Designing transformational professional learning opportunities: understanding participants’ experiences in an on-line and in-place imagination-focused self-study

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The question of how to transform teachers’ practices is vexing, especially if the goal is to change deep set conceptions of human separation from the natural world. In this research, we employed an arts-based methodological approach to consider what kind of professional learning design supports transformation towards pedagogies that acknowledge humankind’s interconnectedness with the more-than-human world. We examined educators’ experiences in a program called Spring TIPs (Teaching Imagination in Place), a self-study designed to engage three principles of eco-social change: Relationality, Immersion and Affect. Seeking to engage imagination explicitly in our methods to enrich analysis possibilities, we employed digital collaging alongside thematic coding to analyse the data collected in focus group interviews. Findings indicate how the program design supported participants’ transformative unlearning and new learning. Unexpectedly, the arts-based and imaginative research process supported our unlearning too, revealing implications and next steps for imagination-focused professional learning for teachers and researchers.