seminar
Are school-university-government (SUNG) partnerships necessary for sustainable and scalable innovation?
In Canada, Québec and Ontario governments express a growing attention to the needs of society to address challenges of an inclusive knowledge society through multi-level partnerships. For example, the Quebec Government has been behind the Remote Networked School (RNS) initiative for the past 12 years, and it has recently established a financial measure for its sustainability. The RNS network is a school-university-government partnership (SUNG) supported by two telecollaboration tools, one for verbal discourse (a web-based videoconferencing system) and the other for written discourse (Knowledge Forum). In Ontario, the Literacy and Numeracy Secretariat is partnering with the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, and with the three Provincial Principals’ Associations. These partners are supporting school teams of principals and teachers who are committed to advancing Knowledge Building as a pedagogical framework.
Classroom-based knowledge building qualifies as disruptive innovation: progressively more impressive accounts of what students and teachers can accomplish alter beliefs regarding developmental, demographic, and cultural barriers. To establish knowledge building communities requires effort from within as well as from outside the classroom. The Knowledge Building International Project (KBIP) has been rooted in school-university-government (SUNG) partnerships, along with their locally based networks of innovation. The main constituents of the Remote Networked School (RNS) initiative will be presented. A description of the SUNG partnership will follow. Engeström’s (1987) third-generation activity theory framework (Engeström & Sannino, 2010) will be referred to for analysis of the overcoming of double binds for a SUNG’s expansion as an activity.
The seminar will be chair by Professor Nancy Law, Faculty of Education, The University of Hong Kong
<p>Thérèse Laferrière is full professor of pedagogy at l'Université Laval. She is conducting a number of collaborative design research projects, including ones related to the Networked Remote School initiative, network-enabled communities of practice, and knowledge building communities. She was the leader of the research theme "Educating the Educators" within the TeleLearning Network of Centres of Excellence (NCE Canada). Her research activities focus on networked learning environments and especially teacher-student(s) interactions and peer interactions as electronically linked classrooms become reality in elementary and secondary schools as well as in faculties of education and post-secondary education in general. She is an associate researcher at the Institute for Knowledge Innovation and Technology (<a href="http://www.ikit.org/">IKIT</a>) at the University of Toronto, and an associate researcher with the<em> Centre francophone d'informatisation des organisations</em> (<a href="http://www.cefrio.qc.ca/">CEFRIO)</a>, a knowledge transfer organization dedicated to the use of digital tools in organizations. She is currently the director of CRIRES, a multiuniversity research center on successful schooling. She served as Dean of Education (1987-1995). She was president of the Canadian Association for Teacher Education (CATE/<a href="http://www.csse.ca/">CSSE</a>), and president of the Canadian Education Association (2001-2002). She was also President of the <em>Association francophone des doyennes et doyens, directeurs et directrices d'éducation du Canada</em>. Recently, and the coordinator of CATE SIG Technology and Teacher Education.</p>