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This research examined how stakeholders (n = 40) from one school district experienced “accountability” within a context where responsibility for student learning was being distributed across the system. Using a case study design, we examined: what conditions supported stakeholders in multiple roles to exercise responsibility for student learning? Analyses of documents and interviews revealed conditions that enabled teachers, instructional leaders, and administrators to share responsibility in relation to their roles, and empowered teachers to engage in inquiry for continuous improvement and build from their sense of professionalism and responsibility. Implications are discussed for empowering teachers, and other stakeholders, to exercise responsibility in the context of an accountability system.

Individuals with intellectual disability are often left out of and overlooked in discussions on sexual health and sexuality. Given this, we undertook a participatory theatre research project to better respond to the needs of the individuals with intellectual and developmental disability regarding their sexual agency and sexual citizenship. The project, entitled Romance, Relationships, and Rights arose when the executive director of a community living agency approached researchers at the University of British Columbia’s Canadian Institute for Inclusion and Citizenship to learn about how they, as an agency, could better support their community. To disrupt sexual ableism and traditional theatre hierarchies, we collaboratively turned to participatory and disability theatre with the aim to advance and promote the sexual citizenship of individuals with intellectual and developmental disability, who refer to themselves as self-advocates - those who speak and act with agency. The challenges of equitable co-creation arose throughout the theatre process; the themes of deconstruction/co-construction and uncertainty and liminality reveal the iterative process of centering self-advocate voices.

In a time of rapid policy and curriculum change, teachers must be knowledge workers who continue to develop professionally. Professional learning networks (PLNs) offer teachers the opportunity to develop professionally by positioning them as inquirers into their own practice and authors and agents of situated innovation. Six examples of PLNs are introduced in this book to illustrate key attributes of PLNs that build educators’ ownership, practice, and expertise. Also highlighted is the potential of PLNs to address questions of equity, both for educators working in remote and rural communities who have limited access to professional development and other resources, and diverse learners and equity-seeking communities (e.g., Indigenous communities, non-dominant cultural groups). Scholar, practitioner, and policy audiences can benefit greatly from the PLNs described here and draw from these case studies to inform equity-oriented PLNs centering the importance of teachers, students, engagement, collaboration, and rural place in educational transformation efforts.

Educational renewal in rural schools and communities can be stymied by many challenges including teacher isolation, staff turnover, and failing resource-based economies. Education change networks within and across rural communities can nuture educators’ professional development through collaborative inquiry and connect educators interested in taking up equity-oriented, place-conscious pedagogies. This afterward draws from the chapters in this book to outline how rural education transformation can benefit from and be realized within education change networks that take up multiple perspectives including the more-than-human world, reconciliation with Indigenous communities, and service learning.

Narrative inquiry’s capacities to reveal relational complexities and nuances of individuals and settings in varied contexts purposefully shape the lived curriculum within a community middle school setting. The experiential narratives of students, teachers, administrators, parents, and mentors contributing to the curricular documentation of the makings of this community have not only provided a medium to access these relations but also become an educative catalyst, opening into ongoing deliberations concerning the nature of education, knowledge, and what it means to be a community, by all involved. Grounded in Dewey’s primary notion of experience, participatory practices position each community member to bring their narratives of experience into the makings and remakings of community, elucidating modes of being and associated habits. Representative voices illuminate the mobilizing potential of narrative inquiry as a vital medium for reframing education within all institutions, communities, and beyond.

In this critical community self-study, we describe the development of the Interdisciplinary Disability and Inclusion Research Collaborative (IDIRC) at the University of British Columbia Okanagan. IDIRC is a self-organizing collective involving eleven faculty, students and staff devoted to Critical Disability Studies (CDS) and the relationships between CDS, practice and social change. We ask: What are the social relations, commitments, activities, and research needs of this university's researchers, students and staff in relation to disability and inclusion? Through a constant comparative analysis of interview data we surfaced themes related to the social relations, commitments, activities and research needs of our members. Our findings and discussion illustrate how similar cross-disciplinary groups might build inclusive spaces, which unite staff, graduate students and faculty towards disrupting normativity, interdisciplinarity, and praxis within and beyond academia. IDIRC attends to the embodiment of values and theoretical perspectives that are relational, diversity-positive, intersectional and advocacy-oriented.

This critical case study (Grosvenor & Pataki, 2017; Merriam, 2009) examines how taking up diversity and plurality within in situ literacy and language arts courses in a Bachelor of Education program created a critical discursive space within mainstream teacher education. Data in this research included interviews with teacher candidates and course assignments. Findings suggest that teacher candidates learned to seek and value diverse students’ funds of knowledge, grappled with inclusive practices, and developed equity-oriented pedagogy within in situ teacher education coursework. Through this project we contribute to the rising recognition that in situ teacher education through a lens of diversity can generate curriculum drawing from the literacies and lifeworld experiences of all learners (Grant & Agosto, 2008; Moll, 2014).

This article presents an in-depth case study of a complex community of inquiry. In this community, teachers worked collaboratively to build from situated assessments of students' learning through reading to refine and monitor practices designed to enhance student learning in their subject-area classrooms. In this report, we present evidence to address three questions: (1) What did inquiry look like within this community?; (2) How was collaboration implicated in teachers' inquiry?; and (3) How was engagement in inquiry related to meaningful shifts in teachers' practice and learning? This research contributes by uncovering important links between teacher inquiry, collaboration, and educational change.