Mark Fettes, an assistant professor of education at Simon Fraser University, has been awarded $992,920 under SSHRC's Community-University Research Alliances (CURA) program. Fettes is the principal investigator in the project Building culturally inclusive schools through imaginative education. Fettes is developing an education model to help B.C. aboriginal people attain greater academic, social and economic success.

A member of SFU's Imaginative Education Research Group (IERG), Fettes is collaborating with three other SFU professors, all IERG members and graduate students. The project also involves First Nations and school district leaders from Chilliwack, Prince Rupert and the Queen Charlotte Islands.

An expert on linguistic ecology, Fettes studies how language and culture influence the way people imagine, and how imagination is implicated in learning, relationship building and community identification. He is applying an innovative teaching approach, developed by SFU education professor and project co-investigator Kieran Egan, to teaching classes with large numbers of aboriginal students.

Egan's theory predicts that students learn best when progressively advanced teaching strategies scaffold their cognitive development through imaginative stimulation. Fettes's believes that even culturally sensitive curricula are not improving the number of aboriginal students graduating from high school because they are based on conventional teaching strategies.

Fettes says, to the detriment of aboriginal students, these strategies make tacit assumptions about students' identity within the politically and economically dominant culture. Fettes hopes his project will demonstrate that imaginative education encourages learners to re-imagine their communities' future and their place in the world.

--30--

Mark Fettes, 604.291.4489; mtfettes@sfu.ca

News Release:
Health, education research draws $11 million in new SSHRC grants