History, Structure and People

CIRCE grew out of the Imaginative Education Research Group (IERG), which Kieran Egan and colleagues in the SFU Faculty of Education founded in 2001. Egan was one of the first recipients of a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair, which he held from 2001-2015. The Chair included funding for postdoctoral fellows and research assistants, and enabled IERG to organize a landmark series of conferences on imagination and education and to develop a range of workshops and courses for practicing teachers, including a Master of Education (M.Ed.) program that continues to be offered by the Faculty on a regular basis.

Two of the early IERG postdoctoral fellows were Mark Fettes and Sean Blenkinsop, both of whom were subsequently hired as tenure-track faculty members at SFU. In 2004 Fettes received a million-dollar grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council to explore the uses of imaginative education in schools and classrooms with large numbers of Indigenous students (the LUCID project). Six years later, Blenkinsop and Fettes were recipients of a second million-dollar grant to develop an “environmental school” with the Maple Ridge/Pitt Meadows School District in a community on the north shore of the Fraser River east of Vancouver. One of Blenksinsop’s doctoral students, Gillian Judson, developed her own approach to “imaginative ecological education” and worked closely with Egan on a number of projects to extend IERG’s influence among school educators and educational leaders. Many other people were involved in IERG programs and activities over this period, including Annabella Cant and Kymberly Stewart, both of whom completed PhDs (with Egan and Fettes as their respective supervisors) and are now faculty at Capilano University in North Vancouver.

Kieran Egan retired from the Faculty of Education at the end of 2015. Some years earlier, he and Mark Fettes had established the Centre for Imaginative Education as a university-wide research institute, and it was decided to fold the IERG’s work into the Centre. In 2018 the Faculty agreed to support Gillian Judson as a half-time Executive Director of the Centre for two years. She led the rebranding and reorganizing process that created CIRCE, resituated it within the Faculty of Education, and set the stage for the present phase of its work.

Building on the past two decades of work, CIRCE now focuses on transformative responses to the climate and ecological crises, on ways of connecting imaginatively with nature and place, and on how educational practice can be rethought and reshaped in response to the demands of ecological, Indigenous and social justice. At the same time, we continue to offer professional development opportunities in imaginative education as a powerful framework for finding inclusive, engaging and meaningful ways of teaching curriculum topics of all kinds. We welcome contacts and connections with people from any background and location who are drawn to aspects of our work.