Interdisciplinary Learning - A Conversation with Ed Fidoe

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

There's something about being able to harness and unlock collective intelligence where you need someone that is in this kind of interactional space. And I think when you talk to organizations and you say, I bet there's a lot of intelligence, collective intelligence in your organization that is completely untapped, and that's because you need to unlock their interdisciplinary thinking.

Hello again. Welcome back. It's time for another episode of the Future Learning Design podcast. This week, it's brilliant to be able to bring you this episode of my conversation with Ed Fiddow. Ed is the co-founder and president of the London Interdisciplinary School. LIS is a new university which will provide a fully interdisciplinary undergraduate degree with students studying complex problems rather than specific subjects. Students will graduate with a Bachelor of Arts and Sciences in Interdisciplinary Problems and Methods. LAS also runs professional and leadership programmes. Prior to LAS, in 2012, Ed co-founded School 21 with Peter Hyman and Ollie de Botton. School 21 is an innovative school for 4 to 18-year-olds in Stratford, East London, designed for children from all starting points and backgrounds, which achieved outstanding in the Ofsted inspection in 2014. Ed has advised leaders at Cambridge University, the London School of Economics, along with some of the UK's most exciting schools, exploring new ways of teaching students. He's also worked with organizations specialized in working directly with disadvantaged students, such as ARK Schools and Teach First. Ed was also the co-founder of Edspace, a co-working space for innovative education companies. Prior to founding School 21, Ed worked at McKinsey Company and ran a theater production company. Do check out the courses and offers that LIS have on their website, and you can follow them @wearelis on Twitter or @lisuk.

On LinkedIn.

Hello. Hey, Ed.

Hey, how you doing?

I'm all right. How are you, man? Perfect. All right, so I would love to start with a bit of a general question about the London Interdisciplinary School and just think about where the impetus for the idea came from. A lot of conversation about interdisciplinary learning in the education space and how important that is, but for people actually have turned that into a tangible reality on the ground as an education model? Where did that come from for you and the guys that you set that up with?

I think similar with School 21, people often say, where did you get the idea? Or where does this start? And it's actually quite, for me, hard to pinpoint it. But I suppose for the university, for LIS, I think the answer comes from really observing within School 21, which I'm sure we'll get on to, seeing the narrowing that happens in school, which of course you're conscious of when you're younger, but when you're at school, you're mainly thinking of yourself. Maybe this is from a pre-fees in the UK mindset where you're like, I've got to get over those hurdles. Tell me the rules of the game and how I win at those rules. And the rules were you narrow down to 3 A-levels or 4 A-levels, you get those, you narrow down to one degree, and then you, you get into the best place you possibly can get and you get as good a degree as you can possibly get, right? Those are the rules of the game. And you're not really critiquing the system, you're trying to understand it in order to game it. And then as someone who was involved in running a school, you look at the students and how they're having to just stop doing subjects they're quite clearly about, and you start to think, what is driving all of this? And in the end of the day, in the UK certainly, it's basically university entrance.

And that was very early on at School 21, 2012, 2013.

I started to think about that. And then, you know, you then go on this big kind of thought process of how do you change that? And I ended up in, well, starting a university, maybe. Brilliant.

One way to do it.

Yeah.

I mean, I've had that conversation with many different people who are like, yeah, that's what we should do. We should just start a university. And it's like, yes, brilliant. You did it. Amazing. But also, maybe you could just say say a little bit about the specifics of how this model is structured at LIS, because perhaps some people may not have seen it yet. I totally encourage them to go and look at the website and find out more, but, but from, from a model of moving away from that specialism idea, how have you structured the offerings at LIS?

Well, the starting point is to say the profound difference is that we're not organized around disciplines, we're organized around complex problems, which is how the world is organized, which is helpful. So you know, the big things we're wrestling with now, and we don't need to rehash, we know what they are, don't respect disciplinary boundaries, but yet our education system is still straitjacketed by them. And I won't get into the arguments as to why we disagree with that, but the way we're structuring is around complex problems. So about 50% of the course, the students will be exploring and pulling apart a complex problem and looking at it with different disciplinary lenses. So we still observe the fact that disciplines exist, but you might take an anthropological perspective on, let's say, mental health and a linguistic perspective as well as a neurochemical perspective, potentially, and whatever the perspective is, a visual arts perspective.

Right.

And then that's about half of the course. And the rest of the course is interdisciplinary methods, which are, again, individually, they're nothing new. It's the way we're organizing them that's different, which is quantitative and qualitative methods, data analysis, statistical analysis, coding on the quant side, on the qual side, how you design a fantastic survey, how you do ethnographic research, how you visual representation of data to emote certain things in people. I mean, these things are useful to a range of employers and it's unusual for people to have a bunch of these things in their toolkit. So it's, those are the two ways that we're organizing the degree. It's a Bachelor of Arts and Sciences. So, you know, in a way, like a liberal arts and sciences degree, the difference is that these integrating moments around complex problems that existing universities find very hard to do.

That's brilliant. And what I find interesting, that it's like situating research and the kind of research methods as a core element, right? It's not just something that you might go on to do at postgraduate level, or actually that kind of disciplined inquiry is right in the heart of just straightaway undergraduate. We've got to figure out how to learn in a rigorous and disciplined way at that level and beyond.

Yeah, I think that's completely right. And people say, look, on the progressive side of education, which is definitely the side I'm on, but I take issue with lots of the stuff that people assume should be part of the educational package. And, you know, people talk a lot about people need to generate new learning and new knowledge as well as learn existing knowledge. It's my view on that is it definitely shouldn't be at the expense of existing knowledge because there's so much that we need to learn about the world that we can't discount existing knowledge. It's completely vital. There are new ways of positioning it for people, for sure. In a way, what we're doing is reorganizing existing knowledge around problems, not disciplines. But I think what these research methods do is it enables you to create new knowledge genuinely at university by collecting data and inquiring or generating new insights from existing data, you know, asking questions. So I think that, that's exciting for young people to start new knowledge.

Absolutely. And there's a, I'm assuming there's quite a core collaborative element to that as well in the way that the students work together on the course, because I mean, I would assume in the sense of that's, that's vital for that kind of co-creation in response to complex problems.

Yeah. I mean, something that we'll do more than most courses is have students work in teams, certainly when they're working on the problems. And then of course the trick for us, which is, is not trivial, is to try and help the students spot the connections between the disciplines and how they can use the methods when they're working on these problems.

Yeah.

Working on a climate change problem, what's the method you'd use here to gather some data to make a difference? And then, yeah, organizing yourself as a team to do that.

Brilliant. And so, so if we go back a step slightly chronologically with School 21, if you could briefly just say a bit more about School 21, because as one of the co-founders, um, with Pete Hyman and Ollie de Botton, that was a really interesting model in itself. And then obviously you've stepped on into higher education, but Clearly there's a connection there between those two things.

Yeah. So when Peter and Ollie and I were working on what School 21 was going to be, all of us actually started with a clear idea of what it wasn't going to be, which is what most people have of education, actually. I find, you know, when you're chatting with people, like, I know, yeah, this is terrible, that's wrong, this is boring.

It's true.

And then you say, what should it be? And this is kind of vague things about students should take control of their own learning. What does that mean? What, you know, really what's going to happen? I think with us the sort of headlines for School 21 are two or three of them. One is oracy, which I think is perhaps the biggest transcendent thing we've done. The thing that's going to make the biggest impact as a kind of lasting thing at School 21 is a focus on speaking skills. Most schools don't. It's a truism to say communicating in different contexts is really important. In school, you're mostly told to be quiet. Is this right? Most people kind of go, well, yes, probably that could be better. And so we've said, right, what's the curriculum we can build around that? How do you structure a school so that raises the status basis of speaking, given that there's not an assessment they're going to sit in GCSEs on speaking. You need to raise the status thing. So that's a big thing. Second headline is we do a lot of project-based learning. We try— it's hard to do well. We try and do it well. We're sometimes successful with that, sometimes not. Yeah. Third thing we do, big focus on well-being. I think that's another, you know, the whole child. So those three things and the kind of— I'd say the thing that's had the most impact on schools beyond School 21 though is oracy.

Yeah, yeah, fantastic. And, and of course that, that leads into all those other kind dispositional aspects that it develops as well as just the ability to communicate, right? You know, the confidence and all those other things that come with that. Interesting. And so I just wanted to— I love this phrase that I saw on the LIS website that maybe we could dig into a little bit more on this idea of collective intelligence, because I think we're seeing that a lot as a kind of an emergent property with the pandemic and, you know, with all sorts of things happening right now. But just if I read it, the magic of collective intelligence is the key to unlocking interdisciplinarity. But maybe how does that manifest itself in practice in LIS and what's employers' responses to that? Or, you know, do you get any friction related to that?

Well, look, collective intelligence is an area which has deep bodies of research into it, and I'm not an academic in it. We do have an academic on our faculty who's Mattia, who's an Italian philosopher, who's also an expert in collective intelligence. So I would defer to him, or if you want to, you need to get that guy in. I'll talk to you a little bit. It is important. I think one thing we make an argument for is that to unlock collective intelligence, we need some agents who can go and unlock that. And I think that is the graduates of our courses, undergraduate, but also our professional development courses should be better at doing that than we are currently, than the people we're currently producing. So you want people who can say in a room, look, anthropologists have been thinking about this for 30 years. We don't need to solve this from first principles. Let's get an anthropologist on the phone, right? Or someone who says, this feels like an engineering problem, actually. Yeah, just have a hunch from the bit of engineering that I did at uni. So I think it's— there's something about being able to harness and unlock collective intelligence where you need someone that is in this kind of interactional space. Have you come across this notion of interactional expertise? It's kind of between being a bit of a novice and someone who's going to make contributions in the field.

Okay. Interesting.

Interact expertise might be a science journalist, right? And they're not going to contribute to the field of science, but they can have— they know the vocabulary, they can— they know where the pools of knowledge sit. They can have conversations with scientists. They maybe make connections that scientists cannot make. And so we've got to kind of be brave when we talk about expertise, that it's not like, well, that's, that's for the experts, right? There's a role for these people who can unlock this collective intelligence. And I think the second point is a slightly different point to your point about employers. When you talk to organizations and you say, I bet there's a lot of intelligence, collective intelligence in your organization that is completely untapped. You have people who've got PhDs in physics.

Yeah.

You're not really connecting to it. And that's because you need to unlock their interdisciplinary thinking.

Yeah.

Slightly different thing, which is, look, physics has a role to play. History has a role to play. Your historians can help you here, not just because they're good at writing reports, but because we are persistently ahistorical generally in our culture. Whereas, you know, COVID, to think about COVID properly, All of these perspectives are really useful, right? Including a historical one.

Absolutely. It's really interesting. And this word polymath, always, you know, you can hear that popping around. But in general, that's seen as somebody who's just an expert. They're so, they're so advanced, they're just an expert in all these different domains in the traditional sense of expertise. But actually, I love that idea of interactional expertise because, as you say, you might just bring a different perspective to bear on a problem. That allows you to connect dots that somebody who's very ingrained in that discipline just may not do.

Yeah, I completely agree. And I think what I'm not talking about here is the kind of content-free generalist. And I've come from— I did 4 years as a consultant and there is expertise in consultancies, but there are also, when you're young, particularly you're just a sort of content-free generalist. It's not that. It is the level of expertise that is between the two. And I think it's a really interesting area.

No, that's so important. And I think it's polarized. The conversation often gets polarized between the idea that you're either just a content-free generalist or you're an expert and therefore you're knowledge-rich and you have to go very hard and fast into those 10,000 hours of expertise in order to just get that first and then come back into something else.

And I don't know what the name for that person is. It's completely right, Tim. I don't know what the name for it is because it's not— the problem with polymath is, and we've wrestled with this a bit, is it's a bit grand, first of all. And actually, it's almost not possible to be a polymath now. I mean, maybe there's some exceptions. People might say Elon Musk is making contributions in multiple areas.

He probably is. Right.

But it's pretty rare now. For any academic actually to make a contribution in almost any field because it's very hard and yet in doing multiple ones, really difficult. So, you know, maybe Richard Feynman, it's a sort of defunct word, so maybe we can reclaim it.

But I mean, that's all brilliant. But then we also work in reality, right? Back on the ground. With a bump, and there are some significant barriers and challenges to the current reality of education in order to get more towards this that we're talking about. Where do you see the particular challenges or barriers from a policy level or, you know, right down back to a classroom level?

Well, there's lots there. Firstly, let's say in schools, the subjects are useful. My bet is, is that if we removed subjects from schools and said you're just going to know stuff, that we'd pretty quickly try and organize ourselves around categories, and then we realize how clever the subject disciplines are in a way, right? So I don't think you want to throw the baby out with the bathwater here. So, and the second thing to say, and Carl Gombrich, who's a professor with us at LAS, who's looked at interdisciplinary education for decades, is circumspect about the ability to do meaningful interdisciplinarity at a much younger age. I somewhat disagree with him there, and Peter Hyman from School 21 would definitely disagree. But, you know, it's a debate to be had, is when can you start to play with these the boundaries between disciplines. I certainly think at university level you're ready to do that. So that— there's a cultural thing in schools, but there's also a sort of what's right. It's not just a case of it's clearly right, how do we get the politicians to change their minds? Yeah, and regulate in a different way. I do think, you know, IB is helpful in that it's sort of multidisciplinary, it keeps you broader for longer. The idea— I think it would be really healthy to have a sort of sense that some students can stay broader for longer Some students don't want to do that, and that's completely fine. Right now everyone has to say on the UCAS form in the UK, I've always wanted to do this one subject for 3 years. And I say this in sixth forms and it gets a smile from the students because I say, we know that many of you are lying. It's just a lie. And you're told by your teachers, you've got to do— I'm sorry, you've got to promise with your fingers crossed that you said that you want to do chemistry for 3 years. Yeah, it was all you've ever wanted to do. It's nonsense for most students, complete nonsense. But then I think the challenges for us are then also challenges of depth. People say, well, look, it's shallow and you're a jack of all trades, master of none. That challenge— and how can it be university degree level, all these subjects? Two challenges to that. One is university degree. Anyway, I did mechanical engineering undergrad. There's no such thing as an essential thing of engineering, which you just go deeper and deeper and deeper into. In year one, it gets broken into 8 modules of thermodynamics and fluid mechanics and lots of maths. And then you go somewhat deep into a bunch of modules. And then in year two, you go a little bit deeper into fluid mechanics and thermodynamics and maths and so on. And what we're saying is you might do thermodynamics in our course and no other engineering modules. Yeah, but you still could do level 2 of thermodynamics in year 2. So in a way it's still university depth, but that's, that's quite a hard argument to make. But that's the reality. And Carl conceptualizes depth as a kind of three-dimensional thing of looking at the problem rather than just going deeper and deeper into one subject. If you can combine subjects, it's a sort of three-dimensional depth that you have that's around and focused on a problem. Rather than this kind of narrow T-shaped learner that we all talk about today.

Yeah. And I suppose bringing in the idea of application of knowledge being part of the depth or the transfer and to be able to slightly move sideways and down, not just straight down.

Completely right. And I think there's an intellectual challenge to making connections between things, being able to move, to see the deep structure in different settings.

Yeah.

And see patterns in those deep structures to be able to use, I mean, super concepts of this idea of a concept that has originated from a field like entropy and thermodynamics actually, or evolution in biology and is now, you know, we use these ideas in many, many different fields and that's a skill to say, look, is this behaving like evolution? In what way is it evolving? I mean, obviously COVID, you can look at this now, you can use it there. If it's that kind of a problem that helps us think through different kinds of answers to this complex problem.

Yeah. And I love the idea of of threshold concepts because there are certain concepts which just are more— I don't want to say important, but they're more useful in a way as gateways to either the rest of that discipline or then to make connections across. And evolution, for example, would be one of them. I mean, that's one of the reasons I like the IB MYP because as a concept-based curriculum, you've got scope there to begin that. It doesn't always happen quite on the ground enough, I would say, but it is an interesting part of it. And then just to move slightly, you're obviously in the higher education space at a time when higher education is really having some serious existential challenges right now, and I had the privilege of speaking to Sir Anthony Seldon recently about the realities of higher education and, you know, the challenges particularly for smaller universities and colleges. Do you feel that, or are you somewhat resilient to that because of your your innovative concept in the sense that you're kind of pushing into a new space anyway? Because just for example, the 3-year disciplinary degree I think potentially has a shelf life now, you know, people are really thinking about how else you can work and learn in much more agile ways, credentialing and, you know, all of that.

First of all, I think the main advantage we have is not our innovative ideas, it's the fact that we're new and small and we're just fundamentally more agile and that we've had a year's run-up to this because we opened this autumn. So we're interviewing now and running a trial at the minute, fully online, obviously at the minute. We hope not to be online in the autumn. That's a massive advantage for obvious reasons. I think there's a second thing, which is if you rewind 3 or 4 years ago and you say to me, what were you most worried about? I think me and my co-founder Chris Person would say recruiting students. How do you possibly convince a young person to come to you for 3 years and take out that loan when they could go to something that's 100 years old and literally named after a city? And there are no brands older than Oxford and Cambridge, right? Guinness isn't, I don't think. Happiness is as old as that. So these are the biggest brands in the world and it's the biggest decision you'll make up to that point in your life and it costs a lot of money. So I think that, and I think that, look, before COVID came, we were getting traction, which we were surprised about and pleased. But COVID helps even more because it throws all the cards in the air.

Yeah.

And actually the discourse, again, the discourse since VC pay complaints and now this have flipped it to say, look, universities aren't necessarily the be-all and end-all. They don't necessarily know what they're doing. And is it value for money? The thing that I still get frustrated about, and I don't know if you share this, is that too little of the conversation is about what they're actually taught. Still now, even now in COVID, people are not saying, do we really need 80,000 people a year studying history and 80,000 people a year studying law? We clearly want some historians and some lawyers, but 400,000 of the 2 million people at universities are doing something related to dentistry, medicine, and nursing. Now, maybe that's right, actually, in this context. Yeah, but no one's thought this through. I'm not kind of calling for central planning. But what we've got is a homogenous system where every institution is offering the same batch of degrees. Yeah. So that I think has to come to an end, that's for sure. 3 years is interesting strategic decision we took, right? So, so we could— part of us wanted to say we want to look and feel like a university because if we look enough like a university, then we've now got degree awarding powers. So we're kind of really on the road to becoming one. It's a protected title. So we need to exist for 3 years before we call ourselves a university. That's historic. And we're a 3-year degree and you can borrow £9,000. We're a university now. We can kind of play around right now. We can disrupt from the inside of the members club. So that was some decisions we made early on, which was that we're going to look and smell and feel a bit like a university to then really innovate from the inside. Of course, we could have been much more radical and said it's a 1-year or it's a 10-year, but part-time, and we can still do all of that stuff.

Yeah, I hear that kind of the Trojan horse. Metaphor around quite a bit, you know, let's look enough like this thing in order to smuggle in this other thing. Good. No, thank you. I mean, it's such an important step that someone is saying, yes, let's do this as a university and see what it looks like and see how it runs and let's take on the big dogs, you know, and just on your point that you made just as a last thing about that idea of if it's the appropriate thing to do with younger learners, Is it the right thing to do at that, you know, with 11-year-olds, 12-year-olds? And of course there's all sorts of schools and different models happening, but I—

well, yeah, no, no, it is my view. And Peter Woods, who's brilliant on this stuff, would also champion it. So I mean, for me it would be— and she may be too busy, but where we've had debates about this, somewhere Peter has had debates with Daisy Christie-Dooly, you probably know. So, you know, and I really love Daisy and we're good friends and she's a big supporter of Ella. It's really interesting She's a massive supporter of LAS, but I'm not actually sure she's even visited School 21. She's so cynical about it.

That is interesting. That is super interesting. Why is it okay for 18-year-olds and not for 11-year-olds?

So her novice and expert kind of dichotomy, yeah, that you, whilst you're a novice, it needs to be much more directional, teacher-led, yeah, until, you know, and build up your long-term memory, and then you can start to learn different— experts learn differently. She's just like, well, they are ready at 18. So she believes there's a real Write a Passage type moment behind it. Cause she's an interdisciplinary. She just is.

She's brilliant. I love listening to her speak. She's amazing, but it's definitely, she's got a particular opinion. Yeah.

Yeah.

She's just got a brand and you see this, you see this happening. You talk to Daisy, she's much more sophisticated in reality.

Brilliant.

Thank you, Ed.

I really appreciate it.

It's good to meet you.

Really interesting stuff.

Great. It's good to get some meaty, meaty content.

Thanks, man. Have a good evening. Cheers.

Bye.

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