When the Reimagining Our Work Initiative was launched in 2020, our colleagues in British Columbia were already in motion with reimagining professional learning. Nicky Byres, Lisa Nicholson, Jen Vanderberg, and Jacqueline Ewonus found their way to each other because of their shared heart for children, certainly, and their shared heart for educators. Each desired to reimagine and remake the experience of professional learning in a way that would honor educators’ capacities for both heart and mind. Their work together arose from a deep longing for meaningful, substantive, transformative thinking and questioning—for themselves and for educators—about values and practice, culture and identity, pedagogy and vision, and living with passion and conviction. They knew their effort to reimagine professional learning would revitalize them as it lifted educators into bold and necessary conversations.
They initiated a study-for-action focus working in communities of practice, using the book “From Teaching to Thinking: A Pedagogy for Reimagining Our Work” (Pelo & Carter 2018), and initially wrote about this in the September/October 2020 issue of Exchange magazine (Byres, Nicholson, Vanderberg, & Ewonus 2020).