Deeper Learning Canada: Full Schedule

Save The Date! July 2nd - 4th 2026

You will be able to validate your attendance (Check-In to sessions) using your personal schedule.

9:00am PDT

Deep Dive - Pass the Torch: Theatre, Community, and Reconciliation

Friday July 3, 2026 9:00am - 11:30am PDT

This session is grounded in community relationships, responsibility, and care. Our group will travel to the site of a former Residential School, where participants will engage with the process behind a secondary theatre project in which students worked alongside Residential School Survivors to adapt a survivor’s memoir into a stage production.

Participants in this session can expect to discuss how to continue their own unlearning journeys, connect to their own local territories and cultural protocols to create authentic and reciprocal connections, and how centering Indigenous voices and stories can create hopeful, transformational change.

Participants won’t leave with all the answers, but are encouraged to continue reflections on the responsibilities that come with teaching difficult histories through creative practice and cultural humility.

Speakers

Jen Maxwell

Teacher, School District #33 Chilliwack - Imagine High Integrated Arts & Technology Secondary

Jen Maxwell is xwelítem (settler) in traditional, ancestral and unceded Ts'elxwéyeqw, Semá:th, and Pil'alt Territory. She is passionate about global Indigenous studies, genealogical research, and reading sci-fi and fantasy fiction. She is motivated by authentic, community-connected... Read More →

Penny Miller

Teacher, School District #33 Chilliwack - Imagine High Integrated Arts & Technology Secondary

Penny Miller has been working as an Arts Integration teacher for almost 20 years. Her passion for storytelling through theatre and history filtered with a social justice lens has been at the core of her teaching practice. Collaboration, connection, relationships with people and the... Read More →

Friday July 3, 2026 9:00am - 11:30am PDT
Imagine High - Room 217

Deep Dives & Advisory

9:45am PDT

Den Talks - The Great School Debate

Saturday July 4, 2026 9:45am - 11:15am PDT

Imagine High - Room 217

What happens when a room full of educators has to design a school together... while passionately arguing for ideas they may not actually believe?

In this highly participatory Den Talk, attendees will take part in a playful “turncoat” debate experience where they’ll be randomly assigned opposing sides of foundational educational issues. But there’s a twist: midway through each debate, participants must physically switch sides and argue the opposite perspective.

Facilitated by members of the Classmate team, this session blends educational philosophy, improvisation, and structured debate into an experience that is equal parts thoughtful, funny, and unexpectedly revealing. Participants will help “found” a fictional school together, gradually shaping its culture and values through a series of live debates.

This is not a sit-and-listen session. Participants will be invited to speak, move, debate, improvise, reflect, and inhabit perspectives beyond their own in a safe, playful environment.
Rather than trying to arrive at the “correct” answers about education, this Den Talk explores the tensions underneath school design and what those tensions reveal about trust, authority, creativity, structure, and learning itself.

Speakers

Jani Mitanovski

School Navigator, Classmate

Jani Mitanovski is the CEO and co-founder of Classmate, a Vancouver-based organization helping educators reimagine how students learn and express their ideas. As a teenager who immigrated to Canada at the start of high school, Jani knows firsthand that creative expression — through... Read More →

Nick Evans

Team Facilitator, Classmate

Nick is the Team Facilitator at Classmate, where he collaborates closely with schools and the Classmate team to design creative learning experiences, reflective processes, and collaborative projects. His work often lives at the intersection of facilitation, team culture, experience... Read More →

Jon Yergatian

Systems Navigator, Classmate

Jon is the Systems Navigator at Classmate. He spends a lot of time thinking about the systems we work within, both at Classmate and at schools. He's deeply interested in organizational design — why hierarchies form, what purpose they actually serve, and how we might transform them... Read More →

Saturday July 4, 2026 9:45am - 11:15am PDT
Imagine High - Room 217

Workshops & Den Talks