Enterprising Youth or Youth Entrepreneurship - A Conversation with Nicole Dyson

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

We've got a generation of young people that are marked by this independent, energetic spirit, and if they see a challenge in front of them, they feel that they have the skills, the space, and the support to do something about it, then it doesn't matter what pathway they follow in life. They are going to have the agency that they need to actually take action, and I think that's really, really critical.

Hi everyone, happy New Year and welcome back to the first podcast of 2024. My name's Tim Logan and the podcast is brought to you in partnership with Notosh. There will be loads more amazing episodes coming your way over the course of this year, so don't forget to like and subscribe to the podcast. A big part of the work that I do personally is creating spaces for young people to connect and engage in their own learning in meaningful ways, so I'm really happy to be starting this new year off picking up this theme with the amazing Nicole Dyson. Nicole is a multi-award-winning educator and entrepreneur and a global authority on project-based learning and youth entrepreneurship. With an extensive background in school teaching and leadership in the public education system in Australia, she's the founder of Future Anything, an award-winning education provider that works with more than 15,000 young people and their educators each year. You can find links to Nicole's other work in the show notes, as well as some of the topics we discuss. Hey, Nick.

Hey, hey, how you going?

Hey, hey, hey, good. Yeah, how you doing?

Very well.

Awesome. I mean, it's really, really good to meet you and be able to have this conversation. And it's, yeah, we were introduced through the work through social innovation and social entrepreneurship through the OECD, and I know you're doing amazing things over there in Australia. So yeah, looking forward to the chat.

Yeah, let's dig in.

Cool. So just for people who are not aware of your work with Future Anything, one of the things I heard you talking about was the present bias in education. And I thought that was maybe a nice way in to start thinking about, you know, obviously your organization, you've called it Future Anything. So give a little bit of an overview of what that's about, but also, you know, in relation to what is it about education that gets so kind of hooked on the present and perhaps doesn't look into the future quite as much?

Yeah, that's a great question. I think I always reflect back on, I guess, the catalyst moment for me and the creation of Future Anything. And I feel like people who work in education have these moments in their career that kind of challenge them about where they are in the world and maybe the impact that they want to create moving forward. And mine happened in an all-boys Year 9 English class, which sounds like a terrifying place to be for any teacher. And I remember my head of department telling me it'd be good experience, which, you know, we all know is code for nobody else wants the class, right? And, you know, I had 2 boys that were staying back at lunch because they were repaying back some time that they'd wasted. Pretty stock standard 15-year-old boy stuff. And one of the boys kind of looked up at me and he said, "I don't mean to be rude, miss, but..." At which point your heart kind of hitches a little bit when a 15-year-old boy says that, because you just don't know how much paperwork is going to sit on the other side of that sentence finishing. And he said, "I don't mean to be rude, miss, but why are we doing this?" It certainly wasn't the first time I'd heard that question at all, and I had all the stock standard answers in my back pocket that I could have thrown out at that point. But I remember really being struck in the moment of the fact that this was a young person who had a reading age of maybe grade 4 or grade 5, and he was in a year 9 English class and there hadn't been any significant modifications to the task. We were supposed to read a novel, write an analytical essay, and I remember looking at this young person and thinking, my gosh, like, why were we doing this? Like, it was so far removed from, I guess, the purpose of education, which is to prepare young people to navigate life, right? To be able to step outside of the safe space that we curate for them and then step into themselves, I think, when they leave us. And I remember looking at this young person and saying, because we have to. And I'm sorry. And I've always been struck by that moment because I remember going home and feeling just really rubbish about that. And I think, you know, that was probably the first moment where I went, well, actually, like, it's not okay, and there's got to be a better way to do this. And so that kind of was the catalyst moment that started, I guess, the journey of Future Anything. And at the core, I think we exist to find the link between the learning that's happening in the classroom and life that's happening outside the school gates. And I firmly believe that if you can bridge the gap between those two things, you have a more engaging, relevant, purposeful experience that helps young people to understand who they are and also understand the world around them and then navigate the steps they need to take between those two things.

Yeah, no, interesting. And just to focus in on the kind of that present obsession, I mean, it's—

it—

yeah, what is it about that that particularly you want to challenge? I mean, where do you see that manifesting? Is it like you know, just in the way that the obsession with the success culture and the achievement culture now, or I mean, yeah, what is it that, because I have some interesting tensions around the future and the present thing, which maybe we can get into.

Yeah, for me, I think it's always been this obsession with content and content regurgitation. So that the best and brightest young people are judged in their ability to kind of open up their skulls and absorb all of this information and then regurgitate it back in the right order. With no purpose to the information. There's no creation on the other side of it. And look, I understand the industrial model of education and potentially why that knowledge acquisition element was of critical importance in generations past. But where we are now, I just don't think that serves young people moving forward. And so, you know, as much as knowledge is important, I think for me it's around unraveling this critical importance for education to address the skills gap that we have. Between what our young people are capable of doing with the plethora of information that's in front of them, rather than their ability to regurgitate it back in the right order.

Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, clearly there's a preparation going on, that navigation that you're talking about. And I'd love to talk about that when we talk about the kind of enterprising thinking stuff, because I think that's one of the things that I struggle with about the future narrative sometimes, is that there's this kind of engineering backwards of the things. So we come up with a list of the things we want to create. And then we engineer backwards from that list. And so in some ways, the, the logic of the present bias of like, oh, well they need to know this, this, this, and this now shifts into a, the same logic, but shifts into a future frame of, well, we want to create these kind of people that have this, this, this, and this skill or competency or whatever. And I sometimes I worry that there's a little bit of the, the underlying logic's actually pretty similar, even though if you're talking about a future orientation or a current present orientation.

Mm. Yeah, that's super interesting. And I think you're right, because if all you do is replace content with skills, then I don't think you've actually served any different outcome. I think, you know, the Odyssey that underpins like a lot of the work that we do is founded on these two steps, which is where have you come from and what matters to you? And I genuinely believe that those are the foundations of a good education. Like if you can help young people to understand where they've come from and then help them unravel who they are and the things that they care about and the stuff that they love and also the stuff that they hate, because finding out what you hate is just as important as unlocking the stuff that you enjoy. Then it's through that sense of self-discovery and then the connection that we make to the world around us that we can kind of reveal the path in front of us. And then I think we need the skills development that sits around that. So then how do I take action to deliver on the knowledge that I now have about who I am? And where I might like to go.

Yeah, yeah. No, I think that's really powerful, that kind of matter, like the mattering, the purpose that you're talking about. Like, if it's coming internally, there's something very powerful in that because it kind of creates, like you say, this maybe this emergent path forward, but it's not necessarily an engineering backwards. Because like things like future-proofing, you know, phrases like that, I just, I, I hate because I just really struggle with the idea that anyone can be Well, and what does that even mean, right? How can we prove someone for, I don't know, protect them from this uncertainty of the future? Inevitably, it's going to be uncertain. But I think if you're coming from a place of where things matter to you and you can flow and roll with the way that emerges, I think it's an interesting process, but a tough one to prepare, in inverted commas, young people for, I think. But I think that's what I was so interested in what you seem to be doing now with Future Anything and like having the courage to actually question almost some of your initial core ideas like social entrepreneurship. And I, that I really appreciated that because there's that kind of constant reflection of, you know, there are things that may come up in, with, in relation to the education system and the way that we can do things differently. Like you say, with that grade 9 boy and you know, why are we doing this? Let's give them some purpose. Let's find, but then to constantly keep reflecting on that, I think is really important. So, and very concretely, what I understood you doing was trying to excavate, if you like, the idea of entrepreneurship, which is what you've been doing for a while with Future Anything, and then going deep underneath that and think, what, what is there that we actually need to understand a bit more deeply in the work that we're doing? Is that, is that a fair representation of what you've been up to?

It really is. I think, you know, when we started, I really thought that like social entrepreneurship was a vehicle like for young people to solve complex problems in the world. And I still hold that to be true. But I think what I've realized is that the language of entrepreneurship has become quite loaded in education, and not unlike STEM and coding and these like fads that kind of float into education to save the system, that perhaps don't have a sense of, you know, innate purpose or longevity that sit within them. And so the term entrepreneurship has kind of been picked up by all of these other organisms that are operating around the education sector, and I think have kind of butchered the intent of maybe what it intended to be. And so Now it's become, well, everybody needs to be an entrepreneur and have these like commercial products and become their own boss and become a business owner. And I began to realize that we were so far from what that mantra and that mission was. And yet we were still using the language of entrepreneurship to talk about the work that we were doing. And so when I kind of pulled apart the mission, I guess, of what we were trying to do, the vision, I guess, of education that we had, it really came down to building like enterprising young people being the verb rather than entrepreneurs the noun. And so, you know, the definition that we work with is that an enterprising young person is marked by an independent, energetic spirit and a readiness to act. Because if we've got a generation of young people that are marked by this independent, energetic spirit, and if they see a challenge in front of them, they feel that they have the skills, the space, and the support to do something about it, then it doesn't matter what pathway they follow in life. They are going to have the agency that they need to actually take action. And I think that's really, really critical. So we're in this really complex space right now trying to detangle ourselves from the language of entrepreneurship and then almost create literacy around, well, what does it mean to be enterprising? So now we're trying to educate educators about this shift that we feel like is really important for schools to understand. And I know we're going to dig into this in a second, but I feel like this is the linchpin for being able to create space for this style of learning to sit beyond the bolt-on program for the fortunate few, but to see it as an approach that can permeate all spaces and systems within education.

Yeah, and it, it's interesting though, isn't it? Because like there's a presence about being enterprising in the moment, right? And that's where I come back to that tension around future orientation and present, because it's like there's something very present about being enterprising. You might use a different verb for that, but there's this responsiveness to now. What is needed here? What am I looking at? What am I noticing? And I find that really an interesting— again, it kind of brings us back into the present, but in a very real way rather than in a kind of, here's a bunch of content you need to know to navigate the present. But I think— so maybe could you say a bit more about that independent energetic spirit and where is that coming from for you in terms of what you see in schools and where you see more need for that?

Yeah, I, I think maybe what I struggle with the most is like, particularly in Australia, like as far as an OECD country, like PISA data has dropped as there are trending challenges in education. But what I've seen is this tension between like the data showing one story and then our response to that is to overscaffold it and maybe almost shove more content or more curriculum and almost speed up the amount of curriculum and, and make it more complex in this never-ending fight to kind of firm up the educational outcomes in a standardized form. So that's kind of the landscape that's sitting there. And so then on the other notion, I think in doing so, what we've actually done is, is taken away young people's sense of agency and ownership over their learning journey. And so they've become so compliant in the learning experience that they don't question anymore. They're not curious about learning. They don't have a love of learning. They've become so detached from the experience of learning that it's something that's being done to them rather than something that they're doing for themselves.

Yeah, and again, it's like that kind of almost performative aspect, you know, you just learn the game, you learn the rules of the game, you learn how to perform in that, but where are you in that? Where's the things that you care about and that matter to you like you were talking about? No, absolutely. Because it's also interesting that the structures themselves almost prevent that, you know, independent spirit and willingness to act. It's not only that it needs to come from the young people, clearly. And you know, the podcast I've just put out with an amazing social entrepreneur in Nigeria, she was talking about that for the young people when they're so used to this, this top-down directed approach that actually it's quite difficult for them to step into that space initially. So there's some learning, unlearning and learning they need to do in terms of developing that willingness to act because it's not that it's not in there.

It's appetite for risk, right?

Well, yeah, absolutely. But also the structures themselves have prevented the teachers and the young people from kind of experiencing that.

Yeah, definitely. I think there's a real tension in the system at the moment because compliant classrooms are easy, right? Like if you walk into a classroom that's compliant and, you know, all of your students are sitting in front of you with their 3 different colored highlighters and their margins ruled down the side of their book, you know, waiting with pen in hand or, you know, iPad pencil, whatever is the tech in the room at the time, like waiting to kind of absorb what you're going to say, you know, putting their hand up if they need to go to the bathroom. Like, in some ways it's a really sweet siren song for educators to have a classroom culture like that because it makes— the compliant classroom is easy. I think what we need to challenge is that what we don't require are compliant young people when they leave school. We need engaged young people, and that actually looks a little bit messier in the classroom. It's an uncomfortable place for educators because it means that young people are going to take the topic in a different direction. They're going to push the boundaries of what the project is and what they can do there. They're going to ask tough questions and demand more from the schooling system. And, and that feels uncomfortable, and it's not necessarily easy. So how do we reconcile what's easy with what's better? You know, not just for society and the world at large, but, but better for the, for the young people, you know, and their future beyond school.

Yeah, I know, for sure. And I'd love to ask you about— I will come back to this because I think it's really often just a marginal thing that we do outside of the classroom, but, but getting it into the core business, like you say, of the things that are going on in the classroom, I think is key. And that's one of the things I've understood that you're doing really well is to get it into the curriculum. So I'd love to come back to that. But just to come back to your point about curiosity, I really wanted to ask you about that because I think I've heard you kind of, again, if you deep dive in your reflection, it's like even underneath enterprising thinking, what is it? Actually that's in the core of the thing going on there. And you sounded like you were getting to curiosity as a pretty core kernel of the thing that's happening.

Yeah, 100%. So what we've done over the last like 3 or 4 years, we've been deep in trying to work out what are the capabilities and skills that underpin being enterprising. So what does that look like? You know, and there's a lot of data out there around the critical capabilities that young people need to navigate the future of work or whatever language modeling we want to use. So we kind of aggregated a lot of that research and settled in on 6 core capabilities, and each capability has a number of skills that sit underneath it. So when we work with our programs, both teachers and students, we kind of measure— we benchmark first, and then we measure the growth in those capabilities and those skills. With educators, we measure their confidence to teach those capabilities and those skills, and with young people, we measure their understanding of the capability and then also their confidence to deliver on it. What's really interesting is the movement that we've had, like, so in the reflection that we've had between entrepreneurship and enterprise, we've also been really focused on are these the right capabilities and what do they look like? And it doesn't matter what school or system I'm working in, what age group I'm working with, the capability of lowest confidence, both for teachers and students, is always creativity and innovation. And I think it's because we have this relationship with creativity in that we believe it's the creative arts. Because that's how we've grown up thinking about creativity. That's art and music and, and those moving parts. When actually being creative is a way of thinking and doing, it's not necessarily intrinsically related to the artistic product that we've perhaps attached it to. So I think that's really important. But in teasing apart, my original hypothesis was that creativity was the linchpin skill for all the others, that you needed creativity in order to be a strong project manager, in order to have strong communication skills in order to have an adaptive mindset. But what I've actually unraveled is creativity sits here, and, and what we've placed in the center of our capability wheel for next year is curiosity. And this is something that we've only just stumbled into across the last 8 weeks, because what we realized was missing was young people's ability to ask curious questions at every corner and to kind of test their own hypotheses and, and hold their assumptions really lightly, to be curious about other people that they're working with, to be curious about problems, be curious about existing solutions. Solutions, but that curiosity and that innate ability to question is the linchpin skill for all of the other elements. And it is the, I think, the capability that we squash the fastest in the school system. Because if we look at little 5 and 6-year-olds when they begin with us, they're innately curious humans. They ask more questions than you have time to answer. And, you know, maybe the lack of patience that adults have, we somehow beat that innate curiosity out of young people. And then we wonder why they become so compliant in teenagehood and beyond. I think it's because we've stopped honoring the questioning and we've judged it. And so our young people begin to judge that in themselves.

100%. And it's also interesting to notice that the curiosity is absolutely inherent, right? It has to come from within the young person, right? By definition, you can't impose curiosity on anybody else. It's, it's something that fires in you. Because of something, an experience you've had before or something that has sparked—

A wondering.

Something, exactly, for you. And so back to your point about that kind of mattering to the young people, it has to be at the center somehow, right? It's like if it doesn't start there, then whatever you're working with, entrepreneurship, enterprise, doesn't matter. You're still imposing from the outside in when actually there's something quite inherent that has to come with that kind of idea of curiosity and wonder.

And, and I think there's two other elements that sit around that as well, is I think you have to have a space that's safe and playful in order to be curious too. I, I don't think curiosity comes innately in a system that's structured and time-bound and restrictive and constrained, um, and prescriptive. And so you almost have to unravel, like, and create space space for curiosity because, you know, a curious thought will take you in a direction that's unanticipated. And at the moment, our system is so structured that it doesn't allow for that.

Oh my goodness, I couldn't agree with that more.

I—

so one of the things we're talking about with Festival of Hope is creating spaces for young people, because that phrase, creating spaces, is not, you know, they're not arbitrarily chosen words. Like, the idea of creating space is what I think one of the most important things we can do in education right now. And, and I, I dunno if you've seen his work, there's a guy called Joe Adelman who talks about spaces, funnels, and tubes. And I wrote a piece about that recently that what you're talking about is the funnels and the tubes in education are everywhere. You know, we're, we're funneling kids down into particular outcomes, whether they're all the same, or maybe we're going towards a personalized learning approach where you're given a platform, but you're still directed towards outcomes. But those outcomes, you know, you might get choice about what they are. They might reflect, but that idea of just a space, leaving an open space for non-goal-directed, like, well, what are you wondering? What are the big questions that you care about right now in relation to asking and looking into some answers? So yeah, no, so appreciate you bringing that up.

And I think, you know, gosh, my best ideas happen when I'm in the shower or on a long drive, right? It's like these moments where I, you know, I'm not really thinking about anything and I'm also thinking about everything. And it's like where the collision create something like really special. And if you schedule every minute, you don't create that. And the other thing that I would say, like, I think about, you know, adults that find their sense of purpose do so through experimentation and curiosity, right? Like, you have this experience that kind of challenges you, and then you chase that challenge for a period of time. And again, I think if we overschedule young people and we don't create these opportunities for catalytic experimentation, they don't get to see the world that's around them because they constantly funnel or just choose the same experiences because they feel safe. So I don't know, there's, there's so much in this.

Absolutely. And it goes back to what you're saying about the kind of the easier compliant classroom is for a lot of people, teachers and young people, that is a safe kind of preferable option given the uncertainty. And like you said, messiness almost that comes with a slightly more space-like opportunity, right? It has inherent risk built into that because you don't know where it's going to go quite. And that, that is a real challenge in the current system, the way with the high stakes and with all of the things that we know in terms of the way that people, the accountability systems work, it's a really difficult thing to do. So this is not, I think neither of us would be reflecting on this as something straightforward, right? It's really deeply challenging to the logic of the current industrial system.

Totally. Yeah. And I think it's uncomfortable. And as much as we talk about how we want young people to feel uncomfortable in their learning, we often don't take on that responsibility as educators at the front of the room to be comfortable being uncomfortable at the same time. I just— it's like at the end of the day, it doesn't matter how fun your assessment task is that you've designed. Like, as soon as we wrap a metric around an experience, we take away the, I think, ability for young people to be playful and safe and then take risks and kind of build this sense of curiosity and capability that we need.

Yeah, no, it's true. And just, I'm interested, how do you balance that tension then with measuring the capabilities themselves?

Such a great question. At the moment, the tools that we're using are very self-reflective, but how we've built them out is we've unraveled what the particular skills are that fit under the capability. So it's a case of how confident do you feel in your ability to do these things consistently, you know, without support? How confident do you feel? Like, are you confident enough that you could teach other people to do this, or you could elicit this kind of capability in others around you? So it's certainly not perfect, I think. And look, you know, the conversations around agency and capability development, I wouldn't I wouldn't say new within the education sector, but they're certainly building momentum when we talk about learner profiles and micro-credentialing and all the, all of these other moving parts. I think what's missing is you can't do the measurement without the explicit capability building that must sit around that. And so if you are going to measure it, then you have to be explicitly creating space to build that capability in the classroom. And maybe the part that I'm seeing that's missing at the moment is we're doing a lot of measuring, but we're not teaching teachers how to teach this stuff. And then we're not creating space in the curriculum for the teaching to happen with the young people at the same time. And so it's a case of these benchmarking and measurement instruments that are implemented, but there's actually no space within the curriculum to actually support young people to do this successfully or support teachers to implement this with confidence, because you can't have compelling curriculum without competent educators.

Absolutely. Yeah. And I suppose I would also reflect on the fact that maybe the, the way that the articulations of those competencies are done need to be kind of generative enough, open enough for multiple ways of demonstrating that, right? Like to your point about non-goal directed or creating spaces and If we then funnel them into, well, no, this is how you do creativity and innovation, not this way.

Checkbox.

Then suddenly, exactly right. And then, and then that's my other fear is the measure becomes the target. It's like, well, we just need to create a whole bunch of creative and innovative young people. It's like, no, that's not the thing that we're doing, but we are talking about creativity and innovation or enterprising thinking as a means to connect young people to the things they care about. And, you know, for them to reflect and develop their own competencies, but As soon as we end up with the measure becoming the target, I think then we've lost— to your point earlier, we've gone back into this. We've just replaced knowledge for skills outcomes, and now we're just ticking boxes to measure and track the fact that, you know, Nick's creativity level is now a 3.5 rather than a—

Yeah, it's so true. And I think it is like it's a really slippery slope that we slide down in education because the data is really critical, but at the same time, you know, why are you collecting the data and what are you doing with it and what's the purpose of the data? I'm really interested at the moment in, you know, this belief that I have that it's confidence in these capabilities or these competencies that creates agency. And so, you know, the curious thing that I'm, you know, really interested in at the moment is if we can build these competencies in young people, I believe the product of confidence in these competencies is agency. And that's a piece that I'm not sure we've addressed well in education at the moment. We talk about how critical agency is, like we want young people with agency, but all we talk about is, you know, maybe a little bit around feedback processes or having a sense of autonomy or voice and choice in a learning journey, but there's no really great clarity on how you cultivate a sense of agency in a young person. And so I'm interested in, in that, and I'm also interested in how critical a sense of success is to creating that as well, because I believe that young people can't have agency in a learning journey that they don't believe they can do. And so if they're in a learning partnership with an educator that they haven't experienced success with, you know, there's no way they're going to be motivated in that subject, which means there's no way they're going to be engaged in that subject, which means there's no way that they can ever have agency in that subject. And so, you know, the first thing that they have to experience is success because we like to do the things we're good at. You know, no adult has a hobby in something they suck at. Most of us gravitate towards spending our time in places where we feel a sense of success and accomplishment and worthiness. And so, you know, we have to come back to the beginnings of our learning journeys with young people and ask ourselves how we're building a culture of learning where the young person can see themselves succeeding in it.

Yeah, no, it's true. And I wonder if that's, you know, those were your reflections with that grade 9 boy in the English classroom. It's like you perhaps could see that this task was just irrelevant to his life, but also potentially out of his— if he had a grade 4 reading level, you know, this is— this was not something he was going to experience success with, and therefore it wasn't going to create that virtuous cycle of motivation and learning. Because yeah, we, we do enjoy that dopamine hit of doing some things we're good at, right? Even if it's not something that we're deeply curious about in our life, right? It's just something— yeah, that felt good to, to get that answer right. And sometimes I wonder that those kind of superficial dopamine hits are what, what keep that compliant education thing going on, right?

Yeah, look, that's a curly question that we could certainly spend some time in. Yeah, for sure.

Yeah, yeah. But I was also just— what you were saying there about that kind of how do we cultivate those things, I mean, that, that's all the self-efficacy and growth mindset, Dweck stuff, which has been, I think, completely misappropriated in education and just commodified, right? I don't know what it's like in Australia, but across Europe and in the UK It's the answer. Again, it's the silver bullet to that very, very thorny, complicated question about how do we cultivate those kinds of dispositions and senses of self-efficacy in young people. I mean, that's deeply complex stuff, but now it's the market commodifies it into, yeah, you just, you know, you praise them for their effort and you, you know, you tell them they need a growth mindset. And, you know, not to say there aren't some really important ideas embedded in in that. But unfortunately, again, as you said earlier, there's a bit of a reach for the gimmick move in education to solve the problem. And it's a deep problem you're not going to solve with a growth mindset chart.

No. And look, I think the principles of growth mindset and, and wek are, are really effective. But maybe where we lack is, you know, educators typically leap for a solution that they can plug and play that they don't contextualize. And that's the challenge. I think it's the integration that's lacking. So we're looking for a fast win rather than looking for the big win, which might be a gradual implementation over a 3-year period that's contextually relevant to the school culture that you're working in and the community that you're working in as well.

And contextually relevant is such an important phrase, I think, as well, because we also throw in growth mindset as though you as a whole person will either, you know, turn on the switch of growth mindset or not, you know, like in every possible situation. And like you said, you know, I might as an adult decide I want to become an amazing surfer, never surfed in my life. And then I might have a growth mindset in that context, but I may very well not. But then give me a guitar and I might have, for some reason, a much deeper sense of possibility that I can do this. And I don't quite know where those things will come from. And they will come from context and they'll come from the way my teacher spoke to me or the way that the waves were on that day or the way, you know, how cold I felt in the sea. And I was like, You know, it's deeply context-specific. I think the way that those senses of I can do this, that's possibility and self-efficacy come up for young people. And I think we also forget that a bit in education when we, we imagine it's gonna work in the history classroom.

Yeah.

And the English classroom with a different, totally different context, different group of children.

Yeah.

Different teacher, different style, different place, whatever. You know, there's, there's so many factors. Factors, I think, play into that.

I think that's really right because, you know, the reality is like nothing in education should be plug and play because, you know, anybody who's taught in a classroom can know that you can have 2 Year 9 English classes and walk into one lesson and just nail it, you know, the lesson goes so well, and then walk in the next lesson to your next Year 9 class and deliver the same lesson and have it bomb completely. So there is so much in the timeliness and and the context that mean that in some situations a particular learning experience will land and other situations it won't.

Yeah, no, 100%. It's almost astounding that we imagine a—

if we can fix it—

exactly, a complex set of individual humans with all these incredible things going on for them.

parachute in a good book.

Totally the same. Yeah.

So exactly.

One of the things though, I would, I do want to come back to is the thing that you seem to be doing really well, which is obviously there is a place for doing this kind of work as a slightly separate, really exciting, you know, moment for young people to experience this kind of self-efficacy in a different context that is not the history classroom or whatever. Great. Like there's really an important place for that, but there is also, as we've been discussing, a really central role for how do we do more of this kind of work while we're teaching that good book, or while this, you know, you're learning about the First World War. So that integration piece into the curriculum is critical, I think, to this work. And it's, from what I've understood, some of the work you've been doing with some primary schools. I think maybe you could talk a bit about that in terms of how are you approaching that problem of that integration.

Yeah, I think it's really important because when it sits in the Bolton program, for the fortunate few, you only have the same select group of young people choose that experience. And so, you know, I believe that we learn to know ourselves through new experiences, right? So if we didn't choose that experience, we don't learn from that experience. So by embedding it within curriculum, we provide, I don't know, equal footing for all young people to engage in this learning. I'm really famous for saying that I hope young people love our program or I hope they hate it. Um, my greatest fear is that it's a beige experience because you can't learn from beige. So if you love something, you can sort of seek more of that out. And if you hate it, that's actually the perfect catalyst for you to unravel what was it about that learning experience that you didn't like, and then what do you now know about yourself as a result of that too. So I think that's really important in looking at how we embed it in curriculum. You know, we had a company calibration with our whole team in Brisbane recently, and we were talking about our vision statements and our mission statements. And I said, look, I have to believe that the system's not broken, like that the education system isn't broken, because if I parrot that phrase out that the system is broken, I'm saying to every educator in every classroom that there's nothing that they can do to make it better. And I refuse to believe that because as soon as you walk into your classroom with your young people, there's no curriculum police standing over you watching you as you deliver that lesson. And I believe that there's a beautiful opportunity for you to lead learning how it aligns with your values in that moment. And so the work that we do with schools is to find the problem that exists within the curriculum context. And so once you see the curriculum as a problem hook, you can then kind of pull it apart and create the space for young people to explore that challenge and then create from that challenge. So, you know, we do this through lots of different curriculum pieces. The, the very first, you know, our flagship program Activate, the very first curriculum that we delivered in that was in English because my background is as an English teacher. And the original unit of curriculum was for young people to look at how our Indigenous people are represented in different texts. And so the young people would explore poetry and film and all of these different examples of how Indigenous people were represented. And then the original task was to complete like a monologue or something. All we did was, was take those Indigenous representations in text, but see that as an opportunity to explore how marginalized groups were represented within our community. So we, we used what we learned about those characters in novels, in short stories, in film, and then we ask the question of where does that representation exist within our local community, like who is silenced or marginalized within our local community. And then, you know, rather than just finish the unit when students would regurgitate back to me what they learned about marginalized voices or the textual features that you use to create, you know, silenced voices within text, I challenge them to come up with a social enterprise that closed the gap for a marginalized group of choice. But I wanted them to use what they knew and then create something that would change the story for somebody in our community. And so I was still able to meet all of the curriculum checkpoints that I needed. We still did the closed text analysis. It was still a spoken task at the end. So there was certainly in the system that we were operating in, I still met all of the curriculum alignment that I needed to, but rather than have young people tell me what I told them, I asked them to use what they knew about that problem context and then propose a solution. And so, you know, Activate program is delivered in this enterprising curriculum, is delivered, you know, in business classrooms, obviously in innovation classrooms and in STEM classrooms, but it's also delivered in English classrooms and it's delivered in science classrooms where students look at tectonic plates and then they pitch a device that might reduce the impact from a natural disaster or it's delivered in, you know, one of my favorite units was a history curriculum where the students did, you know, a research project on a moment in modern history that had changed the trajectory of the world. That was their chosen piece.

Yeah.

And then they used our design thinking methodology and our Odyssey in order to pitch an idea that would stop history from repeating itself. And so again, they like used what they learned about the causes and consequences of this moment that changed the fabric of our world, but rather than be, you know, complicit or compliant in the status quo, they were asked to use what they knew to then propose something within a community that might stop that from happening again. And I just think regardless of the system that we operate in, there are ways that we can pry open the curriculum to create the problem provocation and then allow young people the space to explore that problem and create from it.

Yeah, and I love that idea that even underlying all of the kind of entrepreneurship type projects, there is a human need, right? Like a need to feel safe. You're coming up with some business idea about safety or security or whatever, or a need to feel that you belong, right? There's, you know, there's all sorts of just human needs underlying all of those kinds of things. And it's exactly the same in the curriculum, right? There's just these human needs and non-human needs, right? If you're talking about the living world or whatever, but at its core, we can really bring it down to, you know, humans involved in this situation and how are they navigating it together and how, what do they need to do or to, to consider when they're trying to make change in that moment. And that's, yeah, if you boil it down to the, the human thing that's going on, that's really at the heart of education, which I, again, it gets totally lost in all of the obsession with outcomes. Do you know this? Can you do this? Like actually there's some, just some fundamental human stories in there and how do we respond? And I think I love that idea of just your integrating into those curriculum opportunities ways for young people to respond in ways that are creative and ask them to create.

Well, and also I think to bring what they know of the world to that. Like, so I think so often in a classroom experience, young people almost have to park who they are at the door in order to kind of absorb whatever's happening in the classroom. And what I firmly believe is the best changemakers or entrepreneurs or whatever language you want to use is, you know, able to catalyze who they are with what they care about. You know, it's that unique combination of their lived experiences and the way that they see the world combined with something that they find curious and fascinating. And, and it's that fusion of those things that great things happen. And so, you know, at the core of it, we can use the curriculum as a catalyst for young people to do that. You know, it's just a case of stepping back, you know, almost to enable young people to step up.

Yeah, no, I love that. And it's, again, that's just another one of those fictions that you can even leave yourself at the door, right? Like what a bizarre idea that you cannot bring yourself into that classroom as a teacher or as a young person. I think it's, you know, it's a convenient fiction that we like to perpetuate, but it's happening whether you like it or not, whether you ask people to not do it or do it. It's going to happen.

It's there.

I'm with my biases. I've had my experiences this morning. I, you know, did or didn't have coffee this morning. You know, there's just a ton of stuff of context, right, that you just can't— you can't run away from and you can't pretend it's not there. So why not? Let's work with it, right? Yeah.

And even more than that, like, why don't we see that as a strength? Like, exactly, strength or value that we can bring to a conversation. And so, you know, you're the only person in the world that has this unique collision of events that's created who you are. And so that places you in this really special place that we should honor as well, like, absolutely.

Yeah, it does. But, and if I could ask, you're— I just, I was really curious about when you were talking about the independent energetic spirit, how much of that is also a collective experience? Because that's also one of the things I worry about, the, the weaponized industrial system, broken or not, It's very, very focused on the individual, right? And I think, and that's, that's a quite a culturally specific frame, right?

Yes.

Many cultures around the world and throughout history don't necessarily think about the world in the sense of this sovereign individual going about his business or her business, right? There is something much more collective happening. And I wondered what, yeah, how does that fit into your independent energetic spirit? Because clearly you're working with young people in groups, right?

Yeah, they get a choice, so they can choose to work independently or collaboratively. The kind of mission statements, irrespective of the curriculum that young people play in, and even our working mission statement that we've got at the moment, is to sort of unleash or build or whatever the word is, I'm not sure yet, but enterprising thinkers and doers who can make the world a better place. And so that's the core of it, is that whatever they're creating or whatever they're delivering on whatever promise they're making through that process, that they're leaving the world a better place as a result of what they've created. And so, you know, we have in our Odyssey the last frame in the steps that the students move through is kind of a young person stepping through a vortex, because we believe that, you know, these youth-led ideas have the power to bend the future. And so the language that we use with young people is, you know, how will the world be different as a result of your creation? And so, yes, like, I do think that we're asking young people to start with self, because otherwise I think what we generate are these hero-preneurs that are picking problems that they don't have the authentic experience to solve. And so I think that's a really important element too. But then also we're asking after they've sort of, you know, maybe leaned into a challenge that they find most curious and most fascinating, we then ask them to look around them and see if there are any other young people who share the same interest or the same challenge as like the chosen challenge. And so, you know, the power of the collective, like to find others who share the same vision of the world as you, is really important in that group formation or that collective effort. And then the challenge at the end and throughout the journey is for young people to be constantly questioning, you know, is what I'm working on going to make the world a better place, or are there, you know, maybe some unintended negative consequences that I haven't considered as a result of the work that I'm leading as well?

Yeah, no, absolutely. And I've had Daniela Pappy Thornton on the podcast recently about hero-preneurship, and she talks amazingly well about that. And it's a very real challenge in this work, isn't it? It's like you want to motivate and support confidence and self-efficacy and agency and all these words, but without tipping over too much into ego and hero and I can, I can save the world, right? It's like, yes, there's a very delicate balance to be forging there.

Yeah, and I think, you know, and look, I'm going to make a generalized statement. I think the risk of hero-preneurship probably sits more firmly in maybe some of our more privileged education settings. And it comes from a good place because, you know, educators are trying to build like an empathy muscle in perhaps a more privileged cohort of young people to consider their privilege and maybe, you know, that other people's circumstances aren't the same. But what we see out the other side of that are these really superficial solutions that buy into a lot of stereotypes and inaccuracies. And so, you know, we talk a lot about vortexing up the complexity that young people operate in. So, you know, the simplest context for a young person to solve from is like a problem that affects them first. And so that's actually the first place that they have to solve from is an experience that they can directly relate to as a lived experience. But then you can stretch them and start to get them to consider maybe friends and family because then it's like a known context, but they're actually stretching beyond a problem that might directly affect them. And then you can start to look at, you know, school because it's a known context, but it's at scale and the problem they might have seen, but it doesn't necessarily affect them. And then you can look at local communities and then you can look at maybe like a national context and then you can start to look at an international context. And then we would say that the most complex context for young people to solve from is like a future hypothetical. So something that hasn't happened yet in the time that doesn't exist. And so, you know, the purpose of like a really beautiful whole school approach to enterprise thinking is when young people move up that vortex of complexity year on year. And so you start with self, and then you slowly build that empathy muscle and that context complexity so that they move through that problem-seeking and problem-solving vortex as they go on year on year.

Yeah, I love that, because it's— it can be quite easy to jump to the, the problem you see on TV, and, you know, save the whales or whatever it is.

Good luck.

Nothing to do with your context. And I love that. Yeah, bringing it back to self to start with, but then looking outwards about, you know, and I think that's really key, isn't it? Like what you in your unique moment and situation and bringing what you're uniquely bringing to it, looking around and thinking, what is mine to do here? Right? Like it. Yeah, that in itself for leaders, for young people, for everyone is a, I think is a pretty probably an important question to be asking all the time. It's like maybe nothing, right? Maybe, maybe nothing. Maybe your role in this moment is not your time, it's somebody else's. Or, you know, you, you hang back because doing nothing is still doing something, right?

Or it's to amplify the solution of somebody else. Like, too often we move into solution creation without actually taking the time to understand, well, what's already happening here? And maybe my role is to amplify the work of somebody else because they're already solving this problem in a really purposeful way. You know, we don't have to be creators to be contributors.

Amazing. This is great. And maybe just, if, just to finish, I've heard you also talking about courageous leaders and living and not just talking. It's not what you say, it's how you live. It was a nice phrase I heard. And I think that's really key to, to this as well in terms of, because as we've talked about, in a way there are amazing educators and leaders doing work in spite of the system, like really doing really amazing work despite the system, not because of it. And I wonder, yeah, what, just to finish, what have you seen in your collaboration with schools? Like where do you see really courageous leaders doing, making and taking really strong choices that start to create some of these kinds of spaces we've been talking about?

Yeah, I think there's a couple of things to this. I don't think every school can be everything to everyone. So I think courageous leaders say no just as much as they say yes. Like, I think that that ability to actually, you know, choose a route, I guess, that's going to align with the school community and stay committed to that rather than trying to be everything to everyone. So I think that's really, really important. I believe that, you know, the greatest movements in education start from a yes from a leader to somebody who might want to take a risk. So I think, you know, courageous leaders are the ones who will back their team on a project or a pilot, uh, that is built with the intent of doing great things for young people, and they back them whether it's successful or whether it's not. And so that ability to almost bring in this design thinking or this experimentation or this prototyping within the school environment, I think, is really, really important. And then the other thing that I would say that, you know, the leaders that we're working with is they're very keen to get quick wins to build momentum, but they've always got the long view. So they're thinking that 3-year process, you know, at the end of 3 years, where would I really love my school or my school community to be? And then how do I backward map from that place in a way that sets my staff, my students, and my community up for success? And so, you know, building momentum with quick wins, but with like the big win in sight, I think, over that 3-year period. So those sorts of things I think are really, really critical.

Yeah, there's— that kind of resonates with what you were saying about just experiencing success for the young people, right? Like the, the team, the school have to experience some success in order to stay on the path, right? Or motivated.

Yes.

But also potentially a note of caution about not engine— like not creating such a goal-directed process of like, where would I like to be in 3 years? Because I think that's another thing that I I think is a danger is that we say we want to create spaces for young people, but then we over-engineer the organization around it. And it's like there's a mismatch between what we say and what we do sometimes in the way that we run the organization even.

Yeah. And I think that there's something to this. We have this saying in the work that we do that you should hold your purpose tightly but your solution lightly. And so I think that there's something to having that 3-year vision or that sense of purpose of where you want the essence of your community to be, but understanding that your way of getting there might shift and change as you learn and understand more. So, you know, that ability to calibrate on the journey, I think, is really critical.

And that's, I mean, that's your vortex of complexity, right?

Dave Snowden.

Yeah. I don't know if you know Dave Snowden, but he says start a journey with a sense of direction and then it's about what's the next right thing. And I think those two things, like, you need that sense of direction, you know, you're not wandering aimlessly. But at the same time, if you've mapped out the journey from day one, it's gonna be completely inaccurate by the time you take the first or second step, right? And that comes back to your point about noticing and being curious and looking around and, you know, what is the next right thing? But we're still moving with a sense of purpose and direction. So very cool. Thank you, Nic. This is amazing.

My pleasure. Great to chat.

I really appreciate it. No, you're doing amazing work and Yeah, no, thanks for taking the time to share.

My pleasure. Thanks for the good curly question.

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