Our Projects
Project Streams 2025/26
CenTCS Fellows and Associates have individual strands of work that align with the Research Compass. Several of these projects are showcased below and grouped under the compass theme that they best illustrate on the Research Compass page. In addition to these individual strands of work, we engage in collaborative project streams. We determine and review the content of these streams annually, using the Research Compass, needs of the field, and individual interests as a guide. We then develop and implement time-bound CenTCS projects within each of these streams that we undertake in smaller teams. The streams below are those that guide our work during the 2025-2026 academic year.
Project Stream 1 - Transformative Professional Learning
This research stream aims to investigate how transformative professional learning serves as a catalyst for change across multiple levels, especially for teachers, schools, and education systems. It examines the extent to which professional learning fosters deep shifts in beliefs, practices, and identities, and explores the dynamics that enable these changes to scale and influence organisational culture and systemic reform. The stream considers how top-down policy structures and bottom-up initiatives interact to create conditions for sustainable transformation.
Project Stream 2 - (Dis)connections and Boundaries
The stream focuses on researching and enhancing connections between communities and educational spaces, fostering parent and family engagement, and building on the affordances of place-based education. We strive to eliminate barriers and soften boundaries between schools and communities, and teachers and caregivers. In addition, we also embrace families' funds of knowledge, and imagine educational futures that include all educators, students, families, and wider communities. Our work foregrounds linguistic and cultural diversity, social inequality, and agency of educators, students, families, and community members. This stream primarily focuses on the first question in our Research Compass by reimagining education for just futures through place-based connections. We also address the fourth theme in the Research Compass by focusing on partnerships (broadly defined) and young people and their communities. Activities of this stream have implications for the other themes in the Research Compass.
Project Stream 3 - Learning Futures
This project stream investigates how educator learning can become a generative force for justice and sustainability amid rapid technological, geopolitical and planetary transformations. It explores pedagogies that open up learning beyond the classroom—across human and more-than-human relationships, digital and material worlds—to imagine new ways of being, learning, and teaching that serve to drive change for social good rather than simply react to external change. Our research approaches aim to support the creation, rather than merely description, of educational conditions for a just and thriving future.