Humane Education and the Solutionary Way - A Conversation with Zoe Weil and Julie Meltzer

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

I realize the power of education that feels deeply relevant to young people, that touches their hearts, that awakens their desire to do something, and that leads them in a direction of research and investigation and critical thinking and action.

Hi everyone, thanks for joining me for this week's episode. I'm your host, Tim Logan, and the podcast is produced by Good Impact Labs. A more humane education for our young people feels very necessary right now. Our planet and its inhabitants all over the world seem to be crying out for it. Humane educators Zoe Weil and Ray Sikora created the Institute for Humane Education in 1996 to do precisely this. And so it's a huge pleasure this week to be able to welcome Zoe and her colleague Julie Meltzer from the Institute onto the podcast.

Podcast.

As the co-founder and president of the Institute for Humane Education, Zoe is considered a pioneer in the comprehensive humane education movement. Zoe created IHE's Master's in Education, an MA, and graduate certificate programs, as well as the institute's Solutionary Framework. Zoe is a prolific author. She's written 8 books, including most recently the hugely popular Solutionary Way: Transform Your Life, Your Community, and the World for Better, with a foreword by Jane Goodall. She's also written books for young people, including a Moonbeam Gold winner Claude and Media, the Hellburn Dogs. Julie Meltzer is a self-described pragmatic visionary. She's a tireless advocate for literacy, justice, and equity, which she sees as integrally related. In the early 2000s, Julie also developed the Adolescent Literacy Support Framework and authored Adolescent Literacy Resources: Linking Research and Practice. After extensive experience in education, including as a teacher, a teacher educator, district administrator, consultant, researcher, program evaluator, and project lead, she is now in her current role as Director of K-12 and teacher education at the Institute for Humane Education.

Welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much, Zoe and Julie, for joining. It's an absolute pleasure and I'm super excited to be able to speak and share with the audience more about humane education and the solutionary way. So yeah, welcome.

Thank you. It's great to be here.

Thanks, Tim.

Good. No, it's absolutely my pleasure. So just in terms of setting the context for listeners, it'd be really— I think there's so much amazing work that you've been doing, Zoe, for quite a few years in terms of humane education. And I just, I think it's an amazing phrase. I think we need more of it. I think there's an urgent case for it, but I'd, I'd love you if you can, just to start with, to speak to that a little bit. What does it mean to you and how has it kind of been part of your journey as you've done, you know, all this different work in lots of different sectors, not just in education?

Thank you for that question. So we have a definition of humane education that is education about the interconnected issues of human rights and environmental sustainability and animal protection, and with the goal of educating young people or anybody to be solutionaries. So that's the formal definition. But what's been really interesting is the people who have come to us because they've heard the term humane education and they have no idea what it means, they think of humane as being an adjective to define education, and they think, well, sure, education really should be humane. I want to learn more about that. So their entryway into our work is because they, they want to see education be more humane. So I would say that in the way that we not only define it but practice it, it is both education that is focused on improving communities and the world in relationship to people, animals, and the environment, as well as being deeply humane toward the people who experience humane education.

Right. Yeah. Interesting. So you're experiencing the humanity and the humaneness as well as learning about it in order to pass it on somehow.

Yes. And in terms of my journey toward humane education, it started for me in the 1980s. I taught some week-long courses to middle school students in a summer program that was offered at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. And I pitched a bunch of courses to the director of the program, and one was on environmental issues, one was on animal issues, one was on media literacy. And what was fascinating to me, I, I, the reason I could pitch so many courses is that I had gone not very deeply into any one topic, but very broadly into many. Some might have called me a dilettante back then, and probably that was accurate. But what was fascinating to me was that when I taught the course on animal issues, which was the second most popular of the 60 courses that were offered that summer, not because of me, obviously, they didn't know me, but because of the topic. What was so fascinating was how quickly these young people learned about what was happening to animals and immediately wanted to make a difference. One boy went home one night during the week, he made his own own homemade leaflets. That was in 1987. He did not have a computer. He handwrote his leaflets. He came back the next day. He wanted to hand them out on the street to passersby because he wanted to be a changemaker. He wanted to make a difference. And I realized the power of education that feels deeply relevant to young people, that touches their hearts, that awakens their desire to do something, and that leads them in a direction of research and investigation and critical Thinking and Action. And that was in 1987 and the work has continued to this day.

Amazing. Yeah. But, but I, if I can, just to reflect from my learning as I was preparing, it also seems that it's a very personal thing for you as well in terms of your commitment to animal rights, you know, as a vegan, women's rights, social justice, you know, your interest in world religions. I mean, there, there seems to be a lot of personal zo in this as well. It's not just about how to help others, right? To become solutionaries somehow. You are one, right?

Well, I'd like to think that I'm one for sure, but it's a practice. It's not something that you just land one day and you're a solutionary and you're done. And I would say that one of the things that you'll hear from Julie is this process toward doing solutionary work requires that you really think about what's feasible for you, where your sphere of influence lies, and you don't take on something too big. But I did not heed that advice myself. Because as you just alluded to, I care about a lot of issues and they're huge issues. And so my particular solutionary path was to look at the system that lay at the root of all other systems and try to influence it, which is the system of education. And so it, it was taking on a very, very big system in order to create massive change. And I don't recommend that to most people. I really recommend that people look at what they can do in a reasonable period of time. I mean, I'll be doing this for the rest of my life and I've already been doing it for 3+ decades. So I don't want people to feel daunted. Being a solutionary can be very, very focused, very, very local, and that's probably the better way to go about it.

Yeah, no, it's great. And I think, I mean, definitely taking on those big systemic challenges, you know, clearly it's incredibly difficult, but you perhaps we can and almost take a little step back and just give people a sense of briefly, because obviously you've been doing this work for a long time, but your latest book that you've somehow distilled a lot of this wisdom that you've accumulated over the years into the latest book called The Solutionary Way: Transform Your Life, Your Community, and the World for the Better. So maybe just briefly, it's worth just saying, what is this thing that we're talking about, this solutionary way? Because I want to get— one of the principles you talk about is getting to the root of, of some of these systemic issues. So I'd love to talk about that. But I think just to, again, orient people in relation to the negatives I've heard you talk about, why is it not humanitarianism or not engineering or not activism? There's something else going on in this idea of being a solutionary.

Yes, there is. So the, the definition that I normally use is a solutionary is somebody who can identify unjust, unsustainable, and inhumane systems and transform them in ways that do the most good and least harm. To everyone. And by everyone, I mean people, animals, and the environment. So you can see in that definition that there is this ethical foundation to being a solutionary. And there's also a focus on addressing the causes. So humanitarians who are really important, and this is by no means saying people shouldn't be humanitarians, but humanitarians focus on alleviating suffering. And mitigating harm when it happens rather than addressing the root or systemic causes of that harm or suffering. So we need humanitarians and we need solutionaries if we want to stop those problems from continuing. In terms of being a problem solver, the reason we needed this brand new word, solutionary, is because it is not synonymous with problem solver. So, you know, somebody can solve the problem of damming a river or blowing up a mountaintop for coal removal, but they're not a solutionary because that ethical foundation of figuring out what's going to do the most good and least harm for everybody isn't part of that equation. And so a solutionary is different from those two things. And I think in terms of activism, solutionary takes activism to the next level. It says, how can we be as strategic as possible, reach out to a variety of stakeholders, investigate thoroughly, find the levers for change that are going to have the fewest unintended negative consequences so that we are really doing the very best change-making work that we can.

No, it's, I mean, it's so powerful and I think that's what jumped out to me as I was reading the book. Those two prin— really kind of underlying principles of the MOGO principle, as you call it, doing the most good and the least harm. And this idea of getting to the root and systemic cause of the problem. But neither of those things are straightforward for young people. As we're, we're all learning, working with young people, both of those things are, they're, they're big asks, right, of young people. So let's, like, focusing on that first one, the MoGo principle. I mean, you mentioned unintended consequences and that, you know, I'm, that's something that I spend a lot of time thinking about is how actually when you're thinking about these really interconnected, challenging problems, and yes, they're showing up, whether it's water scarcity or, or, you know, animal rights or whatever it is, it may be showing up in your community, but it's also multilayered and interconnected with all sorts of of global challenges and trying to understand what is gonna do the most good and the least harm is not a straightforward thing to do.

Not at all. And you mentioned for students, it's hard, it's hard for anybody.

Well, right, exactly.

We live in a globalized world. We have no idea the impacts of our everyday choices, what we wear, what we eat, the coffee we're drinking, the whatever it is, we don't know. And so we have to investigate if we want to know. And that investigative process is not only challenging, but we have to recognize that we are not doing that firsthand research. We are going to be depending on sources that we hope are accurate and legitimate. So there's that process of learning how to find legitimate sources, how to read graphs and charts and statistics clearly, how to ask further questions, how to seek out experts. How to seek out a variety of different stakeholders so that hopefully in that process we get closer to understanding the truth. And we have to be really humble about the fact that we are not gonna know and we're gonna trust certain sources. But the reality is we all can get closer. We can all get better at this. We can all become better critical thinkers and systems thinkers. And that's the goal because unless we're doing the firsthand research ourselves, we are going to depend on sources and we have to learn to parse parse them and evaluate them. And what is more important that young people learn than that ultimately, right? In the world, right?

And there's a lot of educational work going on there. I mean, there's a role for an educator who is engaged with this kind of solutionary work as well, to be a support alongside, because, you know, we don't do these things individually, we have to do them in community. And I think there's something— there's really a lot of educational work going on there. But the other thing I think I've done some work with Nora Bateson and her institute and, and just thinking about complexity and exploring the idea of second order effects or nth order effects or unintended consequences. I think that whole world is really also a really interesting one to bring young people into is, you know, the butterfly effect or, you know, there's different ways it shows up in narratives, kind of more, more mainstream narratives, but it's a really important one is that you think you're doing one thing, but actually you may be having all sorts of downstream effects. That you have no clue, some of which may not be positive. And that's a really difficult thing to hold, right? As you are doing some of this work and it's, it's how to complexify it enough for young people's understanding, but also not so much that you put them off doing anything because it's also really easy to get a bit overwhelmed by that and say, well, not, I can't do anything because everything is gonna have some ripple effect that I can't control. So maybe it's just safer I stay at home and, you know, and watch Netflix, you know, it, so we don't wanna get to that point. So it's how do you help think about that? How do you hold those tensions?

Well, first I would say that I think young people, and we've seen this in our work, when they embark on this, it's so exciting and energizing and meaningful, and it makes education come alive, that they are— they don't want to go home and watch Netflix. They are so excited that this is happening in their classroom. And because the framework that Julie's going to talk about is iterative, If you find out that there's some negative unintended consequences, you tweak your solution, you try something else. Like, it's not as if, you know, young people are suddenly going to do something that's gonna bring down their community or their school or their world. They might learn that there's some unintended negative consequence that they don't wanna happen, so they shift. And isn't that what we all need to be doing, right? Not get so attached to there's one way to solve this problem. Yeah. There's one answer. It's black and white. Black and white, it's either or, you take a side. That is what is essentially undermined by this process so that there is nuance and complexity built in. That is a really exciting place to be.

No, I love it. I absolutely agree. And so then going to the second principle, which was about getting to the root and systemic causes of these things that we care about, you know, that goes pretty deep, pretty quickly into, you know, who we are as humans and questions of what are those dynamics that we really, maybe it's greed or it's power, or there's all sorts of things that come into these pictures of harm to animals or, you know, the roots go everywhere, right? The, the tentacles, the, the roots go everywhere. There's systemic causes and effects everywhere. So again, it's a challenging thing for young people to hold.

Yes, and, which is one of my very favorites.

I love it.

Yeah. I would say the reason why we talk about root and systemic causes of problems is because we don't always want to address the root cause of a problem because that root cause could be something like human desire and human greed and things that we're not going to— I cannot tell you how many people who I have personally taught about how we treat animals in our farming systems and they find it horrible that we do that and it does not make them want to change their diet. I know that. I know that desires often eclipse values in my own life as well. Maybe not with my food choices, but with many other choices, my desires eclipse my values. So if that's the case for the majority of us, then we need to look at the systemic causes because maybe we can change the system so that people's desires can still be satisfied. Satisfied, but the systems are now just and sustainable and humane. So very often I recommend if somebody wants to address a problem that they address it at the systemic level rather than the root level. Now, the root level, I don't want to say we never address it. We absolutely do. But we have to be strategic about that. What is going to be most likely to create positive change with few unintended negative consequences? And it's often the systemic the root causes.

Yeah. I loved your— there's lots of I's in the book, but three of your I's were integrity, introspection, and inquiry. Those, those kind of holding those things that, you know, if I'm constant and you mentioned humility, right? So if I'm asking with humility questions about how do I understand this, if I'm thinking about how am I in relation to that, and then I'm, I'm trying to hold some level of integrity of my behavior in relation to that, I think, yeah, those really jumped out at me as three really powerful concepts. I'm telling the story for you. Sorry.

Oh, I thought you told it perfectly.

I had nothing. I love it. No, that's brilliant. And so maybe then it's worth at this point then going through some of the other eyes, because I think there's a power in the framework that you present, and clearly there's a lot of deep thinking as you've just articulated that's gone into that over decades of, of learning. But there is a real value in having framework, and perhaps Julie, if you are happy to just talk through some of that, the 4 phases of the Solutionary Framework, and then just because I think again, to orient people, that would be really useful.

Sure. Thank you. One of the things I wanna go back to though, is just your comment about the importance of a framework and how important we're seeing that as we're offering it, as we're introducing it to others, as we're using it to build educational materials around and processes and exemplars. The power of the framework itself, both this specific framework and of a framework, are both becoming more and more important. This specific framework, the Solutionary Framework, has 4 phases. The first phase is identify. The second is investigate. The third is innovate. The fourth is implement, and I will do a journey through those phases. But what I want to say is recently I've been sort of referring to this framework as a three-for-one. You can use this framework to design a solutionary project, design how you're going to approach the solutionary work that you want to do. And having a design framework is really, really, really helpful. You can also, as an educator, use it to actually facilitate the work of your students using the framework. That's really important because in many, many educational contexts, we find several things often happen. First, in inquiry to action projects, teachers love to get— they spend a lot of time in the inquiry phases, right? And they learn, they teach and teach and teach, students learn and learn and learn, they never get to Or students want to jump to action, and so they think of something they want to do and then they jump to doing it, and that leads to really shallow action that doesn't really make significant change, doesn't really— sometimes the action's already predetermined by the teacher. We find that the students don't remember those later. When they think about projects in school from 10 years later, it's the ones where they came up with the actions that they wanted to do and they were supported to take those actions for meaningful reasons. And the third piece, which I think is really, really important about this particular framework, is that if you teach students the process that's inherent in the framework, then they have a meaningful solutionary problem-solving process that they can use wherever they live or work or contribute in their lives in the future. If we don't have a framework, then we don't all use the same words. For the different phases. Students might not even realize that the project they're doing in grade 11 followed the same project as the one that they did in grade 7. But if in each case the framework is made explicit, the process is made explicit, students see where they are in the process and where they're going, they start to be able to practice that solutionary thinking that Zoe alluded to. So the framework itself has has proven to be extremely key to our work because you can talk about lots of processes, but by anchoring it in a framework, there's sort of milestones. There's ways to sort of situate yourself. It becomes a roadmap.

Yeah. If I can just comment on that, I think it's really interesting. Again, just holding that lightly because I think there is one way in which that becomes a recipe and then it's like, well, we have to, it's linear and we have to follow step by step and But what you were also describing, I think is really powerful that the visibility of the framework provides value. It shows the value of the thing that, that there are steps and that's okay. They don't, you may jump around a bit, but having some orienting steps I think is important. And I, I really like what you're saying that it structures not only the design process, but also the experience. And then it kind of gets somehow internalized in the young people so then they can carry it with them as they go on. So no, I think I I think that's really powerful. So yeah, happy to then dive into what the actual framework is.

Sure. And still want to comment on one thing that you said, which is absolutely, it's flexible. Absolutely, context is going to make a big difference in how you use that framework. As a curriculum designer, which is my background, is both in program evaluation and curriculum design, one of the challenges in working with this is how do you create a framework that's more of a heuristic than a recipe. Okay. So where the steps actually contribute to the flexibility and the depth of thinking and the breadth of possible action and use that you can have with it. And that distinction is really, really important.

So important. Yeah, absolutely. And it's deeply human again, right? Because humans come up with heuristics naturally, whereas The recipe approach is a more systematic approach, but somehow systemically humans have always come up with kind of rules of thumb, heuristics, just to kind of make sense of the sea of complexity that we live in every day. And I think so there's something, yeah, that's really powerful.

So I, in order to have this framework work really well, you have to sort of plant it in fertile soil and that fertile soil has to be imbued with the idea that we need to foster curiosity, compassion, and we need to foster inspiration. Because without those three dispositions, the work of the framework could devolve.

Right.

So the stages are these. First is identify. So that means that you need to have a starting place for an issue that you care about. In schools, this can start from the curriculum. It can be determined by a curricular unit. It could be a capstone project. It could be determined by students' individual passions. It could start with The things that you see right in front of you that affect you or your friends or your family or the non-human friends that you have or that you live with. And then you need to start to think about, okay, so what are the problems associated with that issue that you care about? How do we explore that? What are the local manifestations of that larger issue? Once you have the problem labeled, and we start with problems, people say, why do you start with problems and not essential questions? Because you can work on a problem, right? And we want students to feel success in the work that they're doing. So they have to be able to see the problem. They have to be able to name the problem. Then they can work on the problem. Then you move into Investigate. And Investigate, you're talking to stakeholders. Maybe in an educational setting you can name all the stakeholders, but you might not be able to talk to all the stakeholders. So how do you at least encourage and support students to talk to and engage with stakeholders that represent a number of different perspectives. Maybe some of those stakeholders don't even think it's a problem, right? So it's important for kids to understand that the way they're thinking about things is not the way everybody's thinking about things. That's a huge lesson in itself.

Yeah.

Then we teach— we're not very good at teaching thinking skills in school. We certainly are not at a place yet where systems thinking is being widely taught and brought into all different content areas in learning. So we give people ways to teach students about systems and then help them engage— we like to use a systems iceberg— but help them engage in an analysis of the problem that gets into the patterns and trends and behaviors and systems and structures that keep that problem in place, and the mindsets that created those systems that might continue to perpetuate that problem. By doing that kind of an analysis, you can carry that kind of an analysis into the next phase and come up with much more innovative and much more solutionary solutions. And we encourage people to do that. But before we, we ask students start innovating solutions, we ask them to start looking at who else is working on this problem, what's working. I mean, if it's a problem in your place, it's probably a problem other places in the world. There's probably other people who are working on it. What have they tried? What ideas would be good for you to try? What things do you want to avoid? Because people have already tried them and they already found out they didn't work, or they had unintended consequences. So those first two parts are the inquiry part of the framework. And then you move to the action part of the framework, which is phases 3 and 4. So in phase 3, we talk about innovating. We talk about going back to that iceberg analysis or systems analysis and looking at leverage points where you could make a change and it would make a difference. The idea that you can intervene at different points in a system. And we talk about what those are and how each of those might need to be a pragmatic response, in a school setting, right? You can make it more solutionary. For example, we do education awareness campaigns with students all the time. They share what they learned. What makes that more solutionary is if you think about who needs to know that information, and there's a call to action associated with it based on your research about something that would actually make a difference if everybody started doing it.

Yeah.

And then we— this is really important— students do not gain agency and optimism if they don't take Writing a paper for the teacher on what they recommend is not action. Presenting what they recommend to a legislator or to a public audience or teaching what they recommend to younger students, that's action. And really that action is what students both remember and get energized by and tell us over and over, "No, I didn't think we were gonna make a difference and then we did that and it was amazing and this happened." And even if it's not 100% successful, students are really excited that they were trusted to take action on a real-world issue in a way that honored their learning and their recommendations. That's really powerful. And then the last step of the process is just to reflect and assess. How did it go? What would we do differently? What would we do if we had more time or more resources? Or what would we recommend to other people who want to work on this problem. And then time to celebrate, because this is hard work persevering through these stages to this accomplishment. And when you think about at least 100 skills that are built into that project, and you think about what schools are doing with their whole profile of a graduate project, what I always ask is like, do you see alignment? I ask people to like look at examples of projects, watch video, listen to the students, tell me what you see in terms of the learned skills, dispositions that are built through this process. And then look at that list that you said you wanted as educational outcomes from your school. And they are blown away at the match. Mentioning that because this is a big shift, right? If we say this is an important way to educate, it needs to be a purpose for our school. It's not just a pedagogy, it's not just a project. No, absolutely.

No, that's amazing. Thank you. And there's, I mean, there's clearly a lot of thought and a lot of experience has gone into that and there's a lot there. And I would have a thousand questions and comments about the content of what you've talked about, but, but actually what I'd love to, if we can just reflect on because, you know, there's, there are many other frameworks around, there are many other organizations doing similar work. There are people that will emphasize things slightly differently. They will take slightly different approaches. But I think the, as you say, the broader, deeper purpose behind all of it is how do we make more meaning-rich experiences for young people in schools? And, and that takes quite a significant leap of faith sometimes, or in shift on behalf of the educators and the, the leadership, the administrators, the system itself to allow that to happen. And as you say, you've gotta make quite a compelling case that there is a reason to make that shift. And I completely agree with you when you've seen the young people and how enriched they are by the process and how, just how energized they are. It's, it is such a compelling case, but if you haven't seen that, you know, it's easy to, to stay safe, right? And stay in the standards and stay in the programs and structures, et cetera. So what I'm interested in is you've been doing a lot of work, I think locally across the whole of Maine as a state, but also then globally across multiple different countries. And I'm just really curious. Curious to hear how are you seeing it? Maybe if we could start firstly on a system level in Maine, as you train educators, work with administrators, how are you seeing some of those cases being made or the resistance that you have to overcome, or where are the kind of bright spots where you see actually there is a real shift happening here? What are you learning broadly from that process of training educators and leaders?

So here in Maine, it's a little bit of a unique situation because the state has been able to leverage federal funding, and we've been able to provide stipends for teachers to go through the process. But they're coming in droves, and now they're recommending it to other colleagues. And we have almost filled up all of the new slots that we opened up, 80 new slots for the fall. And people are coming, and they're telling people that the comments that they're giving us in their feedback sheets and, and in their descriptions of the process have to with that the learning experience itself has inspired their curiosity and their compassion and inspired them as educators. And they are excited to go back and facilitate this with their students. And where they felt scared to do that, like maybe they would lose control, we really try to coach people to take the right size bite. If you've never done this kind of work, don't try to do it at this level. You know, don't try to give kids complete open choice. Don't try to be running 80 groups with your 120 students. Take it from something in your curriculum. Maybe think about a communication outcome. Maybe think about who else in your community you can work with as a partner to help with the project. Those steps seem to be really resonating with people. Then those who have actually carried out the projects, they are giving us the same feedback you were just saying, like people who see how students transform. We did one project with the Maine students, what we're calling a Then and Now project. So a whole group of students who did Solutionary Projects as 6th graders last year were seniors. And so we interviewed them and we said, you know, do you even remember this project? You know, did it make any difference? And they came back with statement after statement about how not only did it impact them, it impacted how they think, it impacts that they look beyond headlines, that they analyze the systems. Some of them said it impacted, you know, I'm going off to college and I want to be a lawyer, I want to be an advocate, I want to be a scientist, and it was because of that project.

Nice.

They also speak about things like, it taught me that problems can be solved. It gave me the confidence that I could make a difference. It's funny to hear seniors talk about when I was very young, even when I was very young, I could make a difference. But the other reaction, which we didn't expect, was this sort of clear anger that they hadn't been able to do more of these projects.

Right.

That they did them in 6th grade, they could have done them much better as high school students, one of them said, you know, if we had had a chance to do it again, I would have done a much better job. I would have known what I was doing. And in almost all cases, they didn't ever get to do another inquiry to action project that had those sort of considerations that we would put under that. That rubric of solutionary.

Yeah, well, that's powerful, right? Because they're hungry for the meaning that it brings and the feeling that they get from taking action and feeling their own agency and all those things. And then we say, oh no, back to class, back to normal school.

And yeah, right. The other thing that I hear a lot of from schools, just opening it up to the world more widely, one thing I'm just constantly struck by is how excited and successful this has in almost any context you could think of. When teachers take on this work, it could be rural Argentina or rural Maine. It could be private school in Indonesia, private school in Germany. It could be a public school in Mexico. It could be a public school in Florida. It could be a charter school. It doesn't matter. The students gain that sense that they can make a difference. They gain a sense that they're connected to the real world. They feel shut off by much of their schooling and they feel like they're being treated as, as if they matter and as if they can make a difference. Then that's really striking that that is working across all those contexts.

Yeah. I was just curious to ask you about if you've done any work with the more systems level leaders. So obviously you're talking about the graduate programs and the teacher training and the micro-credentials. Social training teachers in this work, but what are you seeing maybe in Maine or, or in other spaces where you start engaging on a more systems level to create space for it? Because obviously you can have passionate teachers that wanna carve out this space for themselves. And as you say, it brings meaning and passion back to their professional life, but sometimes they're doing that despite the system, right? Rather than because of it. Right? So yeah, what, what are you noticing about that kind of level things.

Well, I'll give you a couple of examples of where this is emerging, and I would, I would say it is emerging because impacting systems, as you know, is tricky, and, and there's different ways to do it. So in the state of Maine, there's now a Maine Solutionaries page on the state website. There's local control in Maine, so it's not going to be through a curriculum intervention, but it is a professional learning intervention coupled with the Department of Education's emphasis on the need to re-engage students in learning post-pandemic, and the fact that Solutionary Inquiry to Action projects do that and then create a meaningful context for learning during which you can coach skills. So there, the system is the, the educational approach, an endorsement of that kind of approach, of which solutionary inquiry to action projects is one. Yeah, to doing that. Yeah, we're working with Prepa Tech, which is a national network of schools in Mexico, and there it's a curriculum intervention. They are revising their curriculum to include inquiry to action projects, and so they had us work with their curriculum designers to insert the solutionary framework into the new curriculum projects, and then they're planning to do professional learning so that teachers will feel confident and comfortable in being able to do that. You mentioned earlier the project we had discussed with some of the IB schools. Again, if a group of IB schools take an IB structure such as the core of the Diploma Programme and they design an alternate pathway that some or all of their students could use, and it becomes an exemplar for other schools who might want to revisit how the DP core is carried out at their school. There again, it's more of a, a curriculum or requirement structure. We have been contacted by individual principals who will tell us, or heads of school who will tell us, they would like to embed this work more systematically into their educational process. And I use the word systematically very deliberately. And so we've worked with them to say, okay, well, how would this look like at grade 4? What kinds of structures could you attach this work to regardless of whether a teacher picked it up on their own in grades 8 when they, you know, study climate science in their capstone projects in grade 12. And then how can we get everybody to know this language? So those are some of those structural ways that it's getting embedded.

That's great.

And I feel like those are very— those have a lot of potential.

Absolutely.

But I think it's really useful to hear some of those examples for listeners because I think it's great to have the passionate teachers who want to grab hold of this, but it's also so important that we then can move to the next level of how do we facilitate opportunities across systems. As you say, districts, you know, states, even a school level, it doesn't really matter. But if there's a broader, more concerted effort to bring this in, and I like what you say, that it, there's different entry points. It could be educational broadly as a school, it could be pedagogical, it could be curricular, but it's important that we can see where it, it might start to make a contribution at different levels. Tools to the systematic and systemic approaches. So no, brilliant. I think that's super useful. Thank you. And just to wrap up, maybe just, I've heard you say that everybody should learn to be a solutionary. And so obviously we've spent a lot of this time and the podcast is about education, but I, I know you've, there are many other, we don't have time to talk about now, but many other sectors where this kind of work is impacting. So perhaps just in your final remarks, you could just reflect on some of the things that you've seen or, you know, how, how is How is that happening in other spaces as well as in education?

Yeah, well, it, I actually wrote The Solutionary Way because while at the Institute for Humane Education, we want to educate a generation of solutionaries and we think that this is the most powerful way to create a world where all life can thrive. We can't lay this all on the next generation. We all have to learn how to do this work. Absolutely. And so I really took what we've learned from educating young people, wrote this book for anybody. And the book is— only came out in June, so it's still a new book, but it's been really gratifying to see how some people are taking this book and using it in their field. So for example, one person's work who I profiled in the book under criminal justice solutions, he's a law professor. He's going to bring this book and this framework to his law students. A doctor who read the book, who runs two health clinics, is having his staff read the book and they're all gonna discuss the book so they can apply the Solutionary Framework to healthcare. A biochemist, this brilliant biochemist who I know read the book, and it's now one of the three top books that he recommends to, that everybody reads. So, you know, So people in a variety of spheres, and we just held a free webinar for people who want to apply the Solutionary Framework to public policy, and people can watch that webinar, it's on YouTube. And so we're seeing how powerful this framework can be in any sector. And so we hope that obviously we're talking to educators here and that's where we focus, and we should all know that you can share this, this book, this framework, this way of thinking with anybody, cuz we all need to be solutionaries.

Amazing. Thank you. Thank you so much. Sorry to keep you from your other meeting, but no, thank you. So thank you, Julie. Absolutely amazing. There's so much I'd absolutely recommend to everybody the book.

Well, I appreciate the opportunity, like I said, and I hope that we have lots of opportunities to work together.

No, I really appreciate it. And I'm just so happy to be able to share it. We hope you've enjoyed this episode. Please feel free to continue the dialogues with our guests, with us on our blog or on social media, or within your own networks.