A Radical New Kind of 'Probiotic' Education - A Conversation with Dr. Vanessa Andreotti

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

It is a crisis of collective sensemaking. So the role of the teacher, instead of it being the authority in a certain discipline, would be the role of somebody who can help facilitate the metabolizing of everything that's going on cognitively, emotionally, and relationally, and redirect that towards responsibility.

Hi everyone. Thanks so much for joining me for another episode of the podcast. I'm so happy to be able to bring you this episode, which is a long-awaited conversation that I had with Dr. Vanessa Andriotti. With her research collective Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures, Vanessa has been exploring possible educational responses to the current polycrisis that we are facing. What kinds of education would help us to enable healthier possibilities of coexistence that are viable but currently unimaginable within our dominant cognitive and affective frames of reference. Vanessa is the Dean of the Faculty of Education at the University of Victoria, and she's the former Canada Research Chair in Race, Inequalities, and Global Change, and a former David Lam Chair in Critical Multicultural Education. You can find links to her research collective resources in the show notes, as well as a link to her amazing book, Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity's Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism.

Fantastic. Thank you, Vanessa. It's an absolute pleasure to finally get to meet you. We've had some interactions through the IB, and I know you were at the IB Conference in Toronto in July, and I know there's a lot of people out there in the education space who are deeply moved and inspired by your work. So I'm really excited to be able to dig into some of it and some urgent stuff, some important stuff. So Yeah, thank you for joining.

Thank you. It's my pleasure.

So I would love to ask you about the land acknowledgement that you did at the global conference, but perhaps before we do that, you'd like to start us off with a land acknowledgement now.

Thank you. So I'm the Dean of the Faculty of Education at the University of Victoria, and here in what's known as Canada today, we do have this practice of starting with a land acknowledgement, both for, for educational reasons and for political reasons. So there is a land acknowledgement that is from here that is about the Songhees and the Squamish Indigenous peoples and other Lekwungen-speaking and Tsimshian-speaking nations. So we generally say that we pay our respects to the elders, both past, present, and future elders of these nations, and we affirm our responsibility as educators to support the aspirations of Indigenous peoples to have their livelihoods restored and and their systems of education and governance also restituted, right? But I'm also from a mixed heritage family of German and Guarani background, although I here in Canada, I identify as a racialized settler. So I have ancestry that sends me back to Guarani people. And with the Guarani communities in Brazil, there is a much longer land acknowledgement that I've learned that takes the whole day. I'm not gonna do it here, but there are 4 parts of it that I think are very important to start a conversation. So the first part of this land acknowledgement is to acknowledge the land itself as a living entity, not a property or a resource. It's something that we belong to. So our bodies are land as well. So we are an extension of the land, not the other way around. In that this land is currently in a lot of distress. So figuring out how us being together here today can also support the responsibility we have towards the land. So that's the first acknowledgment. The second acknowledgment is of ancestors, and ancestors here are both those who have come before us and those who are yet to come. So it's an acknowledgment that we're part of a continuum of life, and it's not just about human ancestors but also non-human ancestors. And it speaks to our responsibility towards both those who have come before and those who are yet to come. And in that sense, it's an interesting invitation to think about how we honor our disasters. And sometimes dishonoring can take the form of correcting mistakes, for example, and saying, yeah, the buck stops here, right? So especially if recurring mistakes are affecting the possibility of life in the future, which is actually, I think, the case. The third acknowledgment is the acknowledgment of everything that has made it possible for us to be here. And in this case, we do acknowledge the indigenous people of the land. So here it would be the Squamish and the Songhees but we also think about the structural and systemic forces that create the conditions that we have today. So in this sense, we would be thinking about colonialism as what also brought us here today, all the exploitation that happens, for example, in the lands where the minerals for the computers we're using today and for the network connections that make it possible for us to have a conversation online. So we connect with both the, the contributions, the voluntary contributions and the involuntary voluntary processes that are part of, of what creates the possibility for us to, to have this conversation, including the violent and harmful processes, so that we can hold that as part of our responsibility. And the last acknowledgment is the acknowledgment that we are all related, so, and are entangled with each other. This is a big family also currently facing a lot of pain, and in, in that sense, understanding that the pain both inflicted to the land and that we inflict on each other if we are part of, of the same organism or the same metabolism. Our bodies are feeling that pain, and sometimes we try to numb to it with different things, including consumption. But that pain is present in our unconscious and also in our bodies. And here I'm talking about both microplastics in our bloodstream and in placentas, but I'm also talking about, for example, if you're thinking about climate change, the fact that the climate destabilization is not just around us but also within., and, and we are feeling that, and in acknowledging that in the conversation, all these layers brings a different kind of responsibility that, that we have, and, and partly it's intergenerational responsibility of creating the conditions for the possibility of life in the future. So this, this kind of land acknowledgement is about inviting us into a conversation that is responsible towards the past, the present, and the future, and understanding that past, present, and future are not linear, right?

Yeah. No, it's beautiful. No, thank you so much. The thing that I find so interesting about that is how much is coming up in all sorts of different ways, in different conversations, from different directions that point to so many of those same things, right? The just the kind of the connection with the importance of our dependency on each other, on the land, on on the context that we are in and this kind of fluid, the flux and the movement of the ecologies that we're participating in and the entanglement. And so many of the things that you're describing there, I think, are emerging in people's consciousnesses generally about not quite knowing perhaps how to name them. And I think partly that's what's so powerful about your work is that you are giving people some language to talk about this. And I'm, when I say people. I'm talking specifically in my world of education and your world of education, but I think this, I find it so interesting that historically the educational conversation has been about these very kind of linear things like assessment and curriculum and, you know, all of, but actually the things that we're talking about here are deeply educational questions, but they are so much deeper than the operational logistics of schooling, for example. For modern education. And I'd hope we can talk about some of those things in a way, but just the breadth of the, and the depth of the conversation that needs to be had now because of the questions we're being asked educationally, I think is really important.

The kind of moment we're facing too in terms of poly, meta, or permacrisis, right? And the existential threats that are coming.

Yeah. And, and I, I mean, that's a perfect kind of segue into what I'd love to ask you about just in relation to the shared realities that you, you talk about in your work and just how there are different responses to that. So I'd love to ask you about the four denials that you, I think are really, really powerful, but also perhaps what is it partly about this time that we're in? And when we say time, you know, and I, I, I love the challenge to think that it's not we're not in a linear time and it's forwards and it's backwards and it's always, but just there is a kind of a long now that we're in, a moment that is, I mean, Zak Stein calls it a time between worlds and other people give it other names, but how do you describe this current moment?

I think we are at a time of tipping points that we have crossed, and these are tipping points that are affecting people who have been protected from all the exploitation and violence that has been necessary to get us as a society to a point where we define progress and prosperity in the way we do, in terms of wealth accumulation and land as property, right? And when I started working with this, like, 25 years ago, I wanted to look at how we were complicit in the harm we were causing to the planet and how difficult it was to hold that knowledge of complicity and not fall into shame or guilt, but use that as leverage for responsibility. And one of the things that I found is that education was usually thought of as a, a matter of information in addressing ignorance. So it's a lack of information. You present the information, your job is done. But when we're talking about complicity, that was not what was happening. People didn't want to hear that because they were afraid of the feelings that would come and surface with that kind of knowledge. So some people in education have called it difficult knowledge. I'm talking about the work of Deborah Britzman, for example. And this was to do with both knowledge about violence that is systemic, historical, between us, within humanity, and ecological violence too, violence towards other species and towards the rest of nature, towards the land. So I started thinking about then education as a matter of addressing socially sanctioned denials. So denials that we are rewarded for reproducing. And with my research collective, we mapped 4 of them as anchors of the work that we were trying to do in creating containers to address these denials in ways that brought people into responsibility, but without determining what they should do, actually. So we, we were trying to create a process Yeah, that activated a form of responsibility that doesn't require you to be told what to do. It's a form of emergent approach to responsibility where you're going to be able to have the discernment at the time to do the most responsible thing in your context, right, without universal moral parameters that should be imposed on everybody. So the four denials that we identified, the first one was the denial of violence, of the fact that our comforts, our privileges, our securities are subsidized by expropriation, dispossession, destitution, by violence towards the land. It's not a matter of exclusion of other people into our privileges. It's that the problem is that our privileges happen at the expense of others and of other people, of other species, and of the land. So that's the first denial. The second one is the denial of unsustainability. The fact that growth, a growth-based -based economy in a planet that is finite, that is limited, is not sustainable, basically, right? So we can't have infinite growth in a, in a closed system. So the denial of this unsustainability, if you're not thinking about that, you are always investing in this growth, and you're not aware that the promises of prosperity and progress based on this growth-based mentality, they have a limit and they have tipping plants, right? The third denial was the denial of entanglement, the fact that we see ourselves as separate from each other rather than entangled and codependent and co-constituted by the metabolism of the planet. So it's a nested metabolism. We're part of this metabolism, and it's not— when we think about systems, we need to think about the movement of the metabolism, right? So our bodies are land. They've returned to the land. What we eat comes from the land. What we take back to the land goes back to the land and then back into our bodies. So without this metabolic understanding, we have a very mechanistic and reductionist view of existence that is about individuals interacting with each other without the understanding of these exchanges that happen all the time. And the last denial is the denial of the magnitude and complexity of what we're facing. So this refers to this immediacy in our society, which is also associated with consumption, where we want to feel good and to look good by addressing symptoms of things rather than root causes, because root causes are much more complicated. They are wicked challenges, right? And, and then that creates this sense that if we don't have a solution, then it's not worth even thinking about because The emotion behind it is that we have to achieve something. And that kind of thinking really represents a barrier to us being present to the magnitude and depth of the challenge and figuring out how to work with it together.

Yeah, I mean, it's a lot, right? It's a huge amount. And when you think about bringing young people into those denials, because they are systemic denials that institutions and cultures have been built up around, as you say, some on the backs of other people or the exploitation of other peoples and cultures. That's a lot to bring young people into, right? So I, I mean, I'm so with you on the educational invitation of that, but knowing how to work with that with young people, I mean, 'cause as you, I know you, you talk about different ways that people respond and you know, there's a lot of climate anxiety out there in young young people. And so, you know, there's, there's a lot of different ways. There's the kind of solutionism, the changemaker work that is happening in education a lot. Let's fix it. Let's get, let's get together and fix the problem because we know there's a problem. So it, it's a really interesting question, I think, about how do we hold that with and for young people who are in our care, right? That we're working with in our schools or in our educational settings. So is there something there in terms of the response that people have, or the— how do we hold some of that space for them?

Yeah, this, this has been— this is your work— focus. Yeah, how to bring people in an uncoercive way to rearrange the desires that have been imprinted by the system, right? So if we think about it in terms of a neurobiological setup, our education system is very much based on mastery, achievement, And I would use metaphorically this, the sense that it's very dopamine-driven. And if people don't get what they are looking for, they don't know other educational systems, right? And if we think about the last 30 years and what has changed in society and how education has really failed to catch up with the amount of complexity and also the crossing of these tipping points, right? So if we fail to do that, that's the only system we also know. Right? It's mastery and achievement based. So what we have been trying to theorize and propose is a, is an education approach that is probiotic, basically. Right? So it already realizes that people are in an environment of information saturation. Right? So we are, have already been exposed to everything like the internet, Google, and now AI have really fundamentally changed the role of the teacher. So before, like, let's say in the '90s, before the internet became available to more people, the teacher was the one curating the curriculum, curating the reality that the student would be exposed to. And this was often a state, a national project, right? That you create the curriculum that the citizen, the well-rounded citizen is gonna be exposed to, or that the workforce that you need is going to be exposed to. With Google and the massive internet, that role is gone. Like the curation of information is is not in the hands of teachers anymore, although this is still super difficult to land for the profession. So I still work with teachers who believe that what they choose as a curriculum is going to be what, like, the parameters that the students are going to experience their reality through, right? When the technology has taken a very different role in the mediation of how people understand the world and their experience of reality. So probiotic education is much more about processing these things because we are consuming information, we are consuming experiences, we are consuming critique, we're consuming outrage, we're consuming emotions and relationship. And there is this enormous constipation, basically, of things that are unprocessed because we don't have even the time to sit and be able to digest what's going on. So an education that is probiotic or prebiotic would help people to process and digest not only cognitively, but affectively and relationally the challenges of our, our current time, which, and I may agree with Daniel Schmattenberger, it is a, a crisis of collective sensemaking. So the role of the teacher, instead of it being the authority in a certain discipline, would be the role of somebody who can help facilitate the metabolizing of everything that's going on cognitively, emotionally, and relationally, and, and redirect that towards responsibility.

Yeah, I find it fascinating because I mean, I absolutely hear you and on the role of the technology, but I think there is still a very deep sense for a lot of educators that there is a role there for them to play, right? It's not, it's not that we just allow the technology to do all of the curation of this information for these young people, because we know all sorts of reasons why that can be problematic and dangerous, you know, information overload, all sorts of things for young people. So there's a role there. I, I feel it as well. I think there's a role there for educators to do some of the gesturing or pointing or, or like Gert Biester talks about it in that sense of kind of pointing, right? Here's something to look at, you know, an invitation, right? So there is a curation role, but I really appreciate what you're saying about that. Processing, digesting role, like how do you, as an educator, how do you facilitate some of that process? Because as we've talked about, it is a lot, you know, it's a lot in terms of volume, but it's also a lot in terms of the depth of the ideas and the gravity of the ideas that we're dealing with. So, and I also love the embodied metaphors that you use, because I think that's an increasing sense coming into education is that we've been so disembodied in the way that we've done education. It's been an information, as you say, an informational problem in our heads. Actually, there's something very embodied that needs to shift. But all, all of these things I think are, as, as they use the word radical, but I, I think they are quite radical moves for a lot of educators who are working in formal education situations, right? In schools. And, you know, I'm, I'm jumping ahead a little bit, so I'd love to get to some of those more practical questions, I suppose, about how we support the educators, but Maybe you said the word consume and I, I just, I think this is brilliant. I would just love to just spend a moment on it. Your 6 Cs. So I was telling somebody who wasn't aware of your work the other day about your book and Hospicing Modernity is the title of your book, which is, and, and the person was just like, wow, what a phrase. I mean, the phrase itself, the title of the book is so powerful that there is something deeply important going on that is transitioning from, we are, you know, there's something dying and something new is coming into being. It's amazing. But part of that, you describe these 6 Cs of modernity, which I think you've said consume already, but I think there's, that would really useful framing. And I know, I don't know, I just think it's funny that, yeah, education seems obsessed with Cs, right? It's always Cs, collaboration, creativity, you know, whatever. All these 21st— exactly. All these 21st century skills nonsense, all of that kind of stuff. But yeah, the, perhaps you could just briefly go through what those 6 Cs are again, just to kind of help people. I think it's, it was helpful for me to notice certain things that, that show up that are perhaps remnants of the kind of the more modern approach.

Yeah, no, I, I would, I, I will go there, but I would like to go back to what you said about the curation. I, I believe that there is, our role is of curation of experiences rather than curation of knowledge. Right?

Absolutely.

So if you're thinking about mastery education as helping students climb the peak and achieve that, that conquering of the peak, probiotic education is more about inviting them for a deep dive in the freezing ocean so that they can discover that their bodies are water. They're diving in the water that is also their bodies, and they're also everything that we we put in the water that makes it unlivable, right? So figuring out these layers of existence and interdependence and entanglement is something that our current education system based on mastery hasn't touched. Yeah. For a long time, right? So figuring out what the current education system has done in terms of imprints of our cognitive frames, our affective landscape, and now the scope of relational possibilities we have is the first step in understanding the limits of the system. So the cartography you're talking about, it was an acronym of 6 Cs, is related to how we are indoctrinated into seeking certainty, control, a form of coherence that really makes it very difficult for us to sit with complexity. So we are indoctrinated into seeing consumption as a way of relating to the world, imposing consensus, and, and kind of editing out different perspectives and possibilities. And the system rewards for that, right? And it's— this is not a thinking problem, it's more like an addiction, right? It's libidinal attachments to these things. So we've been thinking with my research collective, the latest work we've been doing is around the University of the Forest. It's a collaboration with the Huni Kui people in the Amazon, and it is in conversation also with the Consilience Project. Especially their, um, so they put forward an understanding of narrow boundary intelligence, wide boundary intelligence versus wisdom.

Yeah.

So education in this context would be a move from narrow boundary intelligence, which is the 6 Cs, and which is optimization. It's goal optimization. It generally is about either utility maximization or profit maximization. Yeah, so we move from narrow boundary understandings and approaches to wide boundary approaches, which are much more layered. So from narrow boundary to wide boundary, we have a shift, an effective shift in relationship to reality, which then acknowledges the, the wicked challenges, acknowledges the complexity, both the complexity of the self and the complexity around you, the complexity of language, the complexity of any concept that we put on the table that has many different layers of meaning that are context dependent. And figuring out how we can do this bridge and this invitation for people to do that is part of, I think, as educators, what we need to be thinking about. So for example, we have mapped 4 ways of reasoning that are necessary for you to go from narrow boundary intelligence to wide boundary intelligence. And these are diffraction. So in narrow boundary thinking, you're used to reductionism. Diffraction is about seeing the moving layers of things. In reductionism, what happens is that you, you even see the moving layers, but you flatten these layers, you impose a narrative of coherence, and you police the borders of this narrative. And the energy necessary to keep that lid on that pressure cooker is now what's creating anxiety in people, right? So I want to hold on to this narrative because I, I do not have the stamina or capacity to actually allow myself to be present to the layers of complexities and paradoxes and contradictions that are all around me. And this is because I want to present myself as a Cartesian, coherent, self-transparent individual. Who has a very fixed identity and we want others to acknowledge and validate that identity. So as you move to wide boundary thinking, instead of being fixated on form, you start to pay attention to movement, to the movement in everything, including the movements in your own identity. And you're not trying to arrive somewhere, but you're trying to walk together or to move together or to breathe together or to dance together. As we approach the different layers of reality. So diffraction is absolutely necessary in this move. So figuring out how many people there are in your bus, for example. So inviting people to see themselves as a bus of passengers with different drivers and different decks is part of, of the diffraction movement. Because if you don't see, if you, you cannot be present to your own complexity, there's no chance you're gonna be able to be present to the complexity around you. Yeah. So this is one of the things we have. There are more.

Yeah. I know there's the, the other three, I would actually, it would be really lovely to go into those, but if I could just on that point about the diffraction, I think one of the things that's interesting about the educational move that we often make is we say that the young people can't handle the complexity that we are talking about. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna narrow the boundaries. Things in order to make them more task-specific and reduce the cognitive load, right? That's a phrase that is just everywhere in education now. Let's reduce the cognitive load so we can make it manageable for young people because we've removed some of the kind of complex noise and we're just really taking it down to the signal of the thing that we want them to learn. And this is, it's a really compelling narrative for educators, right? With young children, you know, it's like we've gotta simplify these things. But actually there's something else going on here. Cause I think when you start challenging the informational paradigm, what you are talking about there is something, of course, you know, when you then start imagining young people moving and dancing and flowing with, you know, it's of course they're comfortable with that. And I, I hear you very strongly that when you try and maintain that, when everything outside is saying no, the world is much more fluid and moving and complex. Than this artificial thing going on in the classroom. It takes a lot of energy to keep that fiction controlled somehow, right?

Yeah.

I don't know, maybe, yeah, maybe you could just reflect on that in relation to, because that is with the young people particularly, that is often what we say we need to do as responsible adults.

It's interesting, I think what you, what you're saying, cuz there, if we're thinking about that there's a cognitive, affective, and relational dimension, to this, right? And making decisions like two generations removed for the incoming generations, we will tend to project what our generational cohort felt was needed, right? So we see it a lot with teachers saying, oh, the kids need— right now they are feeling eco-anxiety, they need hope. But what they imagine is what they would have needed in that age, right? As a source of hope. Whereas these kids are in a completely different environment. They have different characteristics of the generational cohort that they're in. And they may need something very different that where we are from, like generationally, we can't imagine.

Yeah.

So I think there is a role in terms of reduction of noise and creation of pathways, but these pathways are not about arriving at an understanding. That is specific in form. The pathway that we need is one that can expand our capacity and children's capacity to hold space for the complexity without feeling overwhelmed, without feeling immobilized, without demanding quick fixes, and without demanding to be rescued from the discomfort of it. But if we have a generation of teachers who are not comfortable with the discomfort There's also the problem that we won't be able to create conditions for the people who are coming after us, the incoming generations, to approach the problem in a different way. We will be trying to imprint what has been imprinted on us.

Yeah, exactly. But I think to your point about the affective, and we are obsessed with the cognitive in education and we remove all the others. And you talk, I know you talk about modern education as educating the head for the body and the behavior to follow. And again, it's a major shift. That's not what the, all of these things we're talking about is inviting us into. It's something much like with the probiotic idea, right? Educating the gut for the heart to be filled so that a head can follow. I, I just think, I mean, that's just such a wonderful phrase, right? And that's a completely different framing of, again, the role of the educator because it's not an informational problem. You know, as you said, the starting point is not a lack of information, it's something else. And I loved what you said about curating experience, because again, I think even the cognitive science now is beginning to show that it's embodied, enacted, embedded experiences that actually is where the learning is happening. It's not an informational question, actually.

Yeah. And thinking about this curation, at least in 3 layers, there's a cognitive layer for sure, but there's an affective layer, there's a relational layer. And like having a critique of the, the current culture that we have that takes us away, moves us away from responsibility and accountability. So the experience would be anchored in how can we be more responsible intergenerationally, ecologically, socially, in a non-coercive way, because you're not going to be able to tell people what to think or what to do. People will have to have their own epiphanies and be able to adapt to whatever it is that the world is asking them to do. It, it, um, I had once, uh, talked to Gert Vesta about a book that we wanted to write together related to what kind of teaching equips us for the possibility of being taught, right? And he makes a distinction between learning from and being taught by. So learning from, you already know what you're gonna learn. Being taught by is when you are interpolated by something that changes you that couldn't have been predicted. From the outside. So figuring out a way of creating an educational approach that allows people to encounter the world in a very different way without losing the historicity of this world, right? And the world in all its complexity. So the idea of wisdom, I think, and Daniel Schmattenberger's work was the one that connected to Chief Niinawákonikwe from the Amazon in terms of creating a connection there, because wisdom then for Chief Niinowa was about healing, because he sees colonialism not as a machine that goes and bulldozes over everything, which is one of the manifestations. This is a symptom of a disease, and this disease is something that impairs our ability to relate and to feel responsible.

Yeah.

Right? So we feel individualized, we externalize responsibility, and we believe that we have unrestricted and unaccountable autonomy. To live our best lives basically without being responsible for the consequence. So we are immune to the consequences of our actions. And then wisdom would be about leaning into the fact that we're part of something much bigger than ourselves. So that is in motion, in constant motion. So there is a materiality of the world that is both visible and invisible, and that is both temporal and atemporal. And there's a mystery of the world too. It's not— the world's not something we can describe in language and control and predict. So language is perceived then as a heuristic rather than a description of the world. So it's the matter, the motion, and the mystery of our own existence too. So approaching living and dying in this wider way is what then activates the stay in the gut, right? That there's more to this than I can see, there's more to this than language can describe. I'm part of something much bigger with others. So Chief Ninawa also talks about something that I— there are certain anchors in the education of the Huni Kui people in the Amazon, which was the research project that initiated all of this. So we were interested in what kind of education would keep Indigenous youth in the Amazon connected to the struggle and defending the forest, right? And seeing themselves as part of the forest when there are so many forces trying to move you away from that, including assimilation, right? And one of the things that came out very strongly there is that, is that this, this idea of you educate the gut. That's because responsibility is an intuitive— it has— it cannot be a responsibility, cannot be an intellectual choice, basically, when you're faced with the demand for you to do the most responsible thing, even if it goes against your self-interest, even if you have to put your life on the line, it is a response from the gut. It's not a calculation in the head, right? So how do we really pay attention to the education of the gut so that there is a rigor, a relational and even an intellectual rigor in how we respond to that? So it's not about romanticizing intuition, for example, but it's about an educated approach to intuition and how that changes our neurobiology. Right. And how do we— it is a neurochemical, neurophysical process rather than a matter of concepts in your head.

Yeah.

We went into that process and a lot of what we heard is that education for Western societies is a process of healing, but also of realizing that our identity and sense of belonging have been trapped trapped within human constructs, which are always going to be exclusionary. So whatever group and whatever way you define your identity, it's always in relation to who is not, right? And what they said is that although this is important still, because we can't let go of the historicity of, of how we got here through this concept, and, and it's layered, it's not either or, it's both and more, there's another identity that is felt and manifests through an umbilical cord we have with the core of the Earth, and that the Earth has with also the rest of the universe. So you can think about it as a metaphor, or you can think about it in terms of quantum entanglement. That umbilical cord is there, and it's through this umbilical cord that the land tells you also what needs to happen. And through dreams and visions and experience, theogenic experiences, you will know that there's gonna be a drought and you have to move up the river to be able to find food, for example. Or what's the next step that we need to do as humanity in order not to prematurely go extinct. So that umbilical cord is like an antenna that takes you to the consciousness and bio-intelligence of the land, or bio-wisdom of the land, and infuses your gut and your body. With the pathway that you need to take with other people and other beings ahead to face the challenges you have to face. So what they are interested in, in the University of the Forest project, is to say, look, many Indigenous peoples have developed relational sciences and technologies to an advanced state.

Yeah.

And without relational sciences and technologies, these sciences and technologies that we have are devoid of responsibility, right? Or they're only accountable to the market, let's say. And bringing it back and having a place where we can have both Indigenous or relational sciences and technologies and sciences and technologies that are modern and that are about building things would be extremely important right now to face the, the poly crisis and meta crisis that we're now immersed in.

Yeah.

Right.

Yeah. It's so, I find it so interesting because it sounds like such a lot of shifts that we need to make, or I'll speak for myself. Just, I, I said, I think I said to you, I'd been reading Mary Battiste's work about cognitive imperialism. And I just, I find that the way that in European Western context, in, in a very formal schooling way, and it's created this whole infrastructure of like ontologies of separation and epistemologies of separation. Like we, we've separated ourselves from ourselves and from the world. And what you're talking about sounds incredible, but it sounds so far away from my personal experience as a learner in school and then my experience as an educator in a schooling context. I mean, you know, it sounds like it's this incredible other planet that I'd love to go and visit, right? So that's kind of my, I'm trying to badly articulate how it feels as you're talking, because it's, and it goes right back to where we started. And that's why I love the land acknowledgement, because all of the things you're talking about, about the depth of education, was all in that land acknowledgement that you made about the dependency and the interconnection and all of those things. So it's, I suppose the question, there's a question in there somewhere about what are the steps towards this new relational ontology and a new relational epistemology that people people can make when they are feeling in this very separated space?

It's going to be by necessity. So it's not gonna— I think one of the things we've realized as a collective, as a research collective, when we started working with it, is that a culture needs to be ready for change. And it's ready for change when what used to work is not working anymore, right? So we have passed certain tipping And we sometimes, when we pass this tipping point, some people then realize we passed the tipping point and they want to go back. And that's where sometimes they vote to people who promise to bring it back, right? And then we have people also exploiting this for political gain. But all the tipping points we've crossed in terms of climate, in terms of biodiversity, in terms of our own psychological infrastructure, right, that we have. I believe when we look at the schools today and all the crisis we are facing here in BC and in, in other places about, uh, the teaching profession. And so there's record levels of attrition, record levels of emotional dysregulation and dysfunction in schools. And this is just the canary in the mine, right? So the kids reflect a meta-crisis that is happening in society. And in teacher education, if we continue to teach our teacher candidates for a stable system, of course they're going to enter the stable system and not be able or equipped to deal with the level of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity that they will find there. So figuring out at this point how to see teachers as frontline workers of the crisis and equipping people to be able to be stable in the context of instability. And this stability in the context of instability is different from the way that we used to think about stability before. So I generally use capoeira. I don't know if you know Brazilian dance/martial art.

Yeah.

So in capoeira, if you just stop and if you have— so you, you have to be in movement and balance.

Yeah.

Right? Because if you're just in movement, you get knocked if you're not anchored. And if you're just anchored without moving, you also get knocked. And the, the other way to think about it is I'm thinking about the eye of the storm. If you are in the eye of the storm, you have to walk with the storm. If you walk too fast, you get caught in the vortex. If you walk too slow, you also get caught. So figuring out how to offer teacher education, both in-service and pre-service, that prepares people for a world of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, that offers courageous climate education that doesn't shield people from the reality, that creates the stamina and all cognitive, relational, and affective capacities for people to stay with the trouble and for them to find joy in the struggle itself rather than in the imagined prize at the end, right? So it's— we're talking about adaptability, we're talking about transsystemic affective resonance, we're talking about the diffraction that we need, but we're also talking about a compass. And it's not— I'm I'm not talking about a moral compass, but an ethical compass. The difference is that instead of kind of a conceptual universal understanding, we have this principle of relationship, of good relationship, which is about trust, respect, reciprocity, consent, and accountability towards everything. So if we have a compass, the compass we are working with in that sense is pointing in to 4 different dimensions. Patients. So we need emotional stability or emotional sobriety, which means interrupting our imprinted compulsions that we have for consumption, certainty, control, coherence, but also learning how to process trauma differently, both systemic trauma, interpersonal trauma, intergenerational trauma. There's a lot of trauma to be composted, right? And we need to learn languages to do that. But I'm not only talking about worded languages. There's languages of the body. There's language of dance that can process these things. The second thing is relational maturity. So figuring out how to age well in terms of your relational responsibilities, which means sometimes doing what you don't want to do, but what's needed, right? And it is about also restraint rather than unlimited and unaccountable autonomy. Then intellectual discernment that allows us to deal with complexity, to navigate complexity, not shy away from it. And then there is intergenerational responsibility. So figuring out in order to honor our ancestors what needs to be corrected so that we can say the buck stops here and offering younger people the opportunity to make their own mistakes as long as they are different mistakes from the ones already made. Yeah.

Yeah. And, and I think just the, the relational point just comes through again and again for me is the, just the sense that this is not individual work. This is not something that I will go away and do for myself, with myself, just figure it all out. This is deeply communal collective work. And therefore, there's something there, I think, about educational contexts, the cultures within those contexts also. Need to simultaneously adapt to be something much warmer, as Nora might say, or something much more deeply relational in order to hold those emotions and all, you know, all of the things that you've talked about, about the sobriety and the maturity that it's gonna take a lot of support from everyone around us. And the adults are gonna need some support as well as the children. And it's, yeah, there's something there as well around How do we organize those communal settings for these things to happen in? Because currently we've got these monstrous factory schools with 5,000 children in it. I mean, you know, by definition, very rigid and, and scaled systems of managing large numbers of groups of people. It's not about human interrelationship. So there's something else there that I think needs to adapt.

Yeah. And I think if, if we think about the standardized schooling system that we have right now, the modern schooling system, it is created to optimize narrow boundary intelligence. So one part of the step that we have is towards wide boundary intelligence, and from there to wisdom, to relational— we can call it relational quantum wisdom that acknowledges the entanglement we have with everything. And in that sense, what what we see is that like Indigenous peoples cannot like curate that curriculum for you, but they can point the direction. And the direction that we've seen over and over again is one of responsibility and restraint and how to reeducate ourselves once we have been educated in this culture of expansion of entitlements, how we can reeducate ourselves to be responsible for the future in the sense of restraint is one of the biggest challenges. Scientists too.

Yeah. Amazing. And, and there's something there as well about the future. Not, I mean, Indi Johar talks about it rhyming with the past, right? The future rhyming with the past. And I, you know, as we started with the land acknowledgement, that the forwards and the backwards, as you talked about, it's because we've gotta integrate the current, as you brought in AI and the technology and those things need to be part of, well, they don't need to be, but I think they are a feature of our current reality. They need to be somehow held in relation to some of these things we're talking about.

It's part of everything. I think AI is, is, is another conversation. It could, in terms of wide boundary intelligence, it can give us the synthesis or the, the tools of synthesis that we, we will need, but it will depend on the kinds of questions we ask.

Of course. So, but, but I guess about the wisdom. Yeah, exactly. And, but the point is not that there is a, a desire here in what we're talking about to go back to a romanticized the past, right? Where people had figured this out and now we just lost our way with modernity. No, there's something else happening, which is about giving birth to this other thing, which is, as Indy says, rhymes with the past, but is something different and has integrated some of this technology and whatever.

Yeah. And hospicing what's harmful without losing track of the lessons and the teachings of what's dying. So hospicing is about disinvesting in the futurity of something. That is already dying, but that also had a lot of harmful things disguised as beneficial. So figuring out how to sit with that knowledge and offer palliative care so that there is a death with integrity. At the same time that you're offering prenatal care to something that is gestating and that is potentially, but not necessarily, wiser. So the wisdom of this, this new system will depend on than the depth of learning that we have about the spirit that is dying, right? So figuring out how to get people to sit between life and death, moving them away from whatever it is that has been imprinted in us in terms of the old system, of the forms of well-being that were sold to us in the old system, figuring out there are other forms of well-being that have now been exiled and that need to be brought back And some of them are about going through processing pain together, right? Processing trauma collectively and finding ourselves in a group where— of inquiry, for example, with curiosity and seeking epiphany rather than achievement and finding ourselves in a position where we see ourselves as both insufficient and indispensable to the task at hand. Yeah, that's, that's a different way of understanding existence. It's not an understanding because it's not a conceptual problem. It's about experiencing existence.

No, thank you. I mean, this is amazing. I, I know that also there is an appetite for it out there. I mean, you know, I've, I've spoken to Nora Bateson on the podcast. I know, you know, Nora, you're doing some work with her. You know, that's now the most listened to episode that, from the whole podcast from the last 4 years. I, that tells me that there is an an appetite for a different way of thinking about the problems that my colleagues face in, in all sorts of situations where they are working as educators or leaders. And it's, yeah, there's an appetite there and I just so appreciate your work. And I know we've tried to cover a lot in a short amount of time. And so I would really recommend that people go and spend time with, I mean, there's a lot of your work online, but also the book Hospiting Modernity. And it's, I mean, it's an incredible incredible amount of amazing work that you have done and continue to do. So thank you so much for spending the time with me and amazing. Thank you. Thank you. We hope you've enjoyed this episode. Please feel free to continue the dialogues with our guests, with us on our blog or on social media, or within your own networks.