Richard Fransham was born and raised in a suburb of Montreal, Canada. He comes from a family of teachers and became one himself. As a teacher, he soon realized that public schools were falling well short of providing the environments young people need if they are to flourish and he has advocated for change throughout his career which has spanned more than four decades.
His advocacy led him to leave teaching to publish Child Focus magazine in 1979, the year the United Nations designated as The Year of the Child. The goal was to generate a Canada-wide debate about how to best serve young people. The dream was of an enduring publication, but it was financially not viable and he returned to teaching the following year.
In the early 1990’s, he was teaching in a secondary school of a large Ottawa school board when a rare set of circumstances led to another teacher and him having a proposal accepted to run a pilot program that gave students substantially greater control over their learning. It met all the conditions of the day set by the teachers union, the school board and the ministry of education. Initially, those conditions were perceived as too constraining for the original proposal to succeed, but this did not turn out to be the case. The conditions established scaffolding that contributed to the success of the program. Circumstance changed and the program did not survive, but in the time since, thinking around the program has been refined and the time now seems ripe for progressive schools to run pilot programs based on the refinements. These programs that operate within the boundaries of conventional schools stand to illuminate how to begin transforming education with little disruption to the traditional program.
Richard’s main focus is on helping to create bridges between conventional schools and what is emerging as the new paradigm for education. The Peace School embodies much of the thinking that constitutes the new paradigm and the desire of its founders to work with public school staff to bridge between the old and the new is what has attracted Richard to it. He is also attracted to the school’s emphasis on peace, which conveys that school is about more than education. It is about establishing a future in which all people can flourish.
In addition to his years of public school teaching, his views have been shaped by several summers of working at children’s day and residential summer camps, teaching abroad and for the University of Ottawa Faculty of Education, and a master’s degree in computer application in education. In 2017 he founded Uniting for Children and Youth with local parents and serves as its director.