When Strong Currents Meet is a virtual community of practice for educators working in K-12, post-secondary, professional, and community settings, who are based in Canada and are focused on transformative learning.
Our hope for Strong Currents is that when people rooted in diverse learning lineages and experiences come together to share with each other, grow community, and build practice, we can generate powerful education and learning-focused interventions into complex socio-economic and ecological challenges. Strong Currents is a four-year participatory action research project hosted by UBC and Emily Carr, and we are thrilled that you are considering jumping into these waters with us.
Please reach out to strong.currents@ubc.ca if you would like to join our Community of Practice (CoP) or if you have any questions that are not addressed here.
Our Call to Action and Adventure
The urgency to respond to complex socio-economic and ecological challenges continues to intensify around the world. There is evidence from diverse fields that humanity is pushing well beyond the Earth's capacity to sustain us and that this is impacting all life on Earth in vastly unequal ways.
In this CoP, we know that learning makes a unique and vital contribution to these great challenges of our times. And we also know that just like many other fields, we educators can get pretty caught up in our own contexts, in the mountain of things that we’re responsible for, and in our favourite (and comfortable) ways of understanding and practicing learning for transformation.
So, in this CoP, we are making time and space to come together across these siloes and differences and diversifying our learning praxes – our Strong Currents. We are growing our capabilities to respond to these complex challenges in the unique ways that educators can. We are entangling our relational networks and cheering each other on. We are making the methods and stories of our work more visible, credible, and rigorous. We are welcoming the arrival of newcomers to these Strong Currents and making it easier to access and employ the knowledge we are gathering and sharing. We are writing up both scholarly and practical resources to share beyond our CoP so that our work ripples out beyond this time and space. We are doing all of this so that we can strengthen our collective contributions of education and learning to changemaking efforts on all kinds of complex challenges.
Why ‘When Strong Currents Meet’?
By Strong Currents we mean that there are many powerful lineages that shape learning for transformation - systems change, social innovation, education for sustainability, land- and place-based education, ecological education, decoloniality, anti-oppression, and others. We are interested in honouring the power of each of these lineages, and also exploring what happens when these currents come together. We think that there is plenty of room, and great need, for multitudinous praxes of learning for transformation and in our CoP we will bring these together and see what the currents stir up.
Ready to join us? Click the link below or send a note to strong.currents@ubc.ca. If you still have more questions, then please read on.
Team
Lindsay Cole
University of British Columbia
Maria Azam
Emily Carr University
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Sarah (Wenyi) Gong
University of British Columbia
Alayna Paolini
University of British Columbia
Ellie Yacula
Emily Carr University
Rob VanWynsberghe
University of British Columbia
Laura Kozak
Emily Carr University
FAQs
Is this CoP a good fit for me?
Here are a few signs that it might be! You consider yourself to be – in some way – an educator or a facilitator of learning. A significant amount of your head-heart-hands work is dedicated to this craft. You are based in Canada, and are working in K-12, postsecondary, professional, and/or community-based learning contexts. You are wanting to find (more of) your people, and you are interested in growing a living ecosystem of learning for transformation practitioners. You are constantly curious about expanding your praxes of diverse learning lineages. You are always engaged in deep and generative listening, and you are keen to share your own stories and experiences.
And here are a few signs that this might not be a good fit for you at this time...
You are not based in Canada, and/or not doing much of your work in Canada right now. You’re not actively designing, facilitating, hosting, delivering, or teaching courses or programs that have roots in learning for transformation pedagogies (generously defined). You are not currently ready or able to commit to a CoP where you are actively and reciprocally learning and sharing with other members of the community - this isn’t a passive, “information in” experience. You already feel like you’ve learned everything that you want to about learning for transformation.
How much time can I expect to spend in this CoP?
We anticipate that this will vary amongst CoP members and also vary for each of us. Online gatherings will typically be around 90 minutes and run at different frequencies depending on which parts of the project you choose to join. During the two years that the CoP will be running, each of us will have different cycles and rhythms of availability, and we hope people will work with these in a healthy and generative way. We don’t wish to add more feelings of urgency and scarcity to your lives! What does matter is that you are actively sharing and actively learning in ways that respect and honour both you and your fellow CoP members – this isn’t a place to sit back and watch the show, or half-attentively drop in every so often.
Tell me some practical things about meeting times, meeting spaces, and that sort of thing.
We will have live, virtual sessions as well as asynchronous virtual activities – all in one online CoP space. Activities will be happening with different frequencies; however, we will gather (virtually, synchronously) as a whole community once each season. You’ll be able to join the things that you are interested in, in a way that works for you. Right now, our space will be in English (as the shared language of our hosting team), and we are hoping that CoP members interested in hosting discussions in other languages may do so. We will aim for all of our synchronous gatherings to work for day/evening time for Canadian time zones.
What if there is a question or a conversation that I’m interested in convening in the CoP?
That is great, and exactly what we’re hoping will happen. We have set up our research team and CoP structure to encourage and facilitate hosting of many ways of connecting. We are using Canvas Catalog as our online gathering space, and when you have decided to join the CoP and have filled in the online consent form, we will provide you with information to log-in to Canvas. Our hosting team will be delighted to talk with you about what you might be interested in convening inside Canvas and helping you to make that happen.
Action Research and Ethics
This project is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Insight Grant 2025 - 2028 (435-2025-0224). It is a participatory action research project, meaning that the work we do together aims to generate action-oriented insights and resources that make meaningful contributions to both practice and research.
When you sign up to join the CoP you will be asked to provide your consent to participate in this research, and you will be given some choices about if/how your contributions will be shared outside of the CoP. Our research team is committed to respecting the wishes of CoP members, and to sharing the work that happens inside the CoP more broadly as we hope and expect to generate meaningful resources and insights for others. At all times, trust, respect, and relationality will be expected within the CoP.
The research is guided by rigorous ethics approvals from the University of British Columbia Behavioural Ethics Review Board (H25-01962) and was also reviewed and approved by Emily Carr University Research Ethics Board. If you have any questions or concerns about the research consent process, you can be directly in touch with strong.currents@ubc.ca.
