Imagination as Strategy
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BIG Questions Institute Bi-Weekly UpdateMay 8, 02024, No. 172 (Read online) Imagination as StrategyHey, Have you thought about the role of imagination in decision-making, especially for the prickly, wicked decisions? Would you agree that a well-developed imagination is crucial to making the best decisions you can for yourself and for others? If that’s the case, how do you develop and exercise imagination, even for the most serious questions? If we don't spend time imagining the potential outcomes of the choices we make, then there's a much greater chance that the choices we make will impact our futures negatively, right? And if we also aren't consistently engaged in imagining longer-term futures that we want to live in, we decrease the likelihood that we'll ever bring them into being. There’s a name for imagining the future; it’s called prospection, and prospection has been shown to help our lives become more generous, kind, and meaningful, but also to more robustly and prudently consider the multiple paths we might take in the future. But right now, the author Rob Hopkins suggests that we are living in an "imagination emergency," a time when our collective imagination muscles have atrophied to the point where we are unable to offer new solutions to our compounding problems. As we have seen in many contexts, without some care and preparation, imagining the future can trigger anxiety, so it’s often shut down. All of which is why we encourage the schools we work with to build imagination into every discussion they have about the experience they design for children, and especially into the somewhat stale strategic planning process most embark on every three or five years. Especially in times like these, when complexity and uncertainty are rampant, it's crucial to have an imagined aspirational future that you can use as an anchor and a lens for the decisions you make. And it's not just imagining the "what" of the future. It's also about the "how." As in "how do we imagine working together in this process?" Or, "how might we imagine some non-traditional ways of creating our next plan?" You need to also consider who gets to imagine what the future might look like. If you embrace the idea of imagination as strategy, then the collective imaginings of students must play a critical role in helping to write the plan which moves their school "forward." So, when you sit down to discuss your next moves for your school community, take some time at the start to widen your collective apertures for strategy by imagining what might be, and what you want to be. It will help your school, and the world, become a better place for kids. Onward! Will and Homa Announcing: "Building and Becoming" 2.5-Day Retreat!The BIG Questions Institute is thrilled to announce our first 2.5-day retreat for school leaders who want to engage the future in relevant and inspired ways! What We're ReadingA few links to fuel your inquiry:
"In Bull’s view, this project has a distinctly solarpunk framing — celebrating a literary genre and art movement that conjures visions of a sustainable future, where nature is as central as technology. Although part of the goal was to get more native flowers in the ground, the challenge also hoped to “activate the solarpunk imagination,” and let students offer their perspectives on what the gardens could accomplish. For instance, a group called Latinos en Acción from American University wanted to focus on monarch butterfly habitat, as a symbol of the migrant justice movement. Others, like the Community Learning Garden at the University of Maryland, were interested in exploring culinary uses of the plants they received, which included sunflowers, black-eyed Susans, milkweed, goldenrod, and aster.
“We framed the challenge as a response to the biodiversity crisis, but also as an invitation to be creative and to create habitat and to create space for humans to connect with the more-than-human world,” Bull said. Above all, she and her team wanted the projects to be fun — and to help students feel empowered to participate in solutions. “The solarpunk orientation is recognizing that things are bad. There’s so much cause for grief, despair, anxiety, whatever. But nevertheless, we’re actually just being asked to care more for our communities and to reintegrate ourselves into relationship with the Earth and our local ecosystems.”
Where Seldom is Heard a Discouraging Word: Farm-based Microschools by Mason Pashia "The journey through the concept of microschools situated on farms illuminates a promising horizon for education, where learning transcends the confines of traditional classrooms and becomes a dynamic, immersive experience. This model showcases how integrating agriculture into education not only enhances academic learning but also cultivates a generation of learners who are environmentally conscious and equipped with practical skills for sustainable living. As we reflect on the transformative potential of such educational settings, it becomes evident that the fusion of microschools and farm-based learning could redefine the educational landscape, making it more relevant, engaging, and meaningful for students in an ever-evolving world.” The achievement society is burning us out, we need more play by Alec Stubbs "Play is activity that we do for its own sake. It is what we call an autotelic activity – it has itself as its own goal, and it seeks no further purpose outside of itself. When we play, we are guided by the spirit of passion and joy found in the activity. In play, we are not motivated by external rewards or instrumentality. We are not driven by performance and external purpose. We don’t play to be productive or to self-optimise. We play purely for the sake of itself. In short, when we play, if it is true play, we cannot be achievement-subjects.
The spontaneous play of children helps us see this clearly. The child has no use for their play. The rigid expectations of productivity and efficiency are nothing to them. The child sees nothing before them other than their own presence in the world. The play of the child is the purest form of joy not merely because they are a child, but because they are wholly enthralled by their moment-to-moment experience. The child has not yet fallen victim to the crucial mistake that most of us make in adulthood, that ‘man in general is inclined always to regard every state, since none of them is wholly perfect, as a mere preparation for a more perfect one.’"
Learn With BQIWill We Be in Your Neighborhood?Homa and Will would love to connect at any of the upcoming events they're speaking at: May 17 - Montana Office of Public Instruction, Great Falls, MT (Will) May 21 - Gladwyne (Pa) Montessori School, Parent Education Lecture (Homa) June 1 - Wake County Public Schools, Cary, NC, Global and Intercultural Professional Development (Homa) June 20 - RET Retreat, Iowa State University, Ames, IA (Will) June 25-27 - Leadership Seminar for Overseas Principals, Office of Overseas Schools, U.S. Department of State, Washington, DC (Homa and Will) July 25-27 - "Building and Becoming" 2.5-Day Retreat, Atlanta International School (Homa and Will) Info and Registration August 21 - Chilliwack (BC) School District Leadership Retreat (Will) August 22 - SD67 Leadership Retreat, Penticon, BC (Will) September 3 - Nanuet (NY) School District Open Day (Will) October 25-27 - Tri-Association Conference, Mexico City, MX (Homa and Will) WORK WITH US!Let BQI help you unlock the opportunities that are rapidly unfolding in education and the wider contexts. Everyone is talking about the challenges and the difficulties that are breaking systems and people. Leadership navigates change with fearless inquiry, futures thinking, imagination, and diverse relationships. That takes new skills, lenses, and dispositions and we are here for it. We help school communities:
Why not think about having us work with your staff, leadership team, or board on some BIG Questions worth pursuing? We're working to design healthier, more just, more relevant, and more sustainable futures for school communities. Get all the details here. Onward with hope, Homa and Will |
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BIG Questions Institute Bi-Weekly Update July 8, 02024, No. 176 (Read online) Can You Prepare for the Unimaginable? Hey, As many of you settle into your holiday (during northern hemisphere summer) around this time of year, we offer a hearty CONGRATULATIONS! You made it through another year. We’ve had the added benefit of leading and participating in a number of summer professional development experiences (like the Leadership Seminar for Overseas Principals (LSOP) already this summer, which...
BIG Questions Institute Bi-Weekly Update June 19, 02024, No. 175 (Read online) Honoring Our Responsibility to Students...and the Future Hey, Every now and again we come across something that makes us literally tingle with goodness. And that's what happened this week when we read an amazing story from the University of Victoria Department of Education about how they approached some very difficult budget conversations earlier this year. Every school is confronted with hard decisions, whether...
BIG Questions Institute Bi-Weekly Update June 5, 02024, No. 174 (Read online) Better? Or Easier? Hey, Here’s a frame for thinking about our approach to education in this fraught moment: We’re trying to do the wrong thing righter. Let us first say first that we really believe that the vast majority of people who go into teaching and school leadership care about kids, want them to learn, hope for them to thrive and be joyful in their lives. But what if despite our best intentions, our current...