Eureka! – Coming Together: A Synthesis of Findings Heather Henricks Vice Principal, University of Toronto Schools When we embarked upon our initial Eureka! journey, I was filled with excitement and trepidation. As the Vice Principal with some responsibility for coordinating the teacher research group, I was anxious about the success of the group. All interested teachers were invited to participate as researchers and submitted applications, all of which would be accepted. Reading about their research interests in advance allowed me to work with our partners from OISE to prepare for the first meeting. Two things were making me nervous: our facilitators from OISE all had elementary school backgrounds and I wondered how they would fit in; also, the academic disciplines and research topics of the teachers in the group were so diverse, I wondered how interested people would be in working together as a community. The transition of OISE co-facilitators Clare Kosnik, Pooja Darmisha, and Shelley Murphy from “outsiders” to “insiders” was successful and is well-documented in their report (page 11 of this report). They proved to be very skilled at helping to create a community of inquiry. Teachers were very interested in hearing about and providing feedback to their colleagues about topics far outside their own disciplines. Though each topic was unique and distinct, one of the most amazing parts of this Eureka! process was the unanticipated similarities in findings. Both Josh Fullan and Mike Farley’s studies had a social science focus: Geography and Urban Studies, and examined student response to curriculum focused on complex topics. In Mike’s study, when asked “ ‘what word, phrase, or image comes to mind when you hear the term ‘oil sands’?’” prior to their experience with the Fort McMoney simulation, student responses were “heavily dominated by words such as “Alberta”, “money”, “dirty”, “economy”, “pollution”, and “environment” (Farley, page 47). Whereas, the the post-survey responses indicate a greater awareness of and appreciation for some of the social impacts and Mike notes this as one of his most significant findings. One student responded in the postsurvey, “I didn’t realize the huge impact that the oil industry had on the cities and
towns near it -- not only economically, but socially. The homelessness, the glut of people applying for positions, and the addiction problems...were all completely new for me.”’ (Farley, page 48) This was reminiscent of student responses in Josh’s study, in which they expressed “an increased capacity of being able to imagine how other people live in cities” (Fullan, page 59). Josh further notes that there was “a strong current of empathy running through” the responses. While building civic empathy is a key goal of Josh’s Maximum City curriculum, Mike did not anticipate his students’ increased capacity to appreciate how individual lives are impacted. More surprising than the overlap in Mike and Josh’s findings is the common 103