Educational Ecosystems - A Conversation with Christophe Menagé

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

If I looked at student disengagement rates, they're going through the roof and have done for the last 15, 20 years. If I looked at teacher attrition rates, they're going through the roof. If I looked at mental health issues with young people, the incidence is rising exponentially. So by every measure, the system isn't working.

Welcome back to the podcast. It was a fantastic opportunity today to speak to Chris Menage, who is a wonderful interdisciplinary educational leader, consultant, public speaker, and the driving force behind e-squared Educational Ecosystems. Chris has over 20 years of international experience across the private sector, government administration, and education. And for the past 15 years has successfully applied his critical and systems thinking to educational contexts both in Australia and abroad. Chris is a Hundr3d.org ambassador and through E-squared now activates partnerships empowering others to focus on what they do best, which is co-creating transformative cultures of learning and practice. You can find Chris on Twitter @educational_eco1, and you can also find him very active on LinkedIn.

Hey Christophe, how are you, mate?

I'm good, how are you?

Good, thank you.

Brilliant. So just love to start with what your vision is for educational ecosystems and ideas about amplifying innovation and connecting partners.

Yeah, absolutely, with pleasure. I suppose so to To start off with, it comes from a really deep-seated belief for me that education plays a fundamental role in developing social capital. And that might seem like a real misdemeanor and very obvious, but when you sort of dig a little bit deeper into that role for education in really creating that glue that sort of binds us together and ensures that societies are harmonious. And so when I sort of reflected back over my career so far and my personal experiences that have informed the decisions I've made in my career, I sort of started to notice a pattern whereby I was greatly influenced and the beneficiary of some great mentoring and wisdom from people, peers, elders, and also, you know, my own children, I suppose, and family. And I think one of the things that really struck me was how much of the learned wisdom informed my viewpoints and my worldviews and how much those worldviews then infused my work.

Yeah.

And the correlation between all those things struck me. I used to teach global politics in year 12, and we always had great classes where we challenged things and the whole basis was around challenging opinions. And we would always start a class with the question around what did the kids feel was the singular most impactful event or influence in their life or person?

Right.

Because I sort of felt that once I had identified that, they could start to unpack how that influenced their opinions and their worldview, and that worldview would be what then shapes the way that they approached any problem. And so I sort of started thinking to myself, it's more important as an educator for us to concentrate on those influences and on those factors, on unpacking those things, because in doing so we found that common ground, and that common ground is what then enables us to then target some really intractable problems. So then E Squared came from this idea that if I was learning so much from connecting with others, how did my work environment and my work reality enable that and empower that? And what I found was that I've had, you know, I've worked in different sectors in different industries, and I've had varying degrees of empowerment and agency. And what I really noticed was that the context where I had been really encouraged and not given permission, but actually it was an unspoken autonomy. It was just, yeah, it was an expectation almost that you would go and you would find opportunities and you would create new possibilities. Whenever that was my context, I was as happy as a pig in mud.

Nice.

And so I started to ask myself, you know, if that's not the case in every school, how can I then create an environment for myself where I can flourish in those conditions and surround myself in those conditions, which nourish my meaning and my purpose, because I really believe that education, at the end of the day, for it to be powerful, it needs to come from a place of being very deeply seated in who we are and what we believe. And, you know, I always have a wry smile when I read that education isn't values-laden. I can't see how you could possibly approach education from a completely impartial and non-values, you know, basis. And you can imagine that as a politics teacher, that can be quite controversial to say that. But on the flip side, if you make it as a known quantity to the kids and encourage them to challenge you, it then, you know, opens the door for some really rich learning because, you know, you then role model the fact that your way is not the right way. You role model the fact that you're willing to listen to a different argument. And you role model how to construct that argument in a rational way. So E-Squared was born from this notion that if I wasn't able to find a context that really nurtured my need for learning, I was going to create that context. And so in the last sort of 18 months, I've been doing a lot of reading like you do, and a lot of listening to podcasts like you do, and, you know, sitting down quietly with some friends, maybe around a fire with a nice beverage or something, and just sort of reflecting on, on the bigger things in life and the things that are meaningful. And as I started to piece those things together, I thought to myself, well, what if I can create a context and a platform whereby I can somehow contribute? And if that contribution is around giving advocacy and voice and connecting those people who do create the change, those people who do question, and then not only question, but— and you sort of pointed this out earlier— is take that talk and that questioning and put it into practice and make impactful change.

That's brilliant. And it's interesting, that whole notion of bringing your full self into learning or into work, into your professional context, because that's so often not encouraged, right? In the old traditional environment of being, you know, you have to be professional and you, you know, it's all quite rules-based and it's quite cold in a way, you know, in that sense of you end up trying to ignore the parts of yourself that you would like to bring, but actually they don't feel appropriate because they're, you know, the very rigid norms of the workplace or the classroom removing a huge chunk of who we are as human beings, right?

Absolutely. Couldn't agree more. And I think, you know, linking back to what we were just saying, how education and learning is what we are and what we do. For me, Innovate Square, that model illustrates what I believe the purpose of education is. And so I don't believe that the purpose of education is to get kids to remember what Nazi Germany took power. And, you know, I believe that the purpose of education is to help kids understand the conditions that led to that sort of event, how we might learn from that sort of event, and foresee and forecast and predict how we might avoid a repeat of that sort of event. And that's where it shows a movement down those lower echelons of, you know, Bloom's Taxonomy and Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, how those two intertwine. Leading from that traditional paradigm of everything being very linear and fixed and rational all the way through to the higher echelons and the higher order thinking and even something as esoteric as the notion of presencing. What is my position in society? What is my purpose and why am I here? And I think you just mentioned before how schools are expected or institutions are a bit cold and regimented. And I think that's, that's a function of the era from which they came, where the rational mind— you know, Mark Manson talks about the observing and the rational mind, where everything is structured and can be explained, you know.

Yeah.

And yet science, which can be explained and which is based on facts, science evolves. Everything evolves. Our awareness, our understanding, and our knowledge evolves over time. And so I sort of feel that at the moment we've moved from a rational mind era into this emotional mind phase where whether it's by virtue of our context and what's happening in our world or whether it's by virtue of just time, we're now giving a bit more credence to some of the more intangible things like, you know, Ken Robinson talks about the 7 senses. He didn't base his work on only the 5 senses of the tangible things of sight, sound, touch, taste, and so on. He actually spoke very deliberately about the balance between all those things, you know, as a seventh sense, and obviously intuition as a sixth sense. And I've seen that work in practice in an educational context, you know, living with kids 24/7 for 11 years in a residential living environment. If I only focused on the five senses, I reckon the kids would be— they'd be okay, but I don't think they thrive or flourish. But when you really bring in those two other elusive senses of intuition and balance. How do you make them feel? Are they heard? You know, when you walk into a good restaurant, Tim, and you just— everything's in place, you know you're going to have a good time. There's the right plants, the right color, the right music, the waiter or the waitress is just delightful, the food's amazing, the company is great, and it's something that you can't explain. You just know it in your gut.

Yeah.

I think, you know, there's been a lot of research at the moment around the gut being, you know, our second biggest brain, or, and I think there's a lot to be said around that, listening to our gut and helping kids to listen to their gut.

Definitely. It's also very much counter to the measurement mindset though, as well, isn't it? Because of course, if you know, if we talk measurement and we talk accountability and we talk structured systems to prove that we are doing a good job as educators. We get into quite a murky space when we start talking about such ways of knowing as intuition or ideas around presencing. And that's a real deep challenge to the policymakers and the decision makers within education.

I'd really like to unpack that more with you because, you know, we talked before about the wisdom around the old adages that we rely on and that's passed down through the generations. And one that really always comes to my mind is the old saying that at the moment we're valuing that which we measure when we should be measuring that which we value. And if we really just pull that apart a little bit, it comes down to what makes us tick. And I can understand the place for accountability. I can understand the need for good governance. I can understand, you know, the conditions that led to a requirement for all those frameworks and all those regulations. However, I think there's a really— again, going back to that Seven Senses of Ken Robinson— I think there's a really important role to be played around balance and intuition. In that, and that doesn't mean diminishing the importance of those other systems and processes, it just means holding them very deliberately and consciously in the way in which we interact with our students and, you know, and each other. And I also particularly like to, whenever those arguments of the system doesn't allow for this, or, you know, that would be a risky activity to do with the kids because we're relying on measurement, or, you know, they're not passing their exams and they're failing according these exams and so on, I always like to then use the argument of metrics to promote an alternative view. And so what I mean by that is if I looked at student disengagement rates, they're going through the roof and have done for the last 15, 20 years. If I looked at teacher attrition rates, they're going through the roof. If I looked at mental health issues with young people, the incidence is rising exponentially. And I don't believe it's only because of better diagnosis. I think there's other external factors that that play into that. And, you know, PISA standards in Australia falling for the last decade. So by every measure, the system isn't working. And if the alternative argument is, oh, but you know, it works for 70% of the students, they go to uni and they get a job, and I would actually challenge that as well because How much longitudinal study do we really do to determine the extent to which those kids stay in those courses that they undertake in the first year or two? Continue into professions that reflect those courses and live lives that are fulfilling and purposeful. And if the research around worker disengagement is anything to go by, the majority of workers aren't fulfilled. So, you know, I just think there's a real case for a bit of navel-gazing around what we're doing and just being really honest with ourselves that are we really measuring that which we value? Because I feel like we've put the cart before the horse.

Yeah. Even to go a little bit deeper than that though, I would also even just question the word measure, because I think the word measure itself pulls you into a quantitative and to some degree rational position, right? We want to draw boundaries around things and count them. Whereas actually, I mean, that's one of the things I like about some of the shifts in some of the accreditation practice that I work with is moving away from the idea of measurement, you know, with data outputs. It's actually talking about evidencing learning through impacts, right, for the impacts that you're having on young people.

Yeah, I think you've hit on a really pertinent insight there and perspective which ties in a couple of threads. You know, for me, measurement aligns with the way that we recognize success or how we describe success.

Yeah.

And I think that's another little bit of navel-gazing that we could do as a collective around: are those successes based on other people's expectations or based on a past context of what was required to be successful? And is that still relevant today? And having personally sort of released myself from some of those more social expectations, I suppose, I found it really liberating. I heard an educator speak on a podcast not long ago where he used this phrase, change is painful, but pain is changeful. And it really stuck with me. And it sort of made me remember that if we review how we recognize success and how we acknowledge success, that we might actually value failure and we might actually value guts before brains, you know, and I'm not advocating for stupid behavior. But I'm advocating for a little bit of intuition and, you know, just pushing the boundaries a little bit to see what might eventuate.

Yeah, I mean, that comes back to your Innovate DNA with the Maslow's hierarchy of needs in there, right? Because if the object of education is self-actualization, then you don't achieve that by trying to fit in with somebody else's definition of what you should be or what society defines your maximal self would be like. No one has a clue, you know, has no clue what the limits of you are, right?

You've hit the nail on the head. And, you know, and the question I would throw back to you is how good is it to be around people like that?

Yeah.

You know, they are energizing, they are positive, they are solutions-focused, they have lateral thinking, they see connections between the dots. And Tim Logan, I would even go further and I'd ask you, Looking back over your career as a teacher, I'd hazard a guess that you can probably only really recall and are still in touch with a handful of really extraordinary students. Would that be a fair assumption?

Yeah.

So if that's the case, if you were then to drill into what type of character those students are, I would hazard a guess again that they would be exhibiting some of those concepts of self-actualization and authorship and agency.

Yeah, but I would say that those people, I mean, I can think of one really prime example of what you're talking about, just an incredible person that I had the privilege of working with when I was working in Paris. And I know he's doing phenomenal things now, but as good as the school was and the educational environment was, I don't think he became those things because of what the school did for him.

Couldn't agree more. Yeah. And that's an indictment on our system.

Exactly. That's a function of a system with a limited view. I've been reading the book Grasp. They use the metaphor of the global educational winnower. So basically—

Yeah, I saw your diagram.

Cutting away the potential in order to create this kind of standardized output of a student, essentially highlighting just how much are we wasting of human potential by putting kids through this system. That values only a certain type of behavior and outcome.

Yeah, Tim, you've used the word output several times in our conversation already, and it's really interesting because I think it is a nice segue into what I believe needs to be called out. You know, Simon Sinek, I'm a big fan of some of his work, in particular, not just the Golden Circle idea of the why and the how and the what, but his most recent book around the infinite The Infinite Mindset. And basically what it means is that if you have an infinite mindset and you play the infinite game, you're not playing according to rules that are written and explicit and restrictive and structured. You're playing to universal values of what makes people tick and what we know works. You know, again, that 7th sense of Ken Robinson's, the intuition and the balance. So when we go back to that notion of output, for me, our current model of education, which has been the same one for the last 400 or 500 years, is based around a need to measure output and outcomes in order to be compliant, in order to tick off certain achievements that can be recognized by the majority, and in order to better— and when I say better in inverted commas— manage children on a day-to-day basis. That's the presumption. So it needs to be a two-way flow, and that's for me is my why, and that's what educational systems, I believe, need to focus on. And, yeah, and at E-Squared, that's what we're trying to do, is just remind people that if we focus on those, um, self-determinant theories and learning from experience and reflecting on experience, then we give our students and our kids the chance for agency and a bit of self-actualization.

What do you think is the implication there then for the training of educators? You know, it strikes me that it's a whole different set of competencies that we would actually be wanting those people to have in the classroom.

I love your provocations, Tim Logan. Absolutely. I think that needs revision because we're being asked to demonstrate in real time those learning competencies that we advocate for in theory. So when we're talking about agility and when we're talking about lateral thinking and when we're talking about emotional intelligence, how do we demonstrate those things on a day-to-day basis in the classroom or in our interactions with our students? And I would really advocate for far more on-the-job training, almost like an apprenticeship. Yeah, I would argue for far more challenging project-based type of opportunities where you rip undergraduates out of their comfort zone and you plonk them into something as challenging as possible. Because as I said before, I think that you grow from challenges, you know, and when I look at my own life, you know, migrating between countries, the loss of an older brother, my old man passing away from cancer quite young, all of those things were challenging. And yet all of those things made me a better person, not just by virtue of discovering things about myself, but by strengthening my relationships with other people and honing that intuition.

Yeah, interesting. And I think one of the things I love about your work, particularly this idea of collective wisdom, is I think often, coming back to the idea of training teachers, we train them as individual practitioners to kind of be lord of their domain, and they go in and then you know, they're set free on their own, exactly, and, you know, very, very individualistic way. But what you're describing there of really deep, challenging, project-based experiences, by definition, that those would be also extremely collaborative experiences. Then they're also experiencing what the type of environment that we want the students to be put in, to be provided a structured really well-designed collaborative learning experience.

Undoubtedly, and again, it sort of leads me to a bit of an anecdote analogy which hopefully addresses what you've just said. Over the last 5 years, I've been mentoring a young mature adult who has had amazing experiences, has a life full of challenge and enriching experiences where, you know, he's migrated, he's worked in in refugee camps, he's worked as a security guard, you know, he's had challenges as a family, he's experienced loss, and yet this remarkable young man, and I've seen him deal with adversity on a day-to-day basis, he's in his final year of putting himself through his 4-year teaching degree, which he's done full-time while working part-time while juggling a newborn baby you know, in the midst of COVID and all the rest, with the financial pressures of all that. And in his last practicum, he's questioning himself because he is measuring himself according to the expectations of a finite concept of knowledge. He's saying to me, I don't have the knowledge to impart this curriculum to the kids. And I just keep trying to remind him to shift his gaze something far greater than that and to look beyond the horizon to something— what will those kids learn from you in terms of the skills that you've had to demonstrate to navigate what you've navigated, mate? Like, seriously, you, you've had to put up with things which would have brought lesser people to their knees, and you've gotten up each time and you've kept on going. How about we value that and you tap into that in delivering what— just what you said, Tim Logan Logan, the right context and conditions for collaborative learning, because you obviously know it because you've done it. So bring it to the forum. And that really saddens me that we have people like that who may not make it because we, again, we go back to the output and the outcomes. Are you delivering a quantifiable knowledge base?

Yeah. Yeah. And so in Melbourne, Australia, generally where you are, do you see any places where this person you're talking about could find a bit of a home in terms of—

Yeah, absolutely.

Innovation that does value those kinds of qualities and competencies as some kind of a learning guide facilitator, not a traditional teacher in that sense.

Absolutely, Tim. And I think you've just given me a good reminder of another reason that sort of motivated me to start eSquared. And that is that as I was reflecting on my own journey and as I was looking at what was motivating me, I did a lot of research and reflected on past experiences. And I noticed that there's a lot of reinventing the wheel going on in great spaces of innovation around the world, you know, not just in Australia, not just in Victoria, but all around the world. And I wondered what might it look like if we were able to just connect those things a little bit more and save resources. You know, the old economies of scale. And I think with innovation hubs around the world, there's some common threads that we see around how they are collegiate and how they are open-sourced and how they are horizontally structured and how they embrace diversity and all those sorts of things. So yes, to answer your question, there are several great initiatives. And I would say that on an optimistic side, there's more and more of them bubbling to the surface as a result of COVID So I don't see COVID as being a negative at all. And, you know, hopefully this has been your experience as well, is that there is there's reason to be optimistic and there's reason to be encouraged by a renewed sense of community and a renewed sense of collectivism and the empowerment that many minds applied to a problem can achieve.

No, definitely. It's also sometimes hard to know whether I'm seeing them because I'm looking for them or I'm seeing them because they are more numerous.

But it's a bit like the car that you buy, isn't it? When you buy a car, you suddenly see that car everywhere.

Exactly.

But absolutely, there definitely seem to be bubbling up a lot of exciting initiatives, but COVID has somehow, yeah, amplified some of those things, and I think we're seeing them a bit more.

And I think that's quite a natural development, Tim, because at the end of the day, these philosophies or these mindsets are coming to the fore because the current modeling around education, and not just education, but of our of our industrial system, of our economic system clearly is not working because we're seeing the repercussions across industries and across areas. So we're seeing it environmentally, we're seeing it socially, we're seeing it politically with democracy thrown into chaos and people questioning the role of institutions and the validity of, of the mandates that we give these institutions. So it's unsurprising therefore that if all of those things are being stripped back to their very bare necessities and we peel back the layers, that we actually giving more credence to things that we may have been more dismissive of previously. And so I'm quite enjoying no longer being on the periphery as some sort of, you know, random left-of-centre thinker. We might have a merging of the mind somewhere in the middle, you know?

Yeah. It's interesting.

And I do think there's been a lot of talk about wellbeing. Within COVID because it's really come to the fore and focus in people's minds. And I think that has helped kind of catalyze these questions being asked because people are saying, actually, what is really important? You know, maybe actually my relationships and a bit of time to reflect each day and, you know, the things that really I'm passionate about, maybe they're more important than the treadmill that I was on before this all—

Absolutely.

All started.

Yeah.

Absolutely, Tim Logan. And you know, there's another really concrete example of a reason to be optimistic.

Yeah.

Because if all that comes from this disruption is that we do value wellbeing as equally as we value those metric outcomes that you mentioned, then for me, that's a step in the right direction. So yeah, again, it's a no-brainer that we need to consider wellbeing. I would say that it needs to be the point of departure. Before we even consider anything else.

Yeah. Brilliant. Thanks, Christophe. That's, yeah, no, it's a real pleasure to talk to you and just to work through some of these ideas together. And it's, I mean, there's so much need for that right now. I mean, we need to get out there and be active and start making change, but actually some navel-gazing, as you say, and some discussion with challenging and provocative positive supports is a real pleasure.

Thanks, Tim. And, you know, I think also really ensure that we turn those into practical changes, you know, to take the theory into action.

Yeah.

And so that's certainly what I'm I'm hoping to achieve in eSquared. But I've loved connecting with you. This has been a great example for me of the power of collaboration and of collective wisdom. Your perception and your ability to bring in those connectors has been fascinating to see, and I'm very appreciative of the opportunity, Tim. So good on you. And good luck with your initiative.

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