Episode 7: Redefining Success with System Change in Education with Dr. Kevin Kumashiro, International Educational Policy, Equity and Social Justice Expert

“The job of schools isn’t merely to prepare us to succeed in the world as it is. I think the job of schools is to build our capacity to imagine the world as it is not yet; the world as it could be, and then build towards that world if we so choose.”

Dr. Kevin Kumashiro, is an internationally recognized expert on educational policy, school reform, teacher preparation, and educational equity and social justice. He shares that schools are a place of ideological struggle where many groups converge and try to define who we are and what we are trying to become. He explains that this is why schools are seen as liberatory spaces for many.

He advocates for a more expansive perspective of what success in education looks like.

“Success shouldn’t be measures of how well assimilated or conformed you are to sort-of a narrow way of fitting in the world. Success really has to be far more expansive and disruptive. I think education should be getting us to question what we thought was conventional wisdom, not merely to absorb the conventional wisdom,” he says.

Join the conversation between Waterloo Region District School Board Director jeewan chanicka and Dr. Kevin Kumashiro as they dream together about a future education system that will benefit all and redefine success in education.   Continue to dream with us at WRDSB as we work to transform the possibilities and potential for public education.

Learn more about WRDSB’s DreamEd initiative: https://dreamed.wrdsb.ca/