ecological version?
Fortuitously, at the same time as we were pursuing our discussions, the Community University Research Alliance, a branch of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), had announced a particular interest in environmentally focused research. The team applied with an original vision for the project framed as a community-based “school,” that would be guided by concepts related to place-based (Gruenewald, 2003; Smith, 2002; Sobel, 2004), ecological (Bowers, 1993; Cajete, 1994; Carson, 1965; Hutchison, 1998; Stone and Barlow, 1995; Thomashow, 1995) and imaginative education (Blenkinsop, 2008; Egan, 1997, 2005; Fettes and Judson, 2010; Judson, 2010), and whose underlying goal was to respond to this question of whether education can be an agent for cultural change. Quotation marks are used around the term school in the previous sentence (but not subsequently) because this project is concerned with changing foundational metaphors that shape our understanding of the nature of education. Specifically, the school would have no buildings, all the learning would happen outdoors, the natural world would be understood to be part of the teaching faculty (Blenkinsop and Beeman, 2010), and every assumption of the mainstream approach to education would be actively questioned.
The school opened its doors, figuratively speaking, in the fall of 2011 to 60 children ranging in age from 5 to 13. Today it has a population of 88 students (aged 4 to 12 years old), four full-time teachers, two part-time teachers in support roles, three educational assistants, a principal, and a waiting list of almost 100. It is legally required to teach the British Columbia provincial curriculum and fall within its policy mandates. At the same time, there is and has been a high degree of support from the local authority, which appears to have provided a range of latitude allowing us to think creatively and work differently in order to explore new concept(ion)s of learning, teaching, assessment, and evaluation while simultaneously pursuing a curriculum that is place-based, community-based, emergent, experiential, outdoor, environmental, sustainable, and comprised of multi-aged groupings.
In order to support this ongoing and complex process a research team was created. This group has been involved with the MRESP from the earliest discussions to the present and has played a range of roles including: undertaking research (e.g., Blenkinsop, 2012, 2013, and 2014; Blenkinsop et al., 2016a, 2016b; Derby et al., 2013, 2015; Blenkinsop and Piersol, 2013), supporting the community, teaching, facilitating teacher education, and more. Intriguingly, some of these roles become part of our recommendations for policy and funding for future endeavors of this kind. Having overviewed the school itself and its development, we propose to move on to our discussion of policy as it has affected the work we were and are trying to do. As noted above, the most challenging work was often not with regard to the explicit policy as written by the province or school district but was in response to layers of what we have here named implicit policy. These we shall explore next.
Policy: The challenges, possibilities, and limitations for the MRESP
Policy: A course or principle of action adopted or proposed by an organization or individual: the government’s controversial economic policies | … it is not company policy to dispense with our older workers.
… archaic: Prudent or expedient conduct or action.
(Oxford English Dictionary, …)
As our discussions about policy evolved, it became apparent that there were at least two different kinds of policy that were involved in making the school a reality. We divided them into the major categories: explicit and implicit. This division allowed us to recognize more easily the kinds of challenges we were facing and to better decide on the appropriate response. For example, before our project had any chance of succeeding, we found that explicit school district policy required that it had to be approved by a vote from the elected board of trustees. This, therefore, meant that we had to provide a substantial proposal describing issues such as size, location, likely pedagogy, recruitment, how the provincial curriculum would be covered, as well as indications of interest and support from potential parents or caregivers and community members.
Yet, at the implicit level, it was clear that we needed to have meetings with the superintendent and several members of the board to get our ducks in a row. We would also need to demonstrate a groundswell of interest from the community, the possibility of outside funds coming to the project, and a clear indication that this project was not going to cost the district anything or require profound changes in governance. An early challenge we encountered with regard to policy had to do with the local teachers’ union and the hiring process. For us to suggest that we were going to go outside the district and hire teachers that were best qualified for the outdoor, emergent, community-based curriculum we were proposing was a non-starter. However, through building relationships with key stakeholders in the teachers’ union, and with particular teachers in the district known to have talents and an interest in the program we were proposing, we were able to find win–win solutions. In this case, with the help of the union, we wrote job descriptions that were broad enough so as to not make it impossible to find anyone within the school district but were narrow enough to allow us to hire suitable candidates, several of whom had lower seniority. This process was aided by our team’s commitment to providing for interested teachers, at no cost and before the school even opened, almost a year’s worth of programming related to outdoor, place-based, emergent education. This experience of responding to explicit policy through relationship building and carefully finding ways through and around problems was a consistent experience of ours. For us, the explicit policy in many ways did what good policy is meant to do. It provided us with a starting point that often became the minimum standard against which we had to push. And the relationships we built provided us with the connections and experience necessary to find the solutions to particular thorny challenges we encountered when faced with explicit policy.
Implicit policy: We have chosen to divide this category into three different groups although they overlap in significant ways. To begin, we are defining this category as being those things that act like policy, rules, and/or mandates but are not in fact officially written down. The first and most surprising class within this category we have named “assumed policy.” This covers those things that everyone appears to know to be policy but are not actually so. One example of this, which had levels of both explicit and assumed policy built into it, had to do with the role of educational assistants (EAs) and their break time. Right from the beginning of the school it was clear that things were going to be different with regard to how students engaged with each other and their accompanying adults. First, there was an obvious need for more than one adult to be involved in the supervision of any class-sized group. To take 20 students aged 5 to 8 through a mile of forest requires a different kind of attention from that of a conventional classroom. This immediately meant that EAs would have to monitor the entire class and not simply focus on the single child to whom they might have been “assigned.” The problem posed by this assumed policy resolved itself as the EAs became immersed in the school in a very different way, at times blurring the implicit hierarchy between themselves and teachers, while also developing rich and nuanced relationships with many of the children. Another assumed policy was that EAs were allotted times and given a place for their breaks from work. Again a policy that was assumed to be cast in stone was found to be much more flexible, and the EAs were able to find ways to take their breaks without the school having to build a shelter solely for their use. For eco-social innovation theorists, our responses to the challenge posed by this assumed policy that EAs were only responsible for a single child and played a lesser teaching role falls into two categories seen to “greatly facilitate” the possibilities for innovation. The first was “the promotion of interactions across organizational, sectoral, or disciplinary boundaries” and the second was the “empowerment of users and stakeholders to drive innovation themselves.” (Biggs et al., 2010: 3)
The second class that belongs to the category of implicit policy we have named “tradition.” This covers all those rituals, customs, and practices that are known not to be explicit policy but are in fact just the way things have always been done. It was here that we often encountered challenges across the community to “thinking of the problem[s] in new ways and surfacing the opportunities.” (Lettice and Parekh, 2010) Intriguingly this category has quite a bit of flexibility depending on the person(s) employing it. For some it is quite true that things have always been done in this way. School bells, timetables, bus schedules, holiday concerts, prep-time, teacher on call, parental engagement, teacher expertise are all examples of things that have fallen into this category. For example, historically, teacher prep time, that time a teacher gets outside of class to ostensibly prepare lessons, has been apportioned every day for perhaps 30 minutes each, and that has come to be the tradition. But for our school this design was troublesome given the more fluid and extended nature of certain lessons. To schedule 30 minutes at 10:45 a.m. next Wednesday for prep-time is to ignore the possibility that the chum salmon have begun spawning on that day and that the school is going to be up to their hips in the river engaged in a returning fish count. The solution, once we had overcome the inertia of tradition, was to gather prep-time blocks together thus giving teachers half a day every week and allowing the school to appropriately cover those gaps with a consistent teacher-on-call as needed. A second example, that has interesting repercussions for the very nature of the profession of teaching, had to do with parent or caregiver and community member involvement in the process of teaching and learning. Here the school did three things that rubbed school-based education the wrong way, and we needed to respond to the challenge through a time-consuming process of education, meetings, and a lot of patience.
The first step was to open the school to the presence of others throughout the day. Community members with particular skills were brought in to teach about carving, fire-making, tree cultivation, etc. This meant moving the location of knowledge away from being the sole possession of the teacher, which intriguingly, in many cases, involved convincing skilled community members that they a) had something to teach and b) were able to teach. The second and more radical change the school made was to make education a 24-7 process, which meant that parents or caregivers were not only asked to be part of every child’s education at school but that they were also to be involved in the larger project before and after school as well. This idea ran counter to sacred traditions of teacher-centered expertise and required a great deal of re-education and communication before a solution was found. On the one hand, teachers assumed that the teacher was the expert, the professional, specifically trained to do this job called education and, on the other, parents made exactly the same assumptions and, in addition, believed that education occurred in school during school hours. It was not unusual to hear parents suggest at the beginning of the project that their job was not educational but rather to get the students to school on time so their education could be taken care of. In response to this the research team and school faculty spent a great deal of time working with the community developing lines of communication, building pedagogical confidence throughout, and working to educate at all stakeholder levels. In many ways our work was about a) fostering awareness and attachment to local ecosystems and the school, b) building imaginative capacity throughout, c) fostering dialogue, and d) providing the institutional support necessary for innovation (Biggs et al., 2010).
The third and most radical proposal that the school made was to suggest that place itself, i.e., one’s immediate environment and its constituents, could be teachers in the process as well. This third idea challenged a much deeper cultural tradition embedded in Canadian public schools, that of seeing nature as background and relatively unimportant. Luckily for us, the absence of buildings for our proposed school made the notion of place as teacher more acceptable. Such a radical idea required, of course, the support of the superintendent.
We have named the third and final class that we would like to explore in this category of implicit policy, self-limited imagination. This class is not really a policy category but is one that we think must be considered by policymakers because it may have the deepest implications for projects seeking substantial change. The implicit challenge here for us that we are trying to point toward is that to begin with, we naively assumed that our, and the teachers’, imaginative capacity were unlimited. But that in fact was/is not the case. Imagination appears to be the product, the extension even, of one’s culture, experiences, and encounters and there are edges to it beyond which we must be supported to go. An example might help in defining this class. When the school first opened, it had been made clear to the teachers and community alike that it was going to be an educational experiment and that everything that we knew and took for granted from public education was to be up for grabs. The development team had spent a great deal of time and energy creating a vision, exploring diverse examples around the world, and had developed a set of principles for the school that we believed would become the guidelines to direct future decisions. In many ways the formation team, including the three authors, felt they had created a safe and supportive environment in which the vision could be realized. We had provided outside funding, had built supportive relationships, had provided the opportunity to explore, had created rich lines of communication to myriad stakeholders, had confirmed the school’s ongoing survival, had guaranteed the teachers’ jobs, etc. In fact we had, mostly through experiment and necessity, created the kind of environment that good policy might create if true educational innovation was the goal. For most of us we had created a kind of place-based, environmental, educational dreamworld. Teachers would be allowed to do anything they wanted, anything they thought should be done, and we all would be able to discuss, explore, compare notes, draw from all possible resources. It was a teacher’s dream.
To our surprise, the response was very muted. It was as if the teachers could not imagine far enough into what a substantively different education might look like. In knowing that this school was supposed to be something completely different, the teachers had decided to forego all their previous experience as being of no use. All the old ways of doing things were wrong, but they had no idea, nor could they imagine, what the new ways might be. Their imagination was limited because there was nothing for them to build on. They had stepped into a world that was essentially beyond their imaginings. While a limited imagination is not a policy of the public school system, in situations like ours where the educational innovation is more radical in nature it is important for policymakers to recognize that there are boundaries to what most of us can conceptualize, even imagine, and that if the goal is to move beyond those limits then a substantial amount of time is needed to support teachers and communities into the innovation. Had we been aware of the difficulty, we would have worked much longer with the teachers before the school opened. This would have allowed them to develop not only some curricular content, find out about what was happening in other places thereby expanding the experiential content upon which their imagination might work, and deepen their knowledge of the places in which they were to teach; it would also have allowed them to begin the process of changing their philosophy of education. This long-term process requires care to build, support, and develop. It is clear to us now that radical, place-based, emergent, community-as-teacher education requires a different theory of education, one that at the very least incorporates ways of being and ways of knowing that are more relational and interconnected. This form of education must also find ways to incorporate the teachers such that they can begin to imagine themselves as active agents in the teaching thereof. This will include, at the very least, an understanding of how one’s previous approach to teaching may or may not be applicable, and time to establish and solidify better aligned new practices. We believe that we are now at a point, 6 years into the school’s existence, that the teachers might be able to recognize this difference, and that extensive early training would have made a great deal of difference to the speed at which teachers adapted to their new situation.
In summary, through our research dialogues and building out of our experiences, it appears that there are layers of policy that need to be considered when trying to support substantive educational innovation. And although ours is just one example it is apparent that success is not achieved solely through the enactment of explicit policy, it requires awareness of implicit policy as well. In our case, this included three classes that supporters of social innovation needed be aware of: assumed policy, traditions that can act as policy, and the imaginative limits of the stakeholders that can make even the most open policy of little use.
Recommendations
For this section, we ask the reader to continue to consider the policy categories we have outlined above as we reflect upon our educational policy recommendations for cultural change through a return to some of the literature of social innovation policy. The work of Moore and Westley (2011) will form the backbone of the discussion both because of their influence on the field and because the frame they offer will be familiar to educators, although contextually different. We also note that social innovation in the public sector is a growing area of research but that it has not yet been much explored by educational policymakers. And yet we believe there to be an interesting overlap between social innovation and educational change, one that, if explored in more depth, could prove to be beneficial for both. For example, consider this definition of social innovation in light of the vision and goals of the MRESP: any new program, product, idea, or initiative that profoundly changes the basic routines, and resource and authority flows or beliefs of any social system. Successful social innovations have durability and a broad impact, and lead to systemic change. As such, the innovation does not rely on mass adoption to be considered a success; rather, it disrupts a larger institutional context (Moore and Westley, 2011: 3).
Brainstorming
Moore and Westley suggest that brainstorming begins as a response to some crisis that makes it clear that the status quo is no longer acceptable. As the reader will have noted, that was obviously the impetus for the MRESP. This is also then the phase where there is the “greatest need is for new ideas and creative solutions” (Moore and Westley, 2011). It is not about either restricting the flow of ideas or about selecting something that already exists and tweaking it, but about sitting on the grass somewhere and letting the discussion flow, while at the same time figuring out how far those present are willing to push the project. Two clear memories come to mind in recalling the development of the MRESP. The first, which occurred at our initial meeting, was the moment when we committed to pushing this project as far as we could imagine; the second, which had clear policy implications, was in our first meeting with the school district superintendent when she recognized that we did not have the answers to all her concerns and questions but was willing, nevertheless, to support our proposal. In many ways, we did not even really know all the questions we should have been asking or where it was we were trying to get. It is also interesting to note that some of the obvious difficulties and challenges we foresaw, e.g., the weather, turned out to be no great problem when the school opened. The superintendent was not giving us carte blanche to do whatever we imagined so much as providing the space needed to imagine, create, and respond to the unexpected. The superintendent’s qualified approval is consistent with the postulation of some social innovation policy theorists who suggest that policy needs to be able to support the risk required for true innovation, to open the space for sharing diverse ideas across a range of stakeholders, to allow the time needed to explore the complexity of the problem, and to provide a forum for building trust (Hämäläinen, 2007; Bodin and Crona, 2009; Burt, 1992; Gilsing and Duysters, 2008). For us, the challenge of creating this culturally different, buildingless eco-school was, and continues to be, deeply complex and it benefited from our having the time, and of course the financial support of the SSHRC grant, to explore the problem as a group, draw on a variety of expertise and multiple viewpoints, and build trusting relationships while knowing that there was support and permission for ongoing discovery offered by the district itself. All of these supports map directly onto the work done by the Young Foundation (2006), albeit, in our case, in an educational non-profit environment rather than a for-profit business situation, with regards to factors that “greatly facilitate” social innovation: (1) finance specifically directed at supporting innovation, (2) incubation processes that nurture promising innovations in their early stages, (3) leaders who visibly encourage and reward successful innovations, (4) the promotion of interactions across organizational, sectoral, or disciplinary boundaries, (5) empowerment of users and stakeholders to drive innovation themselves, and (6) the opening of markets and governance processes to user groups and private businesses (as reported in Biggs et al., 2010).
Development and implementation
Much of the social innovation literature that speaks about this phase tends to focus on finding the necessary support to succeed. Ideas have been generated and gathered, a plan is in its nascent phase, communities are beginning to form, and what is needed from policymakers is often sufficient funds to take the project to the full implementation level. While the literature does mention other forms of support, it is clear that financial support is at the heart of this phase. For us, this support came in the form of the research grant, and it was sizable: CAN$1,000,000 over 5 years. In this phase, policy needs to be about moving from idea to implementation. Without the research grant the school district would have had to change its financial support policies quite dramatically in order to allow our school to open as, for reasons of equity and distribution, the district does not provide large sums of money. In our case, the research money allowed us to bring in a group of graduate students who could be present at the school every day and help in teaching, facilitating, and imagining, but it also allowed us to fund almost half of the administrator’s salary, which meant that he was not required to administer two schools at the same time, because the MRESP was, as dictated by policy, too small to have its own administrator. Looking back, it is clear to us that the funds provided by the grant facilitated a tremendous amount that was needed for the school’s start-up including relationship building, time with parents or caregivers, time training teachers, etc.
A second important component for policymakers to consider during this phase has to do with policy that allows innovators to leverage resources and remove systemic barriers (Moore and Westley, 2011) while at the same time engaging stakeholders (Biggs et al., 2010). In our situation this involved a continuation of relationship building throughout the community but in particular with those organizations that possessed large areas of land and would allow the school access to it. This required flexibility in policy which enabled us to officially confirm relationships between the school district and specific partners while at the same time providing a community-wide transparency for the project. This latter process is tremendously important in educational innovation; small projects can be shunted aside by the more standard forms of schooling simply because they are new and seen as a threat. In our case, having policy, made explicit by the superintendent, that confirmed the school’s opening, its ongoing existence, a certain flexibility in hiring, coupled with our efforts to share, build relationships, and be open to the educational and wider communities in the district, removed some of the common structural barriers encountered in educational policy.
A final and perhaps the most important policy consideration in this phase, particularly in the case of transformative educational change, is providing the space for the reframing of perspectives (Biggs et al., 2010). The educational status quo brings with it significant histories, norms, metaphorical touch points, and much more. Every human stakeholder we worked with had at least been to school and had had school done to them, and for us that became an important factor to wrestle with. At times the project felt like it was education all the way (Blenkinsop, 2012), as we were ourselves learning while also being drawn into educating parents, teachers, stakeholders, and policymakers at all levels. Without the political willingness and policy space allowing us to change the language and metaphors around the natural world (e.g., moving from nature as backdrop to nature as co-teacher), school (e.g., moving from buildings to parks and outdoors), and the environmental crisis (e.g., moving from subtle behavioral changes that lead to good recycling programs to positioning the challenge as being cultural and the relationship as colonial) we would not have had the ability to reframe perspectives and the work would have been significantly harder.
Maintenance
For those studying social innovation policy, this point in the innovation’s trajectory is about finding ways to measure its success, to ensure its ongoing viability, to provide an environment that allows for the transferability of the skills, insights, and applications, and ultimately to support the replication and expansion of the project across and throughout the organization for which the policy is responsible—and eventually beyond. In educational innovation, in our experience, the policy focus might need to be slightly different for several reasons. The first is that there is a built-in uniqueness to place and community-based education due to the possibilities, communities, and ecosystems present in any situation. To use policy to generically evaluate or transfer a project across any school district, for instance, is to place undue stress(es) on particular spots, the beings living there, and the local supportive organizations. It can even undermine the very evolutionary and eco-responsive nature of the process. The second, at least in British Columbia, is that policy, as we have seen above, is both explicit and implicit and is formed at many levels (e.g., local, municipal, provincial, etc.). It was fascinating and at times frustrating to see how quickly tradition-based policy began to form around things happening at the school. We attempted to be as cautious as possible about anything we did that might become a tradition, but that ossification happened nonetheless.
In spite of this potential difference there are clear policy recommendations we can draw from the social innovation literature. These include “policies that help analyze what has occurred and which new policy priorities have emerged as a result of the innovation … along with policies that … will build capacity to be resilient in the face of future change” (Moore and Westley, 2011). In our case this has included finding ways to support a whole series of activities. For example, in conjunction with the research team and the local experts, we developed first an uncertified teacher education program, then a more officially sanctioned version with the school district, and finally a master’s degree, offered in the community and supported by the university. This process, developed in response to policy limitations and our understanding that the school’s pedagogy required a very different philosophy and practice of education, has allowed us to create a kind of succession for the school. Teachers-on-call are often selected from the training groups and some have then become teachers at the school. The graduate degree supports the training of future administrators. In these and many other ways we are able to share what has been learned beyond the immediate school community. Furthermore, having the research team working alongside the school for much of the project has allowed us to analyze a range of topics, give a form of credibility to the project, and inspire others around the world. School-based policy has also found ways to respond to surprising outcomes in the light of demands being made, particularly on the time of the administrator. For example, once the MRESP became known for its innovation the demands on its time from student-teachers, from the media, from researchers, and from educators across the world were tremendous; finding policy that made this process manageable was needed to sustain the school and the energy levels of all of us.
Educational innovation of the size and scope of the MRESP requires important champions, deep commitment, and some fortuitous happenstance; however, it is clear to us that far-sighted educational policymakers gleaning what they can from our experience and from the larger field of social innovation policy might be able to foster environments that are much more amenable to the possibility as well. It is our conviction that public education is in need of a substantial overhaul, likely not just for environmental reasons, although that is certainly enough, and that without good policy creating the space for significant educational innovation the chances of success are very limited.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: The funding for this project was provided by SSHRC.