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In a time marked distinctly by disorder and disorientation, conversations about climate and sustainability can easily slip into narratives of despair or distress. Yet, as teacher educator and researcher Dr. Hilary Inwood — a faculty member in Curriculum, Teaching and Learning at OISE, and Coordinator of its Sustainability & Climate Action Network suggests, hope is not something to be spoken or thought about abstractly – it is something to be practiced. Her work sits at the intersection of climate action, education, and the arts and demonstrates how creativity can cultivate that practice by linking awareness with action and by engaging learners cognitively, emotionally, and physically. 

For teachers and learners, hope and action are inseparable. As she explains, “hope and action are integrally tied together — if we feel we can take action on an issue that we feel passionate about, we are more likely to feel that we have contributed to addressing it, even in small ways.” Creative and arts-based approaches provide one pathway toward that engagement because they invite participation across cognitive, affective, and embodied forms of learning. Through community-based art making at OISE, environmental themes become lived and shared experiences rather than distant abstractions. Research conducted around these projects showed that participants not only developed deeper understanding about environmental issues but also shifted their behaviour  towards regeneration— planting native species, for example, after learning about local pollinators.

This shift matters. Arts-based strategies create openings for agency: “They raise awareness around environmental issues and eco-justice issues… and can be a really important step in moving beyond ‘doom and gloom’ to understanding that there are positive actions we can take.” Whether through visual arts, music, drama, or dance, creativity becomes a means of sharing knowledge, strengthening connection, and making environmental engagement tangible.

This mural integrates image and text to celebrate OISE's Learning Garden and its many native plant species. Eco Art Installations, OISE.

This relational ethos extends to research itself. Inwood challenges conventional notions of inquiry, observing that “notions of research have been so tightly prescribed in the past that they aren’t meeting the needs of the times in which we live today.” She advocates for expansive approaches that generate “a wider and more diverse set of knowledges”, grounded in reciprocity and listening. Methodologies shaped by relational responsibility, including those informed by Indigenous perspectives, encourage researchers to move beyond extractive models toward collaborative meaning-making. As she puts it, “We should be thinking about how we can use research opportunities to work toward solutions and help all of us understand the multiple perspectives that inform these issues… whether the voices are human voices or whether they come from the more-than-human world.” Research itself is an ethical practice of care and environmental literacy.

Collaboration is equally central to institutional transformation. Reflecting on the long-standing partnership between OISE and the Toronto District School Board that she coordinates, Inwood frames meaningful change as something that unfolds collectively rather than through isolated expertise. Cross-institutional partnerships disrupt assumptions about hierarchy and knowledge ownership, inviting educators, researchers, and community partners into shared problem-solving that strengthens both process and outcome. Listening across disciplines, generations, and lived experiences deepens responses to complex challenges, and relational accountability becomes the grounding principle. Collaboration is not simply logistical. It is ethical, echoing knowledge traditions that position relationships as foundational to how meaningful work is carried out.

This relational grounding points toward imagination as a catalyst for change. For Inwood, collaboration gains its momentum from vision and possibility. Institutional work cannot rely solely on incremental reform; it must be oriented toward expansive futures. She emphasizes that “we have to have these audacious dreams to motivate us,” drawing on traditions of future visioning shaped by Black and Indigenous thought that remind us “we need to be able to dream the future that we want to realize.” This orientation reframes imagination as responsibility — asking educators and researchers not only to critique the present but to articulate the futures they hope to build.

Flap 2.0: This mural focuses on the plight of migratory birds in urban environments.  Eco Art Installations, OISE.

Creativity, research, and partnership are all functions as practices of futurity. They are ways of cultivating possibilities that extend beyond the present moment. When communities engage relationally, they expand the scope of what becomes possible together. As Inwood reflects through the metaphor that guides much of her work, collaboration allows “the gardens we plant… [to] spread the seeds so much farther and… tend to more plants when we work together.” Institutional change becomes an act of collective cultivation: nurturing relationships, sustaining imagination, and shaping futures that are not merely anticipated, but actively brought into being.

Mariam Vakani is a PhD student in Higher Education. Her work examines caregivers and institutional life through relational and equity-focused frameworks. She writes across academic and creative forms, drawn to the spaces where pedagogy, ethics, and storytelling meet and where imagining more responsive futures becomes possible.