How Embodiment Science Transforms Education - A Conversation with Prof. Guy Claxton and Emily Poel

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

Learning about embodiment is, and maybe there's a little bit of should be in there, about actually learning to change our own habits of thinking about ourselves, as well as opening up new professional possibilities for us as educators.

Hi everyone, and welcome back to the podcast. My name's Tim Logan, and the podcast is produced by Good Impact Labs. This week is a huge privilege to have my good friends Emily Poole and Guy Claxton returning to the podcast in celebration of the release this week of their fabulous new book, Bodies of Learning: How Embodiment Science Transforms Education. It really is a significant book that lays out, unlike any other, the deep implications of 4E cognitive science that support and strengthen the case for a more healthy, more humane, more generative educational experience for our young people, which is everything that this channel is about. Guy is Professor Emeritus of the Learning Sciences and an education thought leader and author of The Future of Teaching and Intelligence in the Flesh, among many other books, and he's done decades of research on expanding human intelligence and applying the learning sciences in real-world contexts. Emily Poole is a Berlin-based embodiment practitioner with a background in contemporary dance and history and has taught internationally for over 15 years, developing practical methods that show how movement and physical awareness shape creativity, thinking, and learning. You can find links to the book and the previous episodes that Emily and Guy have been on in the show notes.

Thank you so much, Guy. It's just such a pleasure to see you. I've been so excited about this moment with the book coming out earlier this week and just really feeling how significant this book is and just so happy to see it out in the world. So super excited to have this conversation and thank you for joining me.

Not at all. Absolute pleasure.

Very happy to be here.

Great. Okay, so maybe just by way of introduction overall, I think it would be great to just lay the ground. Perhaps Guy, if we could come to you first. You framed this idea of embodiment science as this transformative possibility, and it would be great just to, 'cause I, as I understand it, we're not just talking about embodiment actually, we're talking about much more than that. And the book goes into lots of amazing and interesting places. So perhaps, yeah, first of all, if you could just lay out what are we really talking about when we say this phrase embodiment science?

Sure. Well, both those words are important. And thanks for the opportunity to kind of set out our stall in terms of what the background is, what's the body of work that we're engaging with. It's sometimes known, maybe more commonly known as either embodied cognition or 4E cognition or 5E cognition. Now the E's are breeding like rabbits, but we prefer the notion of embodiment science. And I'll very briefly tell you why. We have some trouble with the word cognition because it was co-opted in the 1960s in psychology as cognitive psychology. And that was all about what you might broadly call intellectual matters to do with the mind, thinking, reasoning, decision-making, solving kind of well-formed arithmetical IQ type problems, things like that. And I think though that sense of the word cognition is challenged and is used more broadly these days, I think it still carries that sort of undercurrent. When people talk about cognitive science or cognitive psychology, it's often equated with intellect. And a big part of the project in our book is, to put it very simply, to introduce people to the realization that intellect is not the be-all and end-all of intelligence. If we think about education as the conscription and development of human intelligence, then right from the word go, we want to be using words that don't narrow us down unthinkingly onto the intellectual forms of intelligence. So it's as if the intellect formed the peak of an iceberg and that was all that we saw and all that we noticed. But there's an enormous bulk below the surface of the water. Which constitutes the same iceberg. And all of what embodiment science is pointing towards is the fact that you cannot understand human intelligent functioning without talking about the body and without reintroducing into your conversation, not just reasoning and thinking and problem solving and deducing, but feeling and emoting and intuiting. And needing and valuing and wanting and being interested in and all of those things. You know, we know that learning, the major focus of our book, is profoundly influenced by all kinds of things which are not themselves of the intellect. How we go about learning, how well we learn is influenced by our physical surroundings and our sensing of those physical surroundings. It's influenced by the state of our gut. It's influenced by our heartbeat. It's influenced by what we want and what we value. It's influenced by our beliefs about our own capability or indeed about the nature of knowledge. So what we are, the project of our book is to give a more rich and more accurate, more science-based understanding of what learning is and how learning works and how it can be fostered. Science, just as a last footnote to this, the word science means broadly a kind of inquiry that's based on kind of disciplined, or you might say scrupulous observation and reasoning. That doesn't only reduce to lab-based science, right? Or, you know, double-blind controlled experimental methods. So embodiment science, like its parent cognitive science, is a kind of coming together of well-thought thoughts and observations from anthropology, from AI, from philosophy, from experimental psychology, from social and affective neuroscience, from spiritual religious studies. And so on and so on and so on. So we would also reject in our explorations in this book any attempt to try and narrow us down to what sometimes are thought of as the gold standard methods of empirical work. But we give ourselves the license to roam more widely than that.

Yeah. Fantastic. And yeah, I mean, I get that kind of scientism, I suppose, but that's what's so exciting to me about the book is that you are Some of those things, those influences you just talked about, are often accused of being the kind of hand-wavy things that people like to bring in about the feeling and the needing and the relating and all of— and exactly what you're doing in the book, which is why it's so important, I think, is bringing the scientific discourse in and around those things to say they are not luxurious, nice to have after you've, you know, done the real intellectual work, as you said, they are fundamental, like fundamental to learning.

Absolutely. Hard-nosed empirical neuroscientists like Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, for example, will tell you that the science indisputably tells her that you cannot understand learning without including emotion, for example.

Absolutely.

So this isn't fluffy stuff, and we are at pains in the book to distance ourselves from anything that might be construed as a sort of dogmatic or woo-woo or New Age approach to these kinds of things. We want to rescue the discourse from, on the one hand, a narrow scientism, and on the other, from a kind of ungrounded, speculative, and in some cases rather sentimental and inaccurate approach to what's going on in our bodies and our minds.

I love it. Yeah, absolutely. And that's where the ideology often sneaks in too, right? In all sorts of different places and ways. So Emily, did you want to add to that?

Well, it's been so amazing to roam with Guy because Guy, you have such a vast landscape of knowledge and research and academic topics in different disciplines. And so it, it really has been moving in a wide space and trying to bridge disciplines. And my interest is always how do we bring that conceptual space into daily practice or into daily life situations? And I think the, the mix is what makes it that that, that, and I've learned so much on the conceptual side and it's given me even more clarity and grounding about practice and how to communicate about them and teach them in new ways. So I think both directions feed each other and that's really what the book is, is a conversation between two people very interested in learning coming from very different backgrounds and professional worlds.

Yeah, no, I love it. And I mean, just such a nice model of what the thing we're talking about, right? The kind of interdisciplinary praxis, like it can't just be the It can't just be the practice. It's gotta be the constant dialogue between those things. And you two embody that in a really amazing way. So no, absolutely. And so then, I mean, let's talk about some of the places that this is showing up then. So for example, Emily, you talk about lots of practical examples of moves that people can make, but also places where these kinds of things are showing up. And I've profiled some of them on the podcast, places like Green School Bali, the IB Systems Transformation Pathway that's coming up, Big Picture Learning Australia. Lots of different contexts. And I mean, actually, that's also one of the things I'm so excited about with this work is that it does provide a really strong grounding for a real diverse range of progress— what we call often progressive. I don't love the word, but progressive educational approaches. It provides that grounding. So yeah, maybe just give us a few examples of where this is kind of showing up in practicality.

Yeah, and, and that's been something that I've learned a lot about over the last couple of years and diving into some of this stuff. I don't have decades of experience in the field of education, and so I'm, I'm learning all the time from the school principals I talk to, from the podcast episodes with young people, from long discussions with Guy. And now I can start to recognize certain elements that these innovative approaches have. And they just give the most colorful mix of different examples of how those things can be expressed. For instance, it's very clear to me that those more progressive initiatives are absolutely based on the learner's own interests. They're allowed to, to do what is interesting and meaningful for them. They're contributing to their local communities in very real ways. They're solving actual problems. They're working with the people around them, so there's not this I'm at school acquiring knowledge and then I'm supposed to figure out later what I do in my life. It's that these habits are being formed around projects that are meaningful to me, that create real change in the community. A lot of them have that mix going on. There's less this exam-driven model. They, they show exhibitions and portfolios of their results and their failures and their projects. And I find it so inspiring. To see that happening and that I think probably small versions of that are happening elsewhere as well.

No, I completely agree. Because I mean, one of the things that maybe you're pointing to there, one of the ways I often think about it is kind of if we're opening up the space, we're like, we're opening up the spaces of possibility of what learning is and what, as Guy's just talked about, all these different influences and, you know, with strong scientific grounding that feed into this wider boundary version of what learning is in the world. And that's kind of reflected in a lot of the ways that you're just talking about there, the wider boundary ways that young people might show the things they're learning or reflect on the things they're learning. So to me, often it feels like a, just a kind of a really important opening up to the different possibilities rather than often, as you say, the kind of exam-driven is a kind of a narrowing down of we only value these kind of things, or these are the right, wrong framings. We, there's a lot more gray, there's a lot more nuance, there's a lot more possibility in the way that a lot of these different, more innovative approaches are kind of giving value to maybe.

Absolutely. And, and I think they are also effective because there's more embodied action going on. There's more movement, there's more different interactions with different people. There's more thinking and reflecting and meaning making in different ways. And Guy can really speak to this very well of, of how the embodiment science shows up in these initiatives and projects. Because we, it's like we sometimes get stuck making the argument, why is embodiment important? Well, where is it already working? And how does that work actually? And I think that's an interesting point at right now, even reflecting on what we're saying in the book and drawing the lines to real life.

I would also just add on to that maybe something And I would just so appreciate this about you, Emily, personally, and you've already said it, this kind of learning approach, you know, standing in inquiry in the work that you've already said you've been doing throughout this book. But also I think that's a fundamental piece to this whole piece as well, is that we're not standing with certainty as teachers that we've said, these are the right and the wrong things you have to learn about the world. This is how the world is. And, you know, we just inculcate you into those ideas. Actually, we're constantly, you know, if we're honest, We're in learning, and that is something that you embody, I think, personally, and shows through in the work. But it also, I think, shows through in all of these examples that you've highlighted. Something about standing in inquiry and exploration. I mean, even in the book, for example, where you talk about the, you know, predictive processing and a lot of the science around the way that we actually make sense in the world, it's not through certainty, it's through exploration and prediction, and then Checking what is the world telling me? Like, does it resonate with the predictions I had around that thing? So the science also seems to be challenging some of that certainty around we just, yeah, we've got it all figured out. Basically, the world's a machine, we know how it works, and we're gonna teach our young people about it. I mean, it just, I just feel so strongly that that is just, that myth has to die, right?

Yeah. What I was musing on while you two were talking was there are two, two things that are distinctive about the book as well as the particular content matter. One is the bringing together of theory and practice. I'd just like to emphasize that there are chunks of the book that are really quite theoretical, although we hope not in an inaccessible kind of way. We talk about a way in which certain foundational concepts of education, like what is intelligence? What is learning? What is memory? What is knowledge? What is reasoning? And we construct on the basis of the science different images of those key concepts, which then lead us to think, to develop, to critique in quite different ways about what's going on in schools. But then linking that, we hope that this is not merely just a, you know, an egghead book, that would be self-defeating, but linking it in a long chapter, which is called 87 Smart Things You Could Do in Your Classroom Tomorrow or something like that, to actually bring the grounding. The other thing, which I think I'm really grateful to Emily for the work that we've done together and the way she's opened my eyes to things, is that the book also insists that learning about embodiment is, and maybe there's a little bit of should be in there, about actually learning to change our own habits of thinking about ourselves, as well as opening up new professional possibilities for us as educators. There is a journey towards embodying embodiment ourselves, and the book contains a lot of running sequence of invitations to reflect about how did your body engage with that argument? Did you feel drawn to it? Like the, our language is full of metaphors, drawn towards it or repelled by it or intrigued or excited by it or whatever it may be. So we want to, we talk about this at the beginning of the book, to invite the reader to engage as an embodied being, not just as an intellectual being with the content of the book. And I think the joining together of the theoretical and the practical on the one hand and the professional and the personal on the other makes for a really interesting style of book. At least our hope is that people will find that interesting. It's, you know, it's intellectual, but not only intellectual. It's practical, but not only practical. And that all of this evolved through our lengthy, frequent, deep, meaningful, challenging, exciting conversations between the two of us.

Yeah, good. No, I mean, it's, but that's so important, isn't it? Because there's so many traps that push us back into the, let's say, old habits of the, the more disembodied valuing, right? Even the format of a book itself to a certain extent could do that, right? And I think absolutely you've walked that tightrope in a really interesting way to bring all of those things in.

Could I say one more thing? You've raised the notion of progressive education. One of the puzzles from which the book originated was the kind of, particularly around quite strongly in some areas of education at the moment, the strength of some people's hostility to the notion of progressive education and to the fact that progressive education is a very broad and rather unintegrated and disparate set of notions and practices that often, certainly from my point of view, have led to a rather fragmented and often rather ephemeral approach to educational reform. Things sort of flare up often around a rather brave and charismatic school principal, for example, but may not take root or may not spread. So the big issue in education at the moment for people who agree that all is not well about, you know, why are reforms not scaling up? Why are things not breeding or progressing? And we think that our foregrounding the nature of embodiment brings some coherence and some understanding to that, that there is lingering in some people's minds this strong distinction between the world of the mental and the world of the physical or the physiological, and that mind is smart. And body is not, and intelligence equals intellect and body has nothing to do with that. So the continuing struggle to derive the old phrase was parity of esteem for vocational subjects or for subjects that involve more of the body, dance, drama, physical education, things that actually involve you in making things or doing things or performing things. And we think that one of the things that's emerged from the book is a foundation and a synthesis of embodiment science that provides an integrative rationale for things that had often felt rather kind of insecure as progressive forms of education. We would hope that after someone's read our book, they will see that what counts as progressive is not airy-fairy or sentimental, or touchy-feely or whatever the string of pejorative words might be. But they, as well as the intellectual approaches, stem from a solid scientific underpinning. We very much hope that people will join us in that conclusion.

Yeah, no, that's great. And I would also say one of the ways that the more traditional approaches have done an incredibly good job is by, one could say, co-opting the science. And make the evidence-informed approaches often being positioned as leading you to the only possible conclusion, which is knowledge-rich curriculum and lots of rote memorization, etc. And I think again, that's what this, this book really does do is challenge that narrative. But I would also say, I mean, Emily, this is something you say often, I've heard you say, and I think it's just so powerful that it's not just about bringing the more traditionally understood as embodied subjects or vocational subjects or aesthetic creative subjects in and being valued. It's also about challenging that all of the other subjects are also embodied. So would you mind just saying a little bit about that? Because I think that's a really important insight that does sometimes get lost.

Absolutely. I love this subject and I think I just enjoy looking from an embodied lens, right? Because we are all bodies moving in the world and bodies moving in the world are thinking, they're discerning, they're making judgments. So, so I think if we take the starting point that our thinking is embodied anyway, so is math, so is biology, so is how we learn about those subjects. And, and this is where I think a bit of creativity comes in of how do I make biology class more active or more engaged? How do I let students pick up ideas and interact with them and move them around and make sense of them and act out mitosis and meiosis? Because then they'll understand it better instead of just sitting there reading about it in a book and having to take notes and try and make sense of it from this very stationary place. I think that whatever we're learning about, we can add more of the embodied to it. And for sure, there are some times when a frontal lecture is useful and needed. It just unfortunately is the default. And it's, it's kind of, I, I meet it in other settings, work contexts. The, the default is we just sit there and listen and expect someone to deliver something. Right. And then we perform an answer and then that's it. And I think if we would form these more kind of active learning habits way earlier on, we'd have very different, work lives later.

Yeah, because I would also say, I mean, I've been in so many conversations where it's like, you know, that suggestion gets raised of why don't you get the young people to kind of engage with this idea by moving or by acting it out? And so often the response to that is it's inefficient because it takes too much time and they're not really learning the thing that— but so I think part of what this book does is challenge why that conclusion is not actually necessarily correct.

Well, and I think there are other reasons there are resistance, because it might be inefficient, but it also might be kind of awkward or embarrassing or cringe, like, oh no, now I have to act out this thing. And there, there's a kind of embarrassment that goes along with it. And I think this is what we're trying to do in the book is to kind of just open a space to try stuff out in whatever zone feels safe for you. And it might be that acting out mitosis is too much, but maybe it's enough to take a deep breath before we start this new topic, or that we all stand up and stretch a moment before we go into the next thing, or students are staring out the window and tired and then we do some chair jogging or something more active. Like, these are kind of also embodied aspects of learning in the classroom that I think educators can just start to gently bring in and try out., and the small tweaks on that level will already do something. And for those who maybe really want to go wild and try some of the larger suggestions of building things or making things or speed discussions standing, or that students arrange themselves in space according to what they think, and then you have this spatial view of what's going on in the class, and then a discussion can emerge from that. Like, I would wish those were just normal parts of school. And they seem to not be. Yes.

No, absolutely. Guy, did you want to come in on that?

Yes. I was reminded while you were talking of a lesson that I was made aware of a long time ago, which was about something like Year 9. They were doing digestion, a very interesting embodied topic, but doing it originally in such a dry and distant kind of way until the teacher that had a little brainwave. She got them to close their eyes and do a guided visualization of being a mouthful of hamburger that was first of all being, being bitten off. What was that like? And then being mashed up by these big white molars in your mouth and then being squeezed down a very narrow tube and then being squirted with acids and then dissolving. I've never forgotten that.

I love that.

And I'm sure the kids who are in that lesson, I'm sure, have never forgotten it. Now, that might have taken 2 or 3 minutes, but to put a certain amount of imaginative flesh on the bones that they were learning makes things stick in a way that the dry, oh, it's much more efficient if I just tell them and they copy it down and they commit it to memory. There's a different kind of learning that can be deeper, more lasting, and more valuable that can go on if we expand the range of methods that we are using to include not just learning about the body, but learning through the body, learning through the shift in our— Exactly. One of the tools that we use in the book, and it is only a thinking tool, is to imagine that memory consisted of two different interconnected planes that we call the livescape, which is the sort of sedimented residue of all our experiences. And then gradually building up over that, that floats over that, what we call the wordscape, which is literally the scape of propositions, of formal knowledge, of conscious, what have you. And thinking about the connectivity between those two planes, the way in which they work together, or don't work together. Sometimes they become disconnected, but very often a lot of the studies, for example, empirical studies in experimental psychology, show that when we think we're operating on the wordscape in a world of abstract thinking, actually we're operating with a lot of words that have analogical meanings in the livescape. So if you put someone in an MRI scanner, and show them a bunch of sentences and get them to decide whether they're well-formed sentences of the English language or not. And one of them is, John grasped the argument. Involuntarily, what happens is the area of John's brain that is to do with the grasping with the hand lights up.

Amazing.

Automatically, it's as if the livescape can't stop itself getting in on the action. And actually, when you look at creative work in maths, for example, and particularly in science, very often all that creative development of theoretical understanding is driven by concrete analogies that have their origins, that have their grounding in personal experience, experience of life and experience of the body. Einstein got his original ideas for one of the theories of relativity by trying to imagine what it will be like to ride on a beam like. A Nobel Prize-winning chemist got his breakthrough ideas by trying to imagine what it would be like to be one of the molecules taking part in a complex chemical reaction. Yet often in secondary schools, science teachers under pressure to drive through the curriculum would think that that was kind of superfluous or a bit of fancy dressing that we didn't have time for. And what a shame that is.

Absolutely. I mean, so much of what you were describing there is about, I don't know, taking different kinds of sensing seriously. And it's just— I love how it shows up. I mean, there's a study in the book you talk about. If young people are taught about this, they then when they go to the canteen, they make healthier choices about their lunch. I mean, it's just so interesting. Emily, go for it.

No, this is exactly what I wanted to add because the wordscape and the livescape is one of my favorite parts of the book, and it's in the, the memory and knowledge chapter. This has made so much clear for me to, to see how they're interacting because the wordscape of course influences the experience scape or the life scape. So when, when we're primed with certain words and the example you just mentioned, the students, I think some read about physicalism and some read about dualism, and then they went to lunch and then when they came back, they were asked what they happened to be asked what they ate for lunch. And the students who were primed with this physical, that body and mind are one thing, they made way healthier choices in their lunch. And the people who read about dualism made noticeably less healthy choices about lunch. And so the wordscape and the livescape and how we make decisions, it's working all the time. And I think if we start to explore that more, things just get more alive and more interesting. One, just as a side note, the livescape, wordscape, topic is also part of why there's a lot of talking about and not always the practice that aligns with it. And that's when they're not working together like they could. And I think when we're looking at the wordscape and the livescape and we're encountering something that's maybe slightly scary or unfamiliar or vaguely embarrassing, I think on a physical level, our bodies will contract a little bit. They'll be in some way uncomfortable. And if we're not aware of that little motion, that little contraction is just gonna determine everything else that happens next. And maybe it feels much safer to talk about the things rather than actually step into it, because that's kind of strange and new and unfamiliar. But again, I think this is where we sort of land at this topic of safe learning environments, where some amount of that felt sense of things, and sometimes it's awkward and uncomfortable and Sometimes learning is really hard and frustrating and you feel stupid. And if we don't agree to feel those things as a part of learning, then we're not gonna get further like we could.

That was beautifully said. And I would absolutely agree in that I think so often, and I was partly back to what Guy said at the beginning, that it's so powerful not to polarize that it's either one or the other, because I think that's, as Guy was talking about some of the more kind of new agey type approaches that we're trying to distance from, there is a really important role for, as you've just described, the wordscape. You know, it's like the map is not the terrain, right? The map is not the territory kind of idea. And sometimes it's like, so let's reject maps entirely and just be, just be in the territory, just be in the terrain together. But maps are quite useful. And so that like, you know, it's like the words are quite useful to talk about. And then, so there's this dance happening between both. I think it's I so appreciate that as well, because I think that's a part of what's happened in the history of education is flitting from one extreme to another rather than saying, actually, in this middle where the dance is happening between the wordscape and the ideascape, between the map and the territory, that's where the movement is. That's where, that's where we live, right? And so something really powerful there that you do in the book throughout the whole thing, I think is, yeah. Is really important just to name that it's not some vague kind of muddied middle. It is a really importantly balancing dynamic exchange and dialogue between the wordscape and the ideascape. And that's, that's just how we live, right?

Yeah, absolutely. I just wanted to highlight one of the things that Emily brought up was, you know, one of the most obvious places to begin to look at this coming together of things is around what people call the cognitive emotions, but let's call them the emotions of learning. You know, the traditionalist view would be that emotion doesn't have much place in the classroom and we only pay attention to it when it's being a nuisance in some way or other. But there's been some wonderful work a long time ago at Harvard, way, way, way, way back by a philosopher of education called, I think his name was Israel Sheffler. He wrote a wonderful book called In Praise of the Cognitive Emotions. And this is way back in the 1920s or 1930s, I think, way, way back. But it's like learning, as Emily was saying, I just want to reinforce this point. Any learning worth the name takes you into emotional territory. It's like learning is often prompted by being disappointed, by being confused, by being frustrated, by feeling inadequate or incompetent. That's not touchy-feely stuff. That's just brute fact. So if we somehow or other expunge those experiences from what's going on, for example, in a classroom, then we're not playing with a full deck. We're not using all the experiences. Worse, if we stigmatize those things, then we undermine people's ability to learn. If we put them in an environment where those emotions are not normalized, treated as integral to what's going on, then people will become performative. You know, obviously as many, many classrooms are. I was reminded of a, I don't remember his name, an American business guru who made a lot of money talking to senior executives. And there's one occasion, I used to have a video of him talking about this, where he says, you know, every day to these executives, you know, you meet complex, unprecedented situations. And he says, and you know, I, the thing I have to tell you is that when you meet one of those situations, If you're not confused, you're not thinking clearly. In other words, you know, when you meet a situation that you don't have an immediate answer to, you need to dwell in the uncertainty of it.

Yeah.

If you run away from your confusion, you're running away from the opportunity to learn something.

Yeah.

Now this is, you know, once you point these things out, they're pretty damn obvious, aren't they? Yet they're not often or always part of the explicit, taken-for-granted discourse of the classroom.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and just on that point, this is not just about the classroom. And so, you know, to segue into the conversation about leadership, I think this is also a key aspect of what you're talking about is that it's not just something that it's okay for the young people to be embodied, but we don't have to be because we are the leaders, right? This is a whole school whole society approach of taking this stuff seriously. So yeah, I mean, I just wanted to invite you to say a bit more about what does that mean for leadership and things like authenticity or trustworthiness, you know, how can that be modeled in leadership approaches?

One thing that, that became more clear to me through this process is that the learning dispositions go very well with leadership dispositions. A lot of them are the same. And so I think it just points to the fact that as teachers or educators or parents or school leadership that we do have to walk the walk and talk the talk and in a very authentic way. And that when it's not authentic, you can feel it and you can notice it. And it's again this gap between maybe what someone is saying as a leader versus what is actually happening in the day-to-day. And one thing that made me really happy that was very unexpected for me at the very end of the book, Guy brought in Carl Rogers' idea of the fully functioning person. And I was not so familiar with the actual ingredients of the fully functioning person. But I think it's a great summary and that it's surprisingly embodied language because he talks about a fully functioning person is someone who is open to experience. So I'm actually curious and open and I'm not defensive. I'm increasingly living in the moment, like increasingly existential living. So I'm less and less driven by my past predictions and experiences from back then that are— it's more I'm present. Third thing, I increasingly trust my organism. That's what he says. And that this living creature that is a body-mind, that I trust it more and more, and I trust the signals and the information that's coming in whatever form, if it's thoughts, emotions, sensations, and this feedback loop of I'm open, I'm present, and I'm trusting what I'm experiencing, that that's what makes a fully functioning person and also a leader or a teacher. And that's what needs to be modeled then for students. And so I think we haven't really opened this topic yet, but about the kind of safety that's needed actually in a classroom or in a school to allow learning to unfold. I think the leadership is responsible for creating those safe learning environments.

Yeah, because I was just thinking exactly that takes a lot of vulnerability or, and confidence to be vulnerable in a leader. And that is not necessarily the kinds of things that often get explicitly valued in leadership positions. So it's interesting to think about how leaders are given the space to model that. Yeah, Guy, please.

Can I just a slight cautionary note? I've had some personal experience of this working with school leaders. We have to be kind of real-world savvy about this. We were talking about these ideas and one of the school leaders came back after an experience and said, you know, I thought I would take the little risk of showing my vulnerability, being uncertain. That's not what my staff wanted. I got a very negative pushback.

Interesting.

From them, or from some of them. Some of them said, you know, oh, how lovely. She's being more authentic. She's being more human. Others said, come on, she's paid twice as much as us. She's paid to know what to do. That's her job. So moving in this direction is something that is, I think, inevitable or desirable, but we have to be also be sensitive, as we would all agree, to the realities of the world in which we find ourselves. But in general, I think one of the nice things about rediscovering Carl Rogers, this concluding chapter of the book is in a way paying homage to our forebears. People who've walked this path before, perhaps without quite the level of rigorous scientific justification, but with strong, valid intuitions, like Montessori, for example, that we should respect. And one of the things that we— you talked about authenticity and trustworthiness in a leader. And Rogers, I think, very accurately says and very succinctly glosses that as someone who we sense as being trustworthy as a leader or as a parent or as an instructor or whatever it might be, is someone who is congruent, a word that Rogers used a lot, between what's going on in his or her body, what we are aware of as conscious beings, and what we are saying, what we're declaring, what we're publishing about ourselves to the world. And we are drawn to, we are more likely to trust people who we have an intuition that there is a congruence between those layers. You know, that's what makes a superbly good con person is that they can simulate that degree of congruence. Most of us luckily aren't that good at the simulation. But for a leader to take staff on a journey of culture change, which is really what we're talking about here.

Yeah.

Changing little details. There is a sort of technical, practical level, but what those little changes all add up to is a sea change in our understanding of where we're going, what we value as a community. Emily introduced the idea of dispositions, which is a very topical notion in education, particularly in educational reform. There is a recognition that part of what young people need— in fact, it was just in the UK, a report was published yesterday about what young people need from school, which they're not getting, which has caused a lot of attention— is, and these things go by many different names because people are grappling to try and get a handle on this: 21st century skills, soft skills, non-cognitive skills, learning dispositions, habits of mind, key competencies. There's a whole big vocabulary, but it's all roughly the same territory. And what they're referring to are embodied tendencies to engage with complex, frustrating, or difficult areas of life calmly, creatively, and competently. And that, that's what employers are crying out for. That's what young people are crying out for themselves. The surveys show And schools are grappling with what does that mean and how do we do it? And can we do it in a way that doesn't sacrifice the exam results? Because exams are not going to go away anytime soon. So are there layers of thinking that we can add to what's going on in schools, which means that at the same time as we're teaching physics, we're also building a resilient approach to difficulty at the same time as we're doing the history of the Tudors, let's say, recurring topic in English schools, we're also building our capacity for empathy. We're learning to put ourselves into the shoes, the minds, the feelings of, you know, being a virgin queen in the 16th century, which is quite an empathic push for many 14-year-olds in today's schools. But it's worth having a go at because it may stretch your ability to do that. And I love it, the pleasure in doing that. In fact, one of my favorite lessons was a teacher who got the kids, this is a year 7 class, to make sort of cardboard spectacles for themselves, which they call their empathy specs, which they wore when they were doing a writing task, which involved thinking about a historical episode through the eyes of 3 different participants. So the history is now not just some dull thing that you have to plow through. It's an active, what I would call exercise machine for developing something of real-world utility. This was in a school in Wales, and the teacher was amused and pleased to discover that out in the playground after this lesson where they'd been working with these glasses, they were running around and there was a dispute was brewing and things were getting a bit heated until one of the boys had a sort of lightbulb moment. And he said, hold on everybody, I think we should go into the classroom and get our empathy specs. So they all ran in and got their empathy specs so that they could see each other's point of view.

All right.

Now, I think it's not too romantic to suggest that in a very small way that makes a contribution to world peace. It made a contribution to playground peace. But wouldn't it be nice if some of our politicians had a spare set of empathy specs that they could put on at critical moments. So there's another— it's not wishy-washy, it's smart teaching.

Fantastic. Yeah. And just to say again, I think that's some of these things teachers will hear you saying and think, yeah, I do that, or I've done that before, or I've seen lessons where that's happened. And that's fantastic. It's not to say that this is suddenly a brand new range of things you can try, but it's a grounding in the science as to why those things are important and have always worked, even if we haven't necessarily understood why they are working in all sorts of ways.

And how we can join them up and make them more systemic within a school rather than it only happens in history or it only happens in the dance studio. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, I just wanted to throw in there, what we're going for is a kind of responsiveness in leaders and in students and how they're able to kind of flexibly move between states of being and tasks and just having more options. And I think sometimes this, because I was thinking about this vulnerability point in the leaders, and I think there are definitely moments where it makes sense not to show vulnerability, but hopefully I'm aware and flexible enough to recognize when that might be. And that's where this embodied awareness comes in. Like, okay, now this is needed. Actually, now that is needed. Or now actually I slept horribly and I didn't eat lunch, and so I'm not going to make any big decisions right now. That I'm aware enough of my body-mind state. And one new definition of interoception that we heard a few weeks ago at a presentation in London at Notting Hill Prep School from Carolyn Williams, because we were doing a joint workshop with her, and she did a beautiful job laying out the science of interoception, for instance, ending with the definition: interoception is my sense of me here now. And it's actually changing all the time and it's responding to different things all the time. And the more I can include that in my learning math or in my playground or in my conversation with my colleague or boss, the more appropriately I can respond in those different contexts. And that's this kind of embodied dimension that I think there's just so much to gain from and so many possible ways to explore. And that's kind of what we're trying to bring across Absolutely.

No, that's great. And also I would say sensing the movement and the dynamics or the vibe in the room too, right? Like for a leader, because it's not just about me and my inward-facing internal, it's also sensing, oh, there's been, you know, there's been an argument with that group of staff that I know about that maybe now's not the right time. So there's also a kind of an ecological sensing in the room of what's at play. As well, which is part of the amazingness.

Absolutely. I mean, one of the key issues for a school leader who's involved in some kind of culture change, I mean, leadership is about getting your people to come with you on a journey towards something that you think is better. That's my definition of leadership. And there will always be resistance. So dealing with resistance, not sensing it, but not, as Emily was saying, not kind of going uptight about it. Michael Fullan is a great speaker about systematic issues and leadership issues in education, and he has very wise things to say about, of course, there will be resistance. Of course, you know, there may be cynicism. There will certainly be legitimate skepticism. There will be some pushback. There will be some people who are made anxious by the idea that you're asking them to behave slightly differently so that the whole process of leadership is indelibly an emotional and relational one. And if teachers, you know, and I'm no expert in this, you know, the leadership positions I've been in, I've often been in the position of getting uptight when people don't come with me. And I know that that's not the best way of being, that there are other more wise, more mature more effective ways of engaging with people's anxieties or resistances or misconceptions.

Yeah. Interesting. Maybe just to wrap it up, I mean, there is, as we said, there are so many practical implications for all of this and we've been through some of them and there are just, you know, lots and lots more in the book. But one of the things I, I brought it in earlier, but maybe we could end on this point about taking a stance in inquiry or this idea of apprenticeship, epistemic apprenticeship. So something about standing in a learning orientation in relation to this work. You mentioned Notting Hill Prep. I know you've done some work there around that as well as an example of how this work could be taken into a school context and gently explored. As you said, it's not necessarily that you're going to go from naught to 60 and, you know, in a few steps. This is about how do we gently move into this more embodied, more ecological approach. So yeah, maybe, Em, if you could just say a little bit maybe about some of that Notting Hill Prep work and why that idea of taking this stance of inquiry or, or learning feels like quite a nice invitation to people.

I think one of the nicest things about that, it's the second project now with Notting Hill Prep. We did a first one a couple years ago on movement and learning, and now we've started a second one on interoception and learning, also together with Carolyn Williams and using her books as resources for the teachers and the staff. And I think what makes it is this idea of being co-researchers together, teachers and students together, that they're inquiring together about what effect is this having on me when I'm learning this thing? Does it matter if I breathe and notice my insides or not? Does it matter if I have to stand up and stretch? Does that help me at all with the thing I'm going to do next? And I think what I've learned through these kind of pilot projects is the staff need enough, enough food, let's say, to, to have a context for what we're doing and why. And Carolyn's books are great on this, and I hope our book will be helpful in this, of giving you reasons why you might want to try this out. And then creating a space with the kids together, because I think that's the most interesting. Then it's no longer top-down, it's we're discovering together. And that allows the space that everyone can have a different perspective because We are all bodies in the world, but we're each our own mix of our experiences and our genetics, and we're, we're all kind of finding our way in our own way. And so then we have this space where we can talk about that, and for one person it might be this, and another person it might be that, and then we're rolling, I would say. And what I think is crucial is to have some kind of organized framework for learning. Like Arabella Schutt at Notting Hill Prep is an amazing learning coordinator, and she takes our stuff and builds these very clear step-by-step programs for educators. To kind of try things out and be accompanied along the way. So I think there's this dance of the context, enough structure and enough space to inquire. And about this stance of inquiry, I think if you're curious, you're already then in a different state of being than if you're not curious. And I think you're going to select differently in this landscape of stuff, or what is it? You're going to ask questions and you're going to get feedback and you're going to correct and adapt. And so I think this stance of inquiry is just a great starting point or state to start from and go from there.

I mean, involving the kids as researchers is, you know, it's something I do more and more when I go into schools. And I've never yet met a class of kids who don't rise, whose eyes don't light up at the idea that they're going to be researchers. They're so used to being on the receiving end of what other people have done and thought and wondered about that it's often very exciting and it makes them feel grown up. There's a wonderful example that's not one that I was involved in, a group of kids in a primary school in, down in Devon in the UK who did a research project on how bees tell each other where the honey is. And they, their paper was published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Science.

Oh, brilliant.

Now imagine how they feel. And they, the paper was partly written in kidspeak. They talked about the conclusions, their findings were, we found this out about bees and we found that doing science is really cool stuff. These 8 and 9-year-olds saw themselves were positioned as scientists and they were, they were being scientists and they were thrilled by it. One of the practical, more sort of high level if you like, and maybe more long-term things that has come out of the book for us is to rethink not just the practicalities of education, and there are a lot of other people in different countries working in embodied cognition who are devising all kinds of really interesting small things like some of the things that we talk about in the book that you can tweak in the classroom. But also, what about the purposes of education? Not just the practices, but the purposes. I think where, you know, we see, if I can be a bit sort of Millennial. We see a crying need in the world for a generation of young people who we would love to be better thinkers, better learners, better finder-outers, better discussers about complicated things in the world. People who knew how to engage with the requisite degree of nuance with things that are genuinely complex. Who knew about systems thinking, who knew how to think about things that you can't reduce to simple cause and effect relationships, who knew about how to run a good meeting in which people knew and practiced how to disagree agreeably is the phrase. So one of the tracks that we were led down was this idea of an epistemic apprenticeship. That, you know, basically what school could be, and we'll put our ethical hat on, maybe should be, is a protracted apprenticeship in the arts and crafts and skills of being a powerful thinker and a powerful learner. Someone who is confident enough to take things on in their own life, to know what their own purpose is and their own interests, their own passions are, as Ken Robinson has wrote so well about, who are good in relationships, who are good at managing and repairing relationships, who can help communities to problem solve around things that really matter to them. And some who even maybe want to be big enough to tackle more national or more global issues. What would school be like if it was an irresistibly exciting escalating apprenticeship in problem solving, in working with projects, which curiously a lot of 3 and 4-year-olds already do in early years education. What if we took that as the template and ramped that up as kids went through school with projects that became increasingly more sophisticated, increasingly more complex, increasingly more real world? Increasingly more requiring of disciplinary knowledge, that we were building those up, that we had a developmental view of what was going on in school with kids right from the word go up until when they leave when they're 18, which culminated in people who were much, much better at managing democracy than most of us are at the moment.

Yeah, absolutely. One of the things I just love about that framing is that it's not only that it's a stance of learning, as you said, curiosity and openness to learning and possibilities, the kind of opening up that we've been talking about, but also that it just doesn't stop. I mean, you said it's a 12-year epistemic apprenticeship. Actually, it's—

It's actually an 80-year apprenticeship.

Exactly. It's a lifelong, it's absolutely a lifelong. This is just how, you know, it's just part of living as a moving being in the world with other people. And it doesn't stop. We may move spaces, we may move from school to work to wherever,. But it is just an ongoing process. And I think that's the other piece I find just so valuable about that is that it, again, it kind of connects school to life in a very important way.

Well, obviously, you know, school, like, what is school for? Is it just a place to park your kids while you go to work? Is it for the replication of privilege? Is it for creating compliant cogs in an economic machine? What is it? Or is it for We're creating people who will be able to lead lives that are responsible and adventurous and loving, at the end of which we'll all be able to look back and think, what a good life we lived.

Yeah. Sadly, yes to all of the above.

Can I just throw one more piece in there? I think one thing that would help this project is a kind of body-mind literacy that I think not everyone has, and that's kind of another way of looking at the book, I think, is creating shared understanding around nervous system regulation and why that matters at school, or that safe learning environments are important. Like, I think, again, how to translate those purposes of education into the day-to-day. I, I see it also as a literacy project. Not everyone knows about this science. We're still operating on, on older information And that this is hopefully a synthesis of kind of what has emerged now that we can all hopefully agree on more and more and have different ways of expressing it. Sure. But that the more literate we are in understanding body, mind, us, world, other people, relationships, how we're reacting, responding to each other, the better we can understand those dynamics. I think the better we can transcend the unhealthy ones.

Yeah. Love it. No, thank you. No. I mean, this is beautiful, beautiful stuff. You know, I'm so behind all of this work and just want to see it everywhere. And so just absolutely go out, buy your copies of the book. It is just a fabulous read and so relevant to not just globally the challenges that we're facing, but also very locally in terms of in classrooms with young people, with leadership, with teachers. So no, thank you so much, Guy, for everything you do and are. And for sharing it today.

Thanks, Tim.

Pleasure. Thank you, Tim, for your insight and your gentle challenges and your support for our work. It means a lot to us.

Absolutely.

Thank you.

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