Creating an inquiry and research culture in our schools - A Conversation with Prof. Rex Li and Dr. Clara Cheng

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

Dewey is quite relevant to 21st century education. His lab school, experimental school that he started in 1896, you can say he affected me 100 years later. In 1996, I started GT College because of that inspiration.

Hi everyone, and welcome back to the podcast. My name's Tim Logan, and the podcast is brought to you in partnership with Notosh. In this week's conversation with Professor Rex Lee and Dr. Clara Cheng, we take a wide-ranging look at how we can take inspiration and ideas from past educational projects, such as those of John Dewey and Professor Howard Gardner, as we develop education into the future. But also, we're thinking about how we can learn from the experiences of schools such as GT College in Hong Kong about how we can use research and inquiry themselves as practices to enable students and teachers to deepen their own learning and growth. This is as individuals and professionals, but also as part of nurturing a broader learning community. Professor Rex Lee is a psychologist and founder and curriculum director of GT College and founder of the Gifted Education Council. Dr. Clara Cheng is the head of research and training at GT College. Well, I've been very much looking forward to this conversation. Thank you very much for joining, uh, Rex and Clara. I'll ask you in a moment if you wouldn't mind just introducing yourselves, but it's particularly poignant for me with Professor Gardner having made the introduction. So Professor Howard Gardner, I know you both know him well and he's done work with you at the college, but I think what I'm particularly interested in is the way in which you have taken many of his ideas and the ideas of John Dewey, we will talk about, and really implemented those in practice as you founded the school, GT College in Hong Kong. So many different interesting concepts and theories and practice I hope we'll get into today. So thank you very much for joining.

Thank you very much for inviting us to join the program. I'm really honored to be here. And it is very nice that I got Clara to support because she is the Director of Research and Training in our college, and she would be able to talk much more about the latest research that we are now doing.

That's fantastic. Clara, would you like to just introduce yourself briefly?

Yeah, sure. I've been working at GT, or no, working with Professor Lee in the research for gifted and talented education. And we've been working on using our ground data to conduct research for those cases. Okay. At the moment, we focus a bit more on quantitative studies and then we publish published our journal about, for example, like the education philosophies and then the case studies findings to do with gifted and talented children. So, and then we have been, we established student research team, our teacher research team. So since COVID yeah.

Great. No, amazing. No, and we'll definitely talk about that a bit more. And I've seen you very kindly shared a couple of the editions of the journal, which is amazing. And that idea of integrating theory and practice. Through, you know, practitioner research and involving the students. It just sounds fantastic. So yeah, would certainly love to talk about that. So thank you. Perhaps we could firstly just start, um, with you, Professor Lee, just thinking about, it was quite funny actually, because one of the, I contacted Professor Gardner and obviously I'm very interested in his ideas of multiple intelligences and things, but he introduced you to me as someone to, to speak to. And he didn't realize that I'd actually been searching for somebody who was an expert in the life and work of John Dewey. So it was a perfect coincidence for me because, and I, I then discovered you had written this wonderful book called Rediscovering Dewey, a really comprehensive overview of John Dewey's life. And so I would just love to ask you the question to start with. I have many, many questions about John Dewey for you. I'll try and keep it short, but to start with, let's just say, why do you feel that we need to rediscover John Dewey now as we think about education for the 21st, 22nd century? Why is John Dewey still relevant to that?

Yeah, John Dewey was born in '59 and he belongs to the 19th century, but has enormous impact on the 20th century. In fact, the whole education of the 20th century were very much based on his ideas and his ideas become mainstream, like learning by doing, education is living, child-centered education, democratic citizenship, and so forth. His impact is very strong in the first part of 20th century, but slowly declined in the second half of 20th century. And in 21st century, people seem to have forgotten about him. But in fact, his concern is very much up to today. For example, even in today's education, learning is just too academic. Too abstract. And John Dewey wants learning by doing. We are learning by concept, not learning by doing. So that's the problem that John Dewey has pointed out. Also, learning here is learning to earn a living. But John Dewey said learning is to live, not just earn and make a living. So these are the important ideas about education. And he wants education to promote democracy. And that is still a problem that we face today in promoting democracy to avoid war, to end war. But we are now having a lot of wars and people are fighting around. And John Dewey is in support of peace education. He wants nations to collaborate, work together, to live in a peaceful manner. So, so Dewey is quite relevant to 21st century education. That is my view.

Yeah, no, I would absolutely agree. And it feels very urgent now with, as you say, with a lot of conflict going on around the world and obviously with you in Hong Kong and questions around democracy. And I'm sure that's very relevant to you as well. One of the things that you, as I say, there's a lot of the arc of his own history and his own work that you chart in the book. But I was interested particularly in, if I could pick up on a couple of the unifying ideas which you talk about. You've already mentioned about learning by doing and the importance of experience and action in John Dewey's philosophy of education, but the subtitle of your book is about psychology, and obviously he was both in psychology and in philosophy. So how did the psychology and the philosophy connect, do you think, in the way that he then, you know, brought up his educational psychology and philosophy? How did those things intersect?

Yeah, that is a very difficult question and a deep question that I try to answer in my book. A lot has been written on John Dewey's education and philosophy, but nobody really studied his psychology comprehensively. So when I started my journey on studying Dewey, I want to see how his idea developed. And quite surprisingly, he studied a lot psychology and his first publication, first book published is psychology textbook in 1886. So he was born in 1859, and then 20 years later in 1879, he studies in Johns Hopkins University under Stanley Hall to study psychology. But on that year, 1879, it is really the year that psychology began to separate from philosophy. In that year, a great experimental psychologist named, uh, Wilhelm Wundt in Germany started the first psychology lab. So psychology is turning experimental, turning to study the human brain in scientific experimental ways, and they try to get rid of philosophy, getting out of philosophy. But John Dewey is interested in both, and in fact he started philosophy much earlier, even in his middle school years and early college years. So he studied college years philosophy and then graduate school psychology and philosophy. And the interesting thing is psychology is more in demand than philosophy in his times. So he focused so much on psychology, yet he wanted to bring in philosophy into psychology And the two subjects have different questions. For example, in philosophy, you have the question of validity, truth, concepts, and how and what to study.

Yeah.

But psychology, you have just to find the facts and the experiments. And John Dewey is trying to piece together the two and hope to work out a way that the two can function together. That may not be very successful because, as we see in the, uh, Tim, you may know, in 20th century philosophy and psychology, they went separate ways. They're definitely separate. So John Dewey is at the junction of psychology and philosophy separating.

Absolutely. And it, I agree very much that it feels like the power of his work is because he was allowing those two things to support and critique each other. Because I think at the beginning of the 20th century, you know, there was a lot of infatuation with the idea of the science of psychology and the, the optimism around what that could provide in terms of insights about human beings in some really quite dangerous ways. I'd love to ask you about in a moment in relation to eugenics, but two others of the unifying ideas that you identify are wholeness and growth. And I think perhaps you could just speak to those two ideas in relation to that idea of how was Dewey's psychology influencing his ideas about human beings and growth and this idea of wholeness.

Yes. Growth, wholeness, and development. Yeah, these are the very basic ideas that John Dewey have, like organicity and experience and action and all these things.

Would you mind just explaining organicity? Because that may be a word that isn't familiar to everybody.

That is, things are seen as organic. That is, an entity may have different parts. They may act together and interact. In fact, it is organic in the, in the, around the word of organic and in contrast with inorganic. But what is more important about Dewey's ideas is bring in science into philosophy because in German philosophy from Hegel, it is very much on, we may say, speculative on some of the human thoughts, entities, and so forth, but they're not substantive. And Dewey wants to bring in science and then he wants to bring in the most important idea, evolution. Everything's in an evolutionary process. And that is also the concept of growth. Evolution and growth, in fact, are the same thing, we build up. So that is something new in Dewey, that he wants to see growth in psychology so that child development, working step by step from young children to adults and so forth. So that is what John Dewey did in the early 20th century.

Yeah, no, amazing. And there's a great phrase which I know you talk about in the book, which I'd already seen, and I've had Sanjay Sarma on the podcast and he's written a book called Grasp where he talks about this as well, but it's from the book by Ellen Condliff-Lagaman where she talks about you can't really understand the history of education until you acknowledge that Thorndike won and Dewey lost.

Yeah. Right.

So, so this is Edward Thorndike, very much more coming from a behaviorist psychology perspective.

Yeah.

Right.

So, but I don't know, perhaps you'd like to say something about that because I think actually if you look at the longer view as you are doing with the book, You know, maybe Dewey's ideas actually outlasted Thorndike.

Yeah, right. Yes, Thorndike is in fact a great psychologist and he started behaviorism, we can say, because instead of studying people, he studied cats and see how cats, later people study mice, how mice could learn by trial and error. That is how How thought is discovered. And then that becomes the paradigm of psychology for at least 30 or 50 years. A lot of things based on that direction, psychology developed behaviorism and also functionalism. That is, they have to make sure that all the entities, all the concepts functionally defined and operationalized so that it can be under experimental conditions to do research. This is the whole package. From Thorndike, and he has enormous impact because he, the scientific study of psychology and even of education from Thorndike. But John Dewey is different. He wants a more humanistic way of presenting. He wants to see the dynamics of children's growth. And so he proposed child-centered education. He proposed learning by doing. He talked a lot about experience and so forth. So in the long run, I used to say that Dewey's ideas enter into the heads of teachers, of practitioners, of even parents, and Thorndike's ideas get into the heads of the school principals, the educators, the educational psychologists, or the school psychologists who do the testing, assessment, and so forth, and special education as well. This is very important that they can work on with behavioral modification, with improvement in the behavioral instance. Sondha is making good contribution, but in different way from Dewey.

Absolutely. But I would also love to point out that he was also an ardent eugenicist. I mean, his ideas, and this goes back to what we were saying about the idea of psychology, is that there is an idea that you can measure human beings in order to provide a metric about that relates to the superiority of certain races and certain people from different backgrounds versus others. And I think your point about the fact that those ideas were much more amenable to the people building the systems, the testing systems, standardized testing, the school principals, the administrators is really quite significant because we've then inherited, I think, a system. I think we're still dealing with those decisions that were made. And there were many, many eugenicists around in the early 20th century. Francis Galton being the father of eugenics, who, you know, he coined the term eugenics and also the, the inventor of the intelligence test and the anthropometric lab. So there's something there for me about how eugenics and this idea of testing humans to rank them and order them and create superiority and hierarchy has been built into the education system somehow. And I think I read a really interesting paper called Dewey's Dilemma: Eugenics, Education, and the Art of Living, which is a very interesting take on how Dewey managed to resist the eugenics urge, partly because of what you're saying about his— the fact that he brought in philosophy and process philosophy and was very much about organic growth and evolution and not about inherited characteristics which never change, and therefore we can rank certain people like, you know, racial superiority and those kinds of things, which I think obviously were incredibly damaging Right.

Yeah, you're quite right that eugenics is a word that started maybe from Galton and then trying to rank people by their genetic components and then in hierarchy so that they can do different things. And the interesting thing about Thorndike is that he seemed to have many children or people that he tried to rank.

Yeah.

But their understanding was superseded probably by the new discovery in DNA and in all these new things that we are still learning. We still don't really understand much, but it is not just so simple inherited characteristics. It is not that simple. A lot of work going on in our human genetic components. Some of the factors could be random, some would be environmental. In fact, it is another very complicated field beyond my understanding. And yet it, it has a lot of bearings in education, probably with Nobody believed that people should be ranked by order in a way that a society should not be.

Absolutely. And I mean, it's certainly beyond my expertise as well, but epigenetics and omnigenetics and all of the things that are there, but I think are really important areas because this is an insight that Dewey had, was that this was a very deeply problematic direction that education would go in. Because he was coming, as you rightly say, because of his philosophy, he was able to bring in ideas like moral equality of human beings to complement his ideas of growth and evolution and environmental factors and put those things together. And you really honor the growth of individuals in their unique ways rather than trying to categorize groups of people. As fixed and, you know, really unchanging. So I think he really did, he was incredibly progressive in the way that he had that insight and was able to hold that insight in the early 20th century.

Yeah. Even as today, one century has passed, we are still talking about IQ tests and the assumption of general intelligence tests is that there exists something called general intelligence in which it is inherited, it is born with you. And it cannot be changed. This is the main point of the premises that general intelligence is, and that's what Howard Gardner is very strongly against. And that is in fact what we are doing, multiple intelligence rather than general intelligence. I don't object to the fact that there is certain kind of general intelligence in academic ways, but we have so many ways. We have music, we have creativity, we have dances, we have visual art, we have all these things. We should not be just narrowly focused on academic thinking or logical mathematical intelligence and linguistic ones. Yeah, that is the point.

Exactly. No, absolutely. And I would really love to ask you about how you have— so that, that's the segue between Dewey and Gardner, which I think is really powerful. And then you've begun to implement those ideas in GT College in practice. So I really would love to come to that in a moment, but there's just one other thing I would love if we can just to ask. I would really curious about Dewey in relation to his experience in China, because you say 1919 was a really significant year for Dewey.

Yeah.

And then he spent 3 years in China, and then you quote him in the book saying he writes a letter when he comes back to the US after that. He says nothing Western looks quite the same anymore. And this is as near to a renewal of youth as can be hoped for in this world. So it sounds to me like there was an incredible amount of learning for him in terms of his perspective on cultural dynamics and different things about human beings that he gained from his time in China. So could you just speak a little bit about what was that experience like for him and why was it so significant?

Okay. Yes. Just tell a little bit about the story of John Dewey's visit to China. Because that is of interest to many people studying the academic exchange between the East and the West. This is a really interesting case. And in fact, in 1919, Dewey was invited to Japan in Tokyo University for a talk for a few weeks. And then he took his wife to go to Japan. But at that time, he has many students from China and they wanted him also to go to China to give more talks and speeches. And there he, in, in the month of April and May 1919, he went to China, to Shanghai, the biggest city in, in China. And just at that moment, it began the new cultural movement in China that we call May Fourth Movement. That is, on the 4th of May, a lot of university students go out on on streets, on strikes, on demonstrations because they are against the government. They want change, political change, and so forth. John Dewey was just caught in that enormous social change and political change, and he was so excited about it. He stayed there. He has a lot of disciples. He talked a lot and so forth. Initially, he wanted to just stay for 2 months, then it was extended 1 year. And then he continued to have another appointment and continued for another year until he left in 1921. So that is why it is so much change. You are quite correct to say that he has learned a lot in the process.

But equally, as I understood it, his ideas really resonated with people in China.

Yeah, right. Very well received. First, we know that Dewey himself is very much of Western in outlook. He studied Greek philosophy, he knows Greek history, he knew Roman history, Western history, 19th, 18th century history, philosophy, and all these. But he has very little understanding of the East in the history of philosophy. But then he, this time he went to China, he discovered Japan. For example, in Japan he just discovered a very orderly a society of hierarchy, respect for the emperor, and so forth. He did not like it. And then he went to China and he loved China because it is now a republic. It is no more kings and emperors and the society is changing. They are receptive to the ideas of modernity. And most important is science and democracy. That's what he preaches. So he's so excited, he becomes the spokesman of new China, of the new development. And so that is why I say it's a renewal of you, right? Suddenly he felt himself very young now, because 20 or 30 years ago, he was in Chicago, he witnessed the workers' strike and social inequity and people trying to change. Now in China, he saw new changes and he's so excited about all these things. So I say that it's view of youth.

Yeah, very interesting. And, but just to end the story, he, he does change his ideas about China over the rest of his life, right, in terms of as he observes the way that the political situation changes. Is that right?

Oh, let me put this this way. Before 1919, he did not have much understanding of what China is, of course. And afterwards, he studied China, learned much more, and he take a very progressive view. And his progressive view basically is very much on the liberal side. On democracy, and at the same time, he's always anti-communism. So, so when communism starts to rise in China, he's against communism. His position against communism has a long background for his democratic disposition. And then he also visited Russia, and after which, even that, he is not satisfied with the changes in Russia. And he is the defender of democracy.

Yeah.

So to speak.

No, fascinating. Thank you. So just to maybe go back a few steps then in relation to, so we've, we've talked a bit about Dewey and his, and the segue, the connection with Professor Gardner's ideas, multiple intelligence. And I'd, I'd love to ask now if I can, just how have you taken some of those ideas of Dewey and all of his experience with the Chicago Lab School that he was obviously involved in? And Gardner's ideas of multiple intelligence, and then you've begun to use those to inform the development of GT College there in Hong Kong, right? So if we can make that connection, what, how have those ideas informed you, supported you as you're developing a school there?

Yeah, that is, that is important because in fact, I studied John Dewey in my college year, just know that there is a eminent philosopher of education and so forth. Later I went to Teachers College, Columbia University, to study education, and then I took some of the classes on him, learned much more in depth. And after that, that is the idea that I learned from his lab school, experimental school, that he started in 1896 in Chicago University. It is very inspiring. He's trying to put his educational philosophy into practice. He stayed there for 8 years. Afterwards, he quit. And in fact, you should say that his experiment came to an end, but it affected so many people, a lot of people. And you can say he affected me 100 years later. In 1996, I started GT College. Because of that inspiration. Amazing. That is education reform, improvement, education for the children, for less academic, more fun, more learning by doing. All these ingredients, 100 years old, and we're trying to implement it in Hong Kong. And what I'm different from Dewey is that he quit after 8 years. I did not quit. Now it is already 28 years.

Amazing. Absolutely amazing. That's brilliant. And I mean, as I understand it, one of the reasons he struggled was much more personal reasons and reasons to do with his wife and workload and challenges about the contracts in Chicago rather than the success per se of the specific educational experience of the school.

Yeah, you are quite right. Either you read my book or you studied somewhere else about this story.

I read your book. It was fantastic.

In fact, yes, Mrs. Dewey was there. And she is having a hard time with the other faculty in the school, and she's also having a hard time with the university faculties. And that put Dewey in a very difficult position. At that time, Dewey was so busy with his academic work, and he has to manage many things in his department, in the psychology and philosophy department, and then he has to manage 4 schools and so forth. He was just exhausted. He would not be able to continue. And with some kind of disruption in the teaching staff, it is that many teachers are coming and tender their resignation. And so the university would say, well, Mrs. Dewey is not doing a good job, let's change, get somebody else. But John Dewey would not like that, would support his wife, support his wife. And so they both quit.

That is the story. No, and isn't it interesting? I always find this interesting that so many good ideas, in inverted commas, so many really important ideas, often the thing that is challenging for them are some really basic everyday operational things. You know, the reasons why they don't succeed are actually very basic ideas sometimes, not really to do with the quality of the idea itself, right?

No, you're quite right, because Dewey himself would not have that much time to look after school. He would just come once in a while to express his ideas to, to give insights and aspirations or direction and so forth. But in the daily routines, you have to handle so many things, the children, the demands of the parents, and, and a lot of things. And then you have this university management and also other many other educators who want to put a hand onto the new development in Chicago. And you have to take care of all these environmental factors. And, and then you have internal problems between the teaches and Mrs. Dewey and other people. And so, yeah, that comes.

Yeah. And yeah, no, it's— so I guess the question for me is, how have you kept going? What is it that's allowed you to keep going? Because I'm sure that the journey of GT College was, you know, I'm sure there have been moments where it's been challenging over the last 20-plus years. What is it that's kept you going with the vision?

Okay, uh, the first issue is that I did not bring in my wife. She is not here. She has her own She's now retired. And my job, while I have other jobs at university as sometimes visiting professor in Chinese Academy of Science and in Fudan University, my main role is here in GT College, which is a grade 1 to grade 12 school in Hong Kong, trying to work hard to offer quality education for everyone. Especially for the gifted. And we believe every child has strengths and abilities and we want them to learn happily. Yeah, this is not easy. You want students to learn difficult ideas, complications, and yet you want them to be happy. They may not— there is some conflict between being fun and being academic. And you have to— what we say, they have joy, but we also want excellence. And it is not easy. And we have to rely very much on the teachers on how to tailor the curriculum, how to cater for them, and how to try to inspire the teachers. And then the teachers inspire the students. This is what we are doing.

Yeah. No, fantastic. And I mean, obviously a big part of also what you're doing is integrating research like the Lab School in Chicago, but just really thinking about the school as a laboratory for action research and Perhaps Clara, could I come to you just to talk a little bit about how have you taken that idea of research into the school context so that the students, the teachers, and it's, it really informs the way that you work as a school, I understand.

Okay. My training is in literature, so I, my background is actually in more in qualitative studies because, and then my, my research actually is about successful school. So when I joined GT, I did not expect I would start with something like what kind of research I will be doing. I have no idea because this school is a very special school in Hong Kong. It is the first gifted school sponsored by government for gifted and talented education. And then when I joined the school, my feeling is, oh, the kids are very different. They are very happy. And, um, They are strong in a way, not like the traditional elite school kids, because I taught in some traditional elite school. So my feeling is they are kind of like more arrogant, just academic. But when I joined GDT, my feeling is, oh, kids play a lot, but then they enjoy learning too. That is something I start my observation as a teacher and observer. And then one thing about GDT is the intake, for example, the primary section, from primary onward, the student intake, they are very much into— we call it the MI, the multiple intelligences of the student. So the data themselves, they are rich to me. This is very much— you don't have to prove what kind of school it is because from the primary section onward, the data, they are very much focused on the gifted element, the talent element. So I— and then those kids, when they are promoted to secondary, so I'm in the secondary helping some teaching, Training, and then of course the observation is part of my research program, the starting point. Then as Professor Lee just mentioned, so kids play, kids learn, and then they learn, for example, off-campus learning. So one of the very interesting about the school here is in the curriculum, the learning part, maybe it's just like 60% and another 40% will be kids have to go out, they have to explore, they have to a lot of exposure like local. Learning, local does not mean that just the campus learning.

No, sure.

Some kind of like, for example, they learn from doing some kind of projects, local project or international projects, or some kind of like exchange programs. When they are, when they come back, they still have a lot to do. Like, I mean, the learning element is so different from the one I observed in typical exchange programs, usually having fun. Making some friends, some evaluation, that's it, close file. But here at GT is like from the curriculum, you can see kids learning the informal or less formal learning eventually. So kids are more motivated. Okay. When they see that, oh, I'm good at dancing, so they, or singing or public speaking, then they will join different type of contest. So this kind of experience eventually bring the kids or push up their confidence level.

Curriculum.

Sure.

So when they become like a new person, so after 12 years of education, because 6 and 6. So from the, from the experience, the frontline teaching, and then the curriculum, I started like 6 years ago, I start to accumulate all those data. And then we, I talked to school and Professor Lee, he's a very pioneer person. And then, oh, why not we, we start with MI Teacher Reading Club. And then we have teacher research team. And then he even approved we have student research team together. Now, I mean, because our kids are they have some kind of need. This kind of need is typical gifted, talented kids. They can't be satisfied with just with the, the very basic academic stuff. They need something more advanced. They need something you can call it self-directed learning, uh, some kind of system, um, but at their own pace, cater to their own needs inside, maybe some in music, some in mathematics, some in STEM, some in science, and some in linguistic, and some in sports. So they're all different. So eventually we started our investigation and when So we publish our first journal, Research MI, with all, for example, like we call it GG Star. The star, they are from different domain that is different type of MI, linguistic, logical, mathematic. So now we come to our fifth and sixth, intra-intelligence and inter-intelligence, the leadership, the inter-intelligence. So the one we are working is the intra, which is very hard to get data, but eventually it's something case by case. Now we work on the case, which is about from musical intelligence. Because of the reflection competence, it developed into, from music into, we call it the self-conscious. And then for self-improvement, which is something in Professor Gardner's idea of intraintelligence is there. But where are the data? I mean, people are asking, some of them are the readers or educators, they're asking me, where did you get the data? We didn't try to get the data because my background is in very much in ground theory. Ground theory very much into— you have to get the data from the ground. That means, for example, our ground is the school.

Yeah, no, very good. And for the teachers, particularly reading the MI journal that you shared with me, the teachers seem to be contributing a lot to the research that's going into the journal. And so I wondered, does that make research actually becomes part of their professional learning as staff members?

Definitely. I think I For example, one of my colleagues from mathematics, she's, she's a doctor in mathematics. Another one is from biology. And they both told me, okay, because the student, they're asking them, okay, can you bring me up with, they're interested in certain topic. So eventually teachers work together with the student. Okay. Because of your interest in certain topic, they work together and then they try to locate a topic. They work out together and then they try to join on a topic to do with some kind of mathematics. So which is alien to me. Okay, that's not my thing.

Yeah.

And then because of the starting with the student need, the interest, teachers try to— okay, then they work together and then they read together, work together, discuss together, and they write together. And it's usually kids will be so proud they can write together with teacher. They can even write better than teachers. This is what's happening at GT.

That's amazing.

Yeah.

Yeah. And it, it really sounds like a genuine community of practice, right? That idea of a communities of practice between the students, between the teachers, learning community. Exactly. Yeah. Something very powerful there. It reminds me of Charles Sanders Peirce actually, who was another pragmatist philosopher with Dewey, right? To take us back to Dewey. I mean, that, that idea of communities of practice was a big concept for him, but that idea of how, you know, learning together. So, It sounds very powerful. Could I ask one question? I suppose this is kind of the elephant in the room for me, if I may ask you the question. How do you hold the idea of gifted and talented education? And because for some people there's a categorizing of certain people as gifted and certain people therefore as not gifted. And given the earlier conversation we had about Dewey and growth and evolution, and how do you hold that idea of gifted and talented education in relation to some of Dewey's more process and learning, growth ideas.

Oh yes. Yeah. We can say that Dewey is very much on the process theory, process philosophy. Everything's in a flux. The reality itself is in a flux and it's always developing, evolving, having new ideas, all these things. And so that is his views on human beings and on children. In fact, he wrote much about the mental development of children. And they grow one after the other, slowly developing. But he did not go deep into individual differences. That is why some are gifted and some are less able. He did not explore that much. Yet he noticed, he knew this well. He knew that individual differences are vast among students. He is quite aware of that. And that is why he said, let students develop their own potentials. Let's have child-centered learning to allow children to learn at their own pace, all these things. These are all his concepts. So he is very sympathetic to all these. And by about 1930s, I can spot some of his writings related to gifted, to individual differences, to catering even for special education. In fact, that is a time when education in America is beginning to realize that there are gifted children and there are special needs. And Dewey is quite updated and he did not have deep study of all these. And what I would say is after nearly a century now, we would believe that multiple intelligence is the starting point. Individual differences is the starting point of every child. And then the purpose of the school is to cater for these needs so that each child would be able to realize his goals. And opportunities. And it is not good to say, oh, these are gifted, so we put more resources. These are not gifted, let's forget about them. No, this is not the way. Everybody, everybody is gifted. Everybody has their abilities in different ways. And that is how we see it.

Yeah, I suppose. And that's where Howard Gardner's ideas obviously really come in because he then took what had been, or what is still a problematic idea, as you said earlier, of general intelligence. But use the vehicle of intelligence to challenge people's preconceptions that there's only one way to be intelligent. And I think, I mean, from what I've read of your meetings with Howard Gardner and your discussions with him, even for him, I think he was perhaps dissatisfied with the certain categories of multiple intelligences and actually began to think that there were even many more different ways to show up as, in very common, intelligent different, as you say, different gifts in all sorts of domains of life.

Yeah, right. And I should say that the idea of Howard Gardner in multiple intelligence is not new. It was proposed by him in 1983. But even before that, people have been talking about multiple abilities in the 1950s or 1930s already, people talking about multiple abilities. And even in education, the gifted, we already been seeing that there are many different domains like leadership, like music, like sports, and these domains are not being measured by IQ tests. And gifted educators, the gifted, have already proposed that and pointed this out in the 1970s. It's only after that in 1980 that Gardner came along with a new conception that, oh, there is in the brain, there's some kind of multiple intelligences. And people start suddenly realize, oh, that's quite true. And, and so it becomes a new way of seeing and doing education.

Yeah. And from what I read, even he was quite surprised by how much, how popular it became so quickly. I mean, it really took off, right, in the mid-1980s.

Yeah, something like this. As I can remember, he said he was surprised and amazed that his linguistic intelligence has made this a new era simply because if he did not say multiple intelligence, he said multiple abilities, different abilities of people, it won't be popular. But suddenly he add S to intelligence and everybody's jump up like emotion, like EQ, the same thing, the two word emotional quotient, suddenly it jump up, attention, they populate.

No, that's amazing. But what he also resisted doing, I think, was commodifying it, putting it into a package. Because I think that's one of my general observations and concerns about education is sometimes it gets packaged up for the market a bit too quickly. So for example, I read that he was, he could have trademarked the idea and he could have created lots of tests around multiple intelligence. And actually he avoided doing that because of the dangers of almost funneling people down into a particular vision of what that was. And I, I appreciate the fact that he, yes, he defined certain categories within multiple intelligences, but he stayed very open about the way in which that might evolve or the way in which other people might take that and use it in particular situations and contexts.

Yeah, what I think he is quite happy with that now. I mean, he was much happier now than he would have trademarked multiple intelligence. Now multiple intelligence is public asset. Everybody can talk about it, can make use of it., and it is not just belonging to Howard Garner. It belongs to society in the public domain, and we can interpret, develop. That's what he wants. He wants to have conversation, to develop, to see how that is part of culture. I mean, he really believes in that.

Beautiful. Except he'd be a much richer man by now, I think, if he had trademarked it.

May or may not be, because it is not that easy.

Of course.

No, no.

Just being facetious. No, thank you. This is wonderful. Just to finish off the conversation, if I can, where are you now with GT College? What are your hopes for the development, the continued development of your work there? And what would you know, how can other people around the world support your work?

Oh, it is wonderful that I have many colleagues here in GT working together. We've been developing our work in gifted education in multiple intelligences, and we are trying to spread our way of teaching, our way of research through our journal and in international forums and other platforms. And these are the ways that we want to promote and develop and push together to have better education for the future. I think the 21st century, we need education. John Dewey is still relevant to what we have today. And only that the importance is to get administrators to know that education is not just putting more money. It is that we need educators with the heart, with the motivation to motivate students to learn. And this is not easy. And we have to keep doing teacher training. We keep our momentum and ambition of progressive education, of equity, and so forth. Involved. So I really appreciate your website, Future Learning Design, which I learned much by seeing all these interviewers and interviewees and learning from them and incorporate as many ideas that I can to make this a continuation. I mean, education can only be successful if we incorporate more and more ideas and keep growing, keep learning. That is what I am doing.

Yes, Tim, I really appreciate this chance and we need different voices. From different part, different corner of the world. So no matter what kind of background you are, but we will also like to invite, just then because you're asking what other kind of support we would like to have people around the world. I think the less able kids sometimes, the label on those people, the less able kids, because they really need the support from, for example, from government, from different stakeholders, need more understanding, not just the less able, but the so-called able.

Right.

People need the support of research.

Exactly.

People need resources from government, different people, those who have the funds, those who have that power to work together from different parts of the world.

Yeah. No, thank you. And it, I mean, it's, it's an interesting challenge, isn't it, to avoid the labels? Because I think we talk, you know, we end up talking in labels and categories sometimes. And I think it's, yeah, one of the ways is how do we, I mean, back to Dewey, right? How do we really honour the individuality of young people as they grow and change and start from where they are rather than the categories and the labels. And it's, I very much appreciate that. And just to your point about learning and voices from around the world, I do think that is so important now as we really do need to learn from each other in different contexts. I think the context in which people are working is huge, but equally the challenges that we are facing as a species are also very common and universal. So we, there's a lot of collaboration that we need to think about. And if I may just Professor Lee, your point about educating from the heart really resonates with me because I think that is exactly what we need now. It's not about technical solutions anymore. It's about something much more human. And that really does come back to John Dewey and some of his insights. So thank you so much. I mean, this is a lovely conversation. I really, really appreciate it.

Thank you. Thank you. And keep that connection and keep that communication in the future. And thank you so much.

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