Upcoming Event
2026 DARE Seminar 1
Education in a Time of Social and Environmental Unravelling
Come celebrate the release of faculty member Cary Campbell's new book, Education in a Time of Social and Environmental Unravelling.
This book argues that the root of education’s failure to address the complex problems of climate change lies in the stories we tell. At once too complex, too simplistic, and overly focused on communicating and accumulating scientific facts, the stories we tell about climate change often reduce the problem to singular issues, such as CO2 emissions, while advocating out-of-this-world technofixes. Against this challenge, the term “polycrisis” has emerged to describe the interconnected environmental and social crises we are confronting in the 21st century. The polycrisis encompasses much more than catch-all terms such as climate change and global warming, connecting issues as diverse as biodiversity and habitat loss, water and food scarcity, pollution, and resource depletion, as well as growing economic and social precarity. Through a series of essays and interviews with scholars, scientists, artists, and activists, this volume seeks to articulate existential and educational responses and interventions to the polycrisis. The author presents a terrestrial vision for critical eco-pedagogy, arguing that educational freedom in this time is not unlimited or unbounded, but rather cultivated through an engagement with limits and limitations—most fundamentally, the limits of a planet with limited resources and carrying capacity.
Presenters
- Marion Benkaiouche
- Dr. Tim Lilburn
- Dr. Michael Ling
- Dr. William Pinar
- Dr. William Rees
- Dr. Charles Scott
- Dr. Zuzana Vasko
Date/Time
Friday, May 8
1:00 – 3:00 p.m. PST
Hybrid Event
- In person:
SFU Burnaby Campus
Education building 7610 - Zoom:
Link will be sent to registered participants 24 hours in advance.
2026 DARE Seminar 2
Narrative Approaches to Educational Research
You are invited to join a DARE roundtable conversation on narrative approaches to educational research. This roundtable features three distinct ways of utilizing narrative methods to gain deeper insights into the experiences of teachers and students who have experienced forced displacement. Instead of formal presentations, we hope to share some finished work, and some “work in progress.” We look forward to your thoughts and conversation.
Presenters
Gabriely Lolli de Oliveira is a PhD candidate in Education at PUC-Campinas, Brazil, advised by Prof. Luciana Haddad Ferreira, and a Visiting Researcher at Simon Fraser University, supervised by Prof. Robyn Ilten-Gee. Her background began in Audiovisual Production and developed into a career in Education. Her research focuses on teacher education and pedagogical practices, combining media resources with narratives and life histories to support educational transformation.
Topic: (Re)Discovering Myself in the Scenes: The Construction of Teaching Personality Through Self-Narratives
Hadar’s research explores how forcibly displaced youth resettled in British Columbia make sense of their educational journeys and access to higher education. Using a narrative inquiry framework, she combines semi-structured interviews with artifact elicitation to invite participants to share stories through personal objects, documents, and creative materials. These artifacts function as narrative anchors, surfacing experiences of hope and adaptation that are often difficult to articulate through interview dialogue alone. Through narrative analysis, the study examines how educational resilience is relationally shaped by family, community, and institutional contexts, offering insights into both methodological practice and equity-oriented educational support.
Hadar Hamid is a recent graduate of the Master of Educational Psychology program at Simon Fraser University. She defended her MA thesis in December 2025. Hadar currently works as a co-op coordinator and independently engages in youth outreach with newcomer high school students exploring pathways to higher education.
Topic: Educational Resilience: Navigation of Higher Education Access Among Resettled Students with Experiences of Forced Displacement
Robyn Ilten-Gee is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University. Her research interests include critical digital pedagogy and sociomoral development and reasoning.
Topic: Digital Racial Literacies: Exploring Interactive Mosaics through Narrative Methods
Along with co-investigators Dr. Pooja Dharamshi (SFU) and Dr. Jabari Mahiri (UC Berkeley), we are currently analyzing data from an ongoing project about teachers' digital racial literacies. Research on racial literacy development argues that in order to interrupt racism, we must be able to have complex, nuanced conversations about race (Sealey-Ruiz, 2022). Often, digital tools reduce our racial identities to color-coded categories. In a series of professional development workshops, we engaged teachers in making digital interactive mosaics. Join Gabriely and I, as we consider ways that narrative methods might be applied to interactive digital mosaics to gain insights into teachers' racial literacy practices.
Date/Time
Tuesday, May 19
1:00 – 2:15 p.m. PST
Hybrid Event
- In person:
SFU Burnaby Campus
Education building 7610 - Zoom:
Link will be sent to registered participants 24 hours in advance.
2026 DARE Seminar 2
Education in a Time of Metacrisis
What kind of education becomes possible when progress, growth, and human control can no longer be taken for granted? This DARE research seminar brings together scholars from the Faculty of Education to explore how education might respond to a world shaped by ecological instability, colonial legacies, ethical uncertainty, and the limits of modern assumptions about progress. The event also celebrates the publication of their recent contributions to the special issue Beyond the Metacrisis: Educating for the World to Come, highlighting the Faculty’s ongoing engagement with urgent educational, ecological, and social questions. At a time when familiar educational narratives no longer feel sufficient, this seminar invites deeper reflection on how education may be reimagined through questions of relationship, responsibility, agency, and collective futures. Rather than offering simple answers, the session opens a space for thoughtful engagement with the challenges and possibilities of education in a changing world. Join us for an important conversation on what education might become, and on how we might begin to imagine more just, relational, and sustainable futures together.
Moderator:
Dr. Gillian Judson is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University. Her scholarship examines imagination’s role in leadership, learning (PreK-post-secondary), and imaginative and ecological teaching practices (PreK through post- secondary). Her latest book is entitled Cultivating Imagination in Leadership: Transforming Schools and Communities (Judson & Dougherty, Eds., Teachers College Press, 2023).
Presenter Bios:
Dr. Cary Campbell, is a Lecturer in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University and a co-director of the not-for-profit organization New Curriculum Group. Cary works across the fields of educational philosophy, curriculum studies, biosemiotics and music education and is publishing two new books in 2026: “Education in a time of social and environmental unraveling: transdisciplinary responses to the polycrisis” (Routledge, April 2026) and "Tuning in: a new theory of sound, music and instruments" co-written with Thomas Hoeller (Cambridge University Press, late 2026).
Dr. Mark Fettes has been exploring the educational roles and interplay of imagination, language, land and community for more than thirty years. He has longstanding interests in the revitalization of Indigenous languages, the role of language policy and planning in sustainable development,, the theory and practice of imaginative and place-based education, and the research methodology of ecoportraiture. He has led or co-led a number of SSHRC-funded multi-year community-based research projects with schools and school districts in British Columbia. Currently he is the Scientific Director of the Centre for Imagination in Research, Culture and Education at Simon Fraser University.
Dr. Cristiano Barbosa de Moura is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University. His work as a science educator bridges historical approaches to science with cultural lenses and socio -political perspectives in science education, promoting justice-centred approaches in K-12 settings and teacher education. Dr. Moura’s research, which has been published in journals such as Science & Education, Science Education and Cultural Studies of Science Education, focuses on developing theoretical and practical approaches to science that challenge the current boundaries of school science and interrogate science production to foster more inclusive and critical pedagogies and socially conscious scientific practices. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Science & Education and recently edited the book “A Sociopolitical Turn in Science Education” published by Springer.
Dr. Sean Blenkinsop is a Professor in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University. His work engages philosophy of education, imagination in teaching and learning, ecology, and relational epistemologies, with particular attention to place, experiential and outdoor education, and questions of care, justice, and human–environment relationships. Drawing on continental philosophy, his scholarship explores how education can respond to social and ecological challenges. His recent publications focus on ecological education, cultural change, and human relationships with place and the natural world, with emphasis on nature-centred teaching, sustainability, and Wild Pedagogies.
Thomas Hoeller is a co-director of New Curriculum Group and an independent scholar interested in biosemiotics, complexity, economics, and musicology.
Marion Benkaiouche is a founding member of New Curriculum Group and a PhD student in the department of Geography at UBC, interested in the ways communities form, are maintained, and come apart, and explored throughthe themes of accelerationism, decay and circularity.
Date/Time
Wednesday, June 10
1:30 – 3:00 p.m. PST
Hybrid Event
- In person:
SFU Burnaby Campus
Education building 7610 - Zoom:
Link will be sent to registered participants 24 hours in advance.
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