Moving from Imagination to Action

When we published Imagining Liberatory Education Futures in 2022, we aimed to engage you in exploring possibilities for what education might look like if oppression was a thing of the past. Because, as bell hooks told us, “What we cannot imagine cannot come into being.”

We’ve taken the next step in our collective journey and released Mapping Your Journey into Liberatory Education Futures. This toolkit will help small groups move from imagination to action.

This toolkit is designed for groups of three to five people who are colleagues or who have a shared interest in the future of learning. It will guide you through discussing what you want to happen and map your paths toward a more equitable and life-affirming future of learning.

More specifically, this toolkit can help you:

• Deepen your educational equity efforts, including how to design a system that works for historically marginalized yet resilient learners
• Explore the idea of liberatory education and how it fits into your work, including how it might show up in classroom, community and system settings
• Bring future possibilities into your long-term plans, including strategic plans and systems change efforts

The toolkit is divided into seven activities, and we have created a printable PDF version to support in-person collaboration and a Google Slides version to support remote or digital collaboration. 

Many people who have different perspectives and experiences with the education system supported the creation of this toolkit and offered their time and insight to help us make it as accessible and useful for you as possible. We appreciate their contributions and look forward to hearing about the ideas and action steps that emerge from your work with the activities.

The effort to create a new future of learning is full of uncertainty. Each of us has a moral imperative to engage in it. The only way forward is together.