Teaching Future-Makers: Outcomes of an International Design Workshop for Critical Action Educators

This paper reports on recent developments of the Critical Action Learning Exchange (Carvalho et al., 2021), an international community of educators who seek to respond to social and environmental issues that affect their students. We report on an international design workshop that engaged a cohort of teachers in designing Critical Action Learning activities for their students in the Summer of 2023. Participants (n=39) completed 16 curriculum designs for grade levels from kindergarten to university, addressing a broad range of socio-environmental issues and adopting diverse approaches, such as Arts-Based Critical Action, Community Engagement, Critical Making, Games for Critical Action, and Storytelling. This paper examines our Professional Development model, together with an analysis of teacher participants’ ideas and their design products. We investigate what forms of scaffolding can facilitate the changes of practice needed for teachers to become critical action educators and support their Critical Action Learning designs.