How Things Started: Our Changemaker Journey
Before we dive into our research, and the ways you can support changemaking within your learning environment, we want to give you a sense of where we have been so that you can more fully understand how we have come to develop our changemaker toolkit and model.
Project Overview
Georgian College received its Changemaker Campus designation in 2017 catalyzing a deeper institutional investment in social innovation and changemaking. Researchers and practitioners at the college were eager to bring together a group of collaborative changemakers to create inroads in the perplexing challenge of measurement and validation of key skills and mindsets associated with successful social innovation in the 21st century. In an effort to advance research that “focus[es] on impactful and meaningful research outcomes” (Dr. MaryLynn West-Moynes, former President and CEO of Georgian College), Dr. Sarah Hunter and Tracy Mitchell-Ashley applied for and received a $360,000 grant through the College and Community Social Innovation Fund (CCSIF) and College and Community Innovation (CCI) to begin research on a validated evaluation instrument that will help educators assess the emergence of changemaking skills including empathy, teamwork, shared leadership, and practicing changemaking. In partnership with Ashoka Canada, the research team began their work.
Research Project Goals
The overall goals of the research project were to:
- Understand how Ashoka’s social innovation competencies are understood, taught, scaffolded, enacted, and evaluated in higher education by both faculty and learners, as well as in the broader community.
- Develop and validate an evaluation tool to measure learner growth and development in Ashoka’s social innovation competencies.
- Work collaboratively to build educators’ capacity in K-12 (SCDSB) and post-secondary (Georgian College) to measure learner growth and to inform teaching and learning.
- Strengthen the local and national changemaker educational ecosystem so that it is poised to build learners’ capacity to respond to changing societal needs.
Methodology and Methods
By engaging college and community stakeholders, including post-secondary learners, college faculty, local employers, and elementary and secondary teachers, the research team aimed to both inspire and support educators in supporting learners to become changemakers.
Focus groups, action research, and experiential learning supported the collection and analysis of data to inform the evaluation tool, and the support offered to educators. A Research Advisory Team (RAC) was also formed to develop research priorities, goals, and provide insight in the design of the evaluation framework.
The RAC was established during the first phase of the three-year research project, but provided guidance throughout all three years of the inquiry. The second year focused on engaging stakeholders through focus groups, gathering and analyzing data, and piloting the tools with slearners to test, validate, and refine them to determine what best measures the competencies in a particular cohort of learners. The last year of the project was spent helping educators from kindergarten through to post-secondary build their capacity to incorporate these tools into their classrooms and learning environments.
Through each phase of the project, we were not only learning more about these competencies, we were also working out how to remain open to the diverse ways these competencies materialize and manifest. As Dr. Hunter shared, “These changes can be really tiny from awakening empathy and showing more compassion to big ones like questioning their own privilege, dismantling systems of power, or creating a non-profit to effect change in their own community. . . . We want to develop a tool where we can see whether students have evolved their skills . . . [and] a shared evaluation tool would allow us to hone in on where growth is actually happening” (Georgian College, 2021).
