PME 811: Blog Entry 8 - Funding (and prioritizing) innovation
Funding (and prioritizing) Innovation
I read an article the other day that analyzed the recent government budget allocations for innovation in Canada for the coming 5 years (it is cited below if you would like to read it before continuing) and I was quite surprised. Like many Canadians, my interest in the specific details of how the government spends our tax dollar is fairly apathetic. I have this vague idea of what matters to me in terms of public services (more EA's, please!) and a few gripes about them (like having to wait 2 years for a family doctor), but I don't even register the reality when a news anchor rattles off '3 billion dollars announced for ____.' My brain can't handle that many zeros so it translates it into 'money being spent on complicated thingy that will help someone' and I let it go at that. Most of the time.
Then you find yourself reading an article like this one in Macleans by an author with some excellent points to make about the way that Ottawa is funding creativity. Hemmadi points out that funding in Canada for the humanities (which includes many fields suited to informing public policies and spending) is historically very limited. He highlights that this federal government is focused on building - physically building - infrastructure to bring researchers together. He also points out that funding for private-sector research is heavily subsidized, and that despite all of the above (and much more), the efforts of Canadians to turn innovative ideas into actual results and products are depressingly ineffective.
It brought me up short and made me wonder if innovative education in Canada suffers from a similar ailment. Are we fostering creativity and then sitting on it? Don't we encourage creativity and then ignore it? The curriculum asks me to have students complete high-order thinking tasks but then what? I've got an end product but all too often that student has left the room with an experience instead of a skill set.
How can we better fund (and measure) innovation? The current federal government has opted to focus on foundational gaps like digital infrastructure and communication between organizations and their internal hierarchies. What would that look like in a school environment? Does funding lesson plan banks that focus on innovation skills make more sense than paying school board administrators to write motivational memos or do the policy-setters really do have a more important role as they set the standards that we will ultimately strive for?
Sources:
Hemmadi, Murad. (Feb. 27, 2018). Big money for innovation, but questions about the strategy behind it all. Macleans Magazine. www.macleans.ca/news/canada/federal-budget-2018-tech/
