Conference Agenda

In 2025, we, the “Reimagining Schools Collaborative” led the Game Changer “Re-Imagining Schools: A Journey of Playfulness and Hope” at ECQI Edinburgh. These sessions were a mix of semi-structured and free-flowing experiences of playful inquiry into co-dreaming new futures in education. Building from this, our 2026 Game Changer uses our emerging perspectives on education and reimagining schools to practice connections, collaboration and engage in global flows. In our 2025 ECQI session, the activities gave us reflective and creative insight into these questions and what they mean for different communities around the globe from which we have constructed a new series of questions/activities designed to push more critically into the essential questions posed by the Reimagining Schools Collaborative: what is, what if and what’s next?, exploring imagination and investigating possibilities to reshape experiences and spaces of schooling and education for a more equitable and sustainable future. Focusing on the goals of qualitative inquiry and the theme of the 2026 conference, we explore artful and critical methodologies to witness, to learn from, and to be in dialogue with practices that stretch the boundaries of education. It is an offering of paths that connect theory and practice, dreaming and doing, local wisdom and global urgencies—always asking: how can we learn differently, so that we can live differently?

In our Game Changer for 2026, we deepen our questioning to include: What does learning/education look like when it serves everyone: peoples, communities, and the planet? How can we shift from being told what our future will be to actively creating it ourselves? Re-worlding. Our sessions aim to make visible how imagination moves from "what if” to "what we do.” The solutions for the problems we face globally cannot be answered by a select few within academic contexts. We must engage with a poly-vocal approach that includes a variety of modes of expression and understanding. As such our Game Changers embody the conference purpose to, “actively and collaboratively engaged with history and with the futures we all shape” (ECQI 2026, CfP).

The Game Changer activities weave together modes of inquiry from arts, sciences, and Indigenous wisdoms, and offer experiences where education steps beyond its conventional walls to redesign how we learn, how we relate and how we care for the world, honor our shared vulnerabilities, and celebrate our interdependencies. Exploring post-human and post-qualitative paradigms in education and society, we see this historical moment as ripe for transformative change, challenging static relationships between theory, practice, research, and pedagogy.

The story we are creating in our Game Changer Sessions is not about a formula. Our Reimagining Schools Collaborative focuses on imagining prototype futures where learning is relational, regenerative and deeply grounded in the reality and dreams of each place. The Game Changer sessions emphasize the realization that young people exist as their own vast and complex systems of knowledge and that the knowledge they intuitively hold is powerful, brilliant, and wonderful. Recognizing the significance of youth perspectives, this Game Changer highlights their agency, visions and leadership as central to meaningful dialogues on the transformative power of imagination within education. One goal is to use art and imagination to impact wider global education policies by inviting young people, some of whom are already leading their own actions and propositions, to articulate, visualize or embody the issues.

Our three Game Changer sessions will include session leaders, remote organizers by Zoom, youth participants and the session attendees. The purpose of the in-person/zoom hybrid is to include youth participants from around the globe as part of the working sessions. Each of the three days can be attended as the sole session, or participants may attend all three. We consider each session as a point of perception in our world-building experiences, holding traces of how we can transform learning spaces into spaces of belonging, agency, and collective repair.

Day 1: What is (embodiment)? Co-creating the frame for existing systems of global education.

Day 2: What if (flow/collaboration)? How do we move through entanglements of colonial realities and post-colonial futures? Exploring new ways of “world-making”

Day 3: What’s next (point)? We locate generative geographies of change. Day 3 is about the living tensions and the beauty that emerges when diverse communities of educators, artists and young people come together. Structured to inspire intergenerational experimentation with raw artistic materials and to explore the challenges confronting global education

policies, this Game Changer will culminate in a report/policy brief which embodies a call to action for researchers, educators, students and communities alike.