The 2025 Year in Review for Faculty Research

Looking back at 2025, our faculty’s research continues to shape what education is and can become in the face of climate change, social polarization, disability justice, shifting language politics, and the emerging technology of generative AI. Our faculty’s publications do not simply add new topics to education; they invite reflection on what counts as learning, whose experiences anchor research, and which forms of knowledge deserve authority. Given the breadth of our faculty’s work, with more than 100 publications in 2025, this review offers a snapshot that highlights several emerging themes across the year.

Much of this research envisions education extending into aesthetic, embodied, and ethical dimensions, seeing creative practice as not just enrichment but a serious response to uncertainty. As Celeste Nazeli Snowber writes in her collection of poetic meditations, Creating in Dangerous Times, “each small creative act/ is an act of courage”—a way to face personal and external dangers. Her commitment to creative practice is underscored in a second book she published this year, Welcome the Stranger Within, a danced poem that draws on embodied and poetic ways of inquiry to invite and welcome all parts of oneself as a condition for learning and relationality.

Our mathematics education scholars engaged with mathematics to show how it can be an active, sensory, and culturally situated practice. Rina Zazkis explored the “space of an example” using counterintuitive examples such as the equality $0.999... = 1 (in The Equality 0.999…= 1, What Does it Exemplify? Exploring Spaces of an Example) to uncover how prospective teachers draw connections to notions of infinity and limits. Nathalie Sinclair and Sheena Tan, in Tla’amin mathematics: Making math local (again), described their process of developing middle- and high-school resources that centre Tla’amin Nation practices. Working in partnership with Elders and knowledge keepers, the authors highlight the importance of beginning with practice and stories rather than decontextualized concepts. Emphasizing the role of language in appreciating Indigenous knowledges, they argue that “Indigenous ways of thinking cannot be simply folded into existing colonial school mathematics. It can jolt us into appreciating a mathematics that is not only contextualized, but deeply local.”

Work with Indigenous education in 2025 was further shaped by two publications that foreground relational responsibility. In Understanding the Heartwork of Indigenous Student Services during the Challenging Times of Reconciliation, Decolonization, and Indigenization, Michelle Pidgeon (with Stephanie J. Waterman and Shawna M. Cunningham) examined how Indigenous Student Centres function as culturally grounded places of significance, guided by the 4Rs and Indigenous storywork while contending with cultural illiteracy and reconciliation fatigue. Extending this emphasis on responsibility beyond campus contexts, Claudia Diaz-Diaz and Manuela Royo Letelier show, in Decolonial Provocations through Ecofeminist Pedagogies: Imagination in Times of Ecological Precarity, how arts-based, sensorial, grassroots pedagogies in Chile sustain water and land defenders’ imagination—a decolonizing practice oriented toward living well together.

This theme of ecological care is echoed in the work of Cher Hill, Neva Whintors, Ching-chiu Lin, and Tadpole Movie Makers in I Hate the Global Warming Factory! Caring for Tadpoles During the Climate Emergency. Through the creation of a lunchtime program that supports elementary school students in building reciprocal relationships with the land and enhancing collective wellness, children worked to care for tadpoles and shared their concerns about global warming with the community. This study revealed how impactful environmental education can be when it is guided by love (versus logic), involves thinking with (rather than thinking about) more-than-human kin, and when children actively participate in knowledge creation and mobilization through digital storytelling. These researchers illustrate how action-research serves as a generative approach to participatory planetary health, inspiring both individual and collective action to address the multifaceted environmental crisis.

In the digital realm, Robyn Ilten-Gee and Nicole Mirra address the “urgent spaces where media and morality collide.” Their chapter, Employing Digital Media for Moral and Character Education in the Classroom, critiques the “façade of neutrality” in digital technologies and urges educators to utilize digital affordances to connect students with the broader social world. The need for critical digital literacy is particularly relevant as generative AI enters the classroom. Research by Daniel Chang, Philip Winne, and Michael Lin provides essential frameworks for educational AI tools. In their study A proposed methodology for investigating student-chatbot interaction patterns in giving peer feedback, they propose a new approach for analyzing interaction patterns in chatbot-supported peer review tasks. Their findings highlight the need to refine AI chatbot designs to address known motivational issues like student overconfidence and misunderstandings. This research aims to improve pedagogical alignment with learners’ cognitive and metacognitive processes in such learning experiences as self-assessment and feedback giving.

Heesoon Bai, Heather Williams, Charles Scott, and their colleagues argue in Contemplative Inquiry as Research and Pedagogic Method for a shift toward compassionate, dialogical, and holistic learning. By addressing the imbalance between “doing” and “being,” their research offers concrete examples of “inner work” that foster a healing contemplative consciousness.

Across this scholarship, research in education is inseparable from care, integrating intellectual inquiry with ethical commitment, creativity with community, and learning with the “response-ability” to live well, with heart and mind, in a complex world. We look forward to 2026 as an opportunity to expand partnerships, honour diverse ways of knowing, and translate research into practice for advancing educational research and scholarship.