Research Compass
Our Research Compass serves as a guiding metaphor for our evolving research agenda
Rather than prescribing a fixed route, the compass orients us toward key values - equity, collaboration, and justice - that shape our collective inquiry.
It helps us navigate complex educational landscapes, respond to emerging challenges, and remain attuned to the lived realities of schools, teachers, and communities. As our work unfolds, the Research Compass ensures we stay aligned with our purpose while remaining open to new directions and partnerships.
This compass helps us to identify both substantive themes for our research and underpinning principles that inform how we carry out our work.
We use the compass to guide an annual review of our collaborative project streams. Our project streams represent the collective projects we engage in as a centre. While our project streams are meant to provide a specific focus for time-bound projects, the Research Compass themes and ways of working endure to guide all our intellectual and strategic decision-making across time.
Substantive Themes
CenTCS focuses on four interrelated research themes, which all address our mission to support equity through transformative change:
1. How do we conceptualize transformative change in schools?
Explore 'How do we conceptualize transformative change in schools' theme
2. How do we prepare teachers for transformative teaching and praxis?
Explore 'How do we prepare teachers for transformative teaching and praxis?' theme
3. How do teachers enact transformative teaching in classrooms?
Explore 'How do teachers enact transformative teaching in classrooms?' theme
4. How do we describe the complex relationships between transformative teaching and its impact in different contexts?
Ways of Working
Our ways of working are underpinned by the following six principles:
We advance social justice and democracy
We align all research and practice with the principles of equity, inclusion, and democratic engagement, contributing meaningfully to the public good.
We challenge deficit thinking and dominant logics
We actively resist deficit narratives and make visible the colonial and neoliberal structures that shape education, working to subvert them through critical, ethical scholarship.
We foster transformative and practice-based inquiry
We promote research as a transformative process grounded in real-world practice, valuing classroom-based and small-scale studies as legitimate and impactful.
We support critical reflection and action
We encourage reflective questioning (e.g., "So what?") that leads to purposeful action, while embedding regular points for checking alignment with shared goals.
We build a collaborative and inclusive research culture
We cultivate a community of discovery that supports diverse researchers—including colleagues with scholarship/clinical/teaching contracts—through shared learning, mentoring, and career development.
We enable creativity and open exploration
We create space for imaginative, blue skies thinking that pushes the boundaries of conventional research and fosters innovation.