How We Work
LEN’s work is organized through four interconnected lines of inquiry called streams that together centre community-school-university partnerships as an avenue for activism and racial justice through the activism-learning-action trifecta (Shah et al., 2024). These partnerships provide opportunities to nurture reflection, action, relationality, and collective transformation.
LEN cultivates the social and relational conditions necessary for meaningful education systems transformation.
Across gatherings, collaborations, and public interventions, we:
- Bring people together across roles and sectors
- Create spaces for reflection, dialogue, and collective learning
- Support experimentation, imagination, and co-creation
- Build networks that mobilize toward liberatory action
We work within, against, and beyond systems—connecting efforts across schools, communities, and policy spaces.
Real change starts with understanding. This stream creates opportunities for people to reflect on their own experiences, listen to the experiences of others, and better understand how schools and society shape our lives. By asking thoughtful questions and learning together, we become more aware of the challenges people face and begin to imagine new possibilities for education and our communities.
Learning matters most when it leads to action. This stream focuses on putting ideas into practice by working together to improve teaching, learning, leadership, and educational systems. Participants test new approaches, learn from what works (and what doesn't), and develop practical solutions that help create more inclusive, equitable, and supportive learning environments.
Lasting change doesn't happen alone—it happens when people come together around a shared purpose. This stream brings together educators, students, families, community members, and organizations to build strong relationships and work toward common goals. By sharing knowledge, supporting one another, and speaking with a collective voice, we strengthen our ability to create meaningful and lasting improvements in education.
Great ideas and meaningful change can come from anyone. This stream explores new ways of thinking about leadership by moving away from the idea that leadership belongs only to people with titles or authority. Instead, it encourages shared responsibility, collaboration, trust, and care, creating spaces where everyone can contribute, learn from one another, and help shape the future together.
Why the Streams Must Exist Together
The four streams are not separate streams of work but are instead deeply interdependent dimensions essential for liberatory transformation in education. Each stream strengthens and sustains the others. For example:
Without Knowing & Sensing, action risks becoming reactive, superficial, or disconnected from the lived realities of oppression and possibilities are limited.
Without Praxis, critical awareness remains abstract and intellectualized rather than transformative.
Without Movement Building, liberatory work becomes individualized and unsustainable, leaving people isolated within systems designed to exhaust and fragment them.
Without UnLeading, movements risk reproducing the same hierarchies, exclusions, and power concentrations they seek to dismantle.
Together, the streams create a dynamic ecosystem of reflection, action, relationality, and collective transformation. This ensures that the LEN does not merely critique oppressive educational systems, but actively cultivates new ways of learning, relating, organizing, and being.
In this sense, the Liberatory Education Network transcends the monikers of professional learning community or advocacy initiative. It is a living, relational project of educational transformation grounded in the belief that another way of teaching, learning, leading, and living together is both necessary and possible.
Six Dimensions of Regenerative Transformation
LEN embraces uncertainty as a condition of possibility. Rather than offering fixed solutions, we cultivate hope as a practice—an ongoing experiment in imagining and building otherwise futures.
We reject compliance-based accountability. Instead, we ground our work in relationships—being accountable to one another, communities, and the land through care, reciprocity, and ethical responsibility.
We resist urgency and quick fixes. Transformation requires time, trust, and reflection, moving at the pace of relationships and emergent understanding.
We focus on depth over breadth, understanding that meaningful change grows through relationships and replicates across contexts like fractal patterns.
We acknowledge that transformation is complex and often contradictory. LEN invites participants to sit with discomfort, contradiction, and complicity, recognizing this as necessary for change.
Transformation is not delivered—it is co-created. LEN centers distributed leadership, collective learning, and shared action across communities and systems.