Learners Without Borders - A Conversation with Yong Zhao

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

I think for the past 30 years, all education reforms by governments have proven one thing: they're wrong. You know, if you look at all the government reforms, there are only so many things they can play with, but they don't play with the most important thing.

Welcome back. Thanks for tuning in again to the Future Learning Design podcast. In today's episode, I'll be speaking with the inimitable Yong Zhao, whose energy and thinking and prolific writing has provided so many people with inspiring ideas and research to support educational innovation across the world. Yong is the Foundation Distinguished Professor in the School of Education at the University of Kansas. And a professor in educational leadership at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education. Previously, he served as the presidential chair, associate dean, and the director of the Institute for Global and Online Education in the College of Education at the University of Oregon. Prior to Oregon, Yong was university distinguished professor at the College of Education at Michigan State University, where he also served as the founding director of the Center for Teaching and Technology and executive director of both the Confucius Institute and the US-China for Research on educational excellence. Yong is prolific in his writing and most recently published Teaching Students to Become Self-Determined Learners, which he co-authored with Michael Wehmeyer, and other great books including An Education Crisis Is a Terrible Thing to Waste, What Works May Hurt, and World-Class Learners: Educating Creative and Entrepreneurial Students. You can connect with Yong on LinkedIn, on Twitter, with the links in the show notes, and check out his website xiaolearning.com for links to his blog, publications, and other resources.

Hi, Yong.

How are you, sir?

I'm very fine. How are you, sir?

Good. Well, we're in a mess, you know.

It certainly seems that way. Yes.

Yes, yes, yes. Right. Well, this is actually expected. I blame it as a failure of education, actually. It's nothing else. Education did not catch up to the change of technology. So this is a normal historical cycle.

Yeah, I think you might be right, but it doesn't make it easy to live through though, right?

Well, actually, you know, like I say, historians can write about small cycles, but if you're in the middle of it, that's not a small cycle.

Yeah, so thank you. It's such a huge pleasure to be able to speak to you today. My first question, I just wanted to get into this idea from Pasi Sahlberg about the germs and the global education reform movement, and I wondered whether you feel that, you know, we're actually getting to a point where more of a general realization that that's just not good enough anymore?

Well, I think, you know, Pasi is always the smart one. You know, I respect him. I think the germ is a very clever kind of way to describe the changes in education. And there seems to be, you know, a general view of how education should be done by the leadership, and they're wrong, of course, you know. But I have not been really paying too much attention to, honestly, governments. I think for the past 30 years, all education reforms by governments have proven one thing: they're wrong. They are fixing the wrong things. You know, if you look at all the government reforms, there are only so many things they can play with, but they don't play with the most important thing. If you look at education, so what can you do? So you have a system, you can only improve it To improve it, what do you do? You say, okay, let's play with the curriculum, which everybody has to learn. So, you know, almost all governments have been saying, well, we have a new society, let's add content. And that's— well, our old content was not tough enough, let's change the curriculum. Yeah, so they're playing with the curriculum a lot, you know. And curriculum is associated with testing, so let's add more tests, you know. So we, we want students to learn this, let's test this. And then we have standardized testing in most in literacy and numeracy. And OECD jumps in with the PISA and all those things. So, but they said, okay, that's not enough. We have to use testing to hold schools and teachers accountable. So we publicize, publish the test results, and then we try to improve teachers. We do a lot of professional development. You know, we learn a lot from PISA to say, let's have better teachers who are better graduates from high school. We play with teachers. All that George Bush did was send them to do more tests, you know, more degrees. And then we hold school leaders accountable. If you don't improve your schools, we'll fire you. We try. So we've been playing with all of those things.

Yeah.

I'm looking at the system now. Of course, people talk about play with funding, you know, all those things.

Yeah.

But if you notice one thing, Tim, they don't talk about students. None of the education reforms ever talk about what are we going to do with students. But you know, students are the most important factor in learning.

Yeah.

Without learners, you know, unless you change the role of students, unless you make them the participating but also owner of learning, you can't change. That's why in over the last 30 years, have you seen education improved? No.

Yeah.

There's no data. Have you seen this data of showing students the so-called achievement gaps closed? No, actually I was looking at the US data, NAEP data, you know, it's nothing. You know, just, it's looking at international data, PISA data, all those data, nothing has changed. But we have done so much. Why?

We really have, we're doing a lot. I mean, one of the things you've spoken about before, I know, is this kind of tyranny of certainty. Maybe this is the thing that pushes us to keep tweaking and adapting at the edges because we're obsessed with being certain that we're doing the right thing for those students, right? I mean, they are— yeah, we can agree we all want to do that, but it's, you know, we want to be certain that we've got it right.

Well, that's actually, Tim Logan, perhaps one of the most important things that you just— what you said is we have this very authoritarian view of education as adults, as someone who has the responsibility to create something, but we forget about really 3 things about children. One, they are natural born learners. They want to learn.

Yeah.

Two, they are very diverse learners. They're very different.

Yeah.

Three, they're intentional learners that they act, they think, they're active. So those three things, if you look at how have we ever examined them, you know, I just finished a book which will be published by Corwin. It's called Learners Without Borders. If we don't control our students within the border of a curriculum, of a school, of a classroom, then we might have a chance because students, when they pursue what they're good at, what they're passionate about, you don't need to motivate them. You just need to support them.

Yeah, absolutely. I guess the borders and the structures are what we cling to for certainty, right?

Yeah. Well, because we feel like we're in control, you know, we're used to it.

It's an illusion.

Exactly. Don't get me wrong. Like, let's say 100 years ago, you could control. Remember, 100 years, things did not change that fast. You already know. And also, there were not many jobs, just one type of job. You go to the factory, you do it. I mean, really, you could control. And everything else in that entertainment— imagine how many TV channels you had, how many songs, how many music you learned, how many websites you were on. Just It's massively enlarged.

Yeah. Interesting. And so just then looking at now, as for example, around the Relung conference, there's a lot of, you know, positive energy about this. And it's hard sometimes for me, you know, being involved in a lot of these conversations to be able to see outside of that and think, you know, is this just a slight bubble of that feels like a bit of a paradigm shift or is there a general feeling? I don't know, you know, what's your feeling? Because you've obviously been calling for this paradigm shift for a long time in terms of creative and entrepreneurial learners. Do you feel that there is a beginning of a moment now where people are really questioning those central tenets of the system rather than tweaking at the edges?

Unfortunately, no, I don't think so. I think the— it's great that the re:Learn conference can attract so many people. I've seen other organizations doing similar things, attracting more people. I think it's just, it's still a bubble because, you know, what do you see now is even you're doing online. You know, think about global and how many people we got. We got 7 billion people. How many of you are in, in Under? Several hundred people. Maybe even if you get like 30,000, 100,000, I'll give you 100,000. You know how small that is? Of course. That is extremely small, right? It's, it's, but, but, but don't get me wrong. I'm very happy that we are running this, but I don't think there is a general wave, you know, like in America, you know, the election, the blue wave doesn't exist, you know. So, yeah, because also at the same time, I believe the majority of educational researchers would not try to drive the kind of paradigm shift I'm thinking, because there's so, there's so much interest that binds people to strengthen, to make the existing system existing paradigm better. You know, like in my new book, I'm really trying to say, okay, a learner, technically you can have your local community, but you can learn online. You can learn online with a lot of people. I don't mean just watching courses. You can interact with a lot more people.

Of course, yeah.

But how many people is going to do it? You don't know. Like if you go to a classroom, most classrooms today, you wouldn't believe— just take China. China is a huge country. Take China as an example. Teachers still dominate. You know, they're teaching 60 students, 50 students, 45 students, but why can't they just teach 10, 5, and let the others run, you know, go learn on their own? We have a show called Silver Lining for Learning. We had 5 kids from Nepal. They're all learning from MOOCs, and they speak beautiful English. If they're in Nepal, a poor, mountainous, isolated country, learning from MOOCs done by Harvard, by Stanford, Why can't everybody else do it? Yeah, because we don't want them to do it.

I mean, it's that, I guess, that kind of sense of abundance. I mean, we— there is a huge abundance of, of resource and content. Of course, you know, with the digital divide being a major issue, many people don't have access, but when you do have access, there is a huge abundance of learning possibilities out there, but then we cling onto this idea of scarcity within a school. And I don't know, maybe it's again, to cling onto that illusion of control somehow. I don't know.

Yeah. Well, you know, you're right. Like the abundance is there, but also like, you know, I acknowledge there is the digital divide, but if we turn our interest in making that abundance available to every student, I bet we can solve the digital divide problem. I'm from a very tiny village in China. In my village, people have smartphones. They have Access. I mean, they are texting me. They can do it, you know, but we just don't allow them to do it. We just said, okay, now you gotta follow the textbook. You gotta follow me. You gotta— Another thing I think problem is that people believe in the system. They said the system, if I follow the orders, you will give me something. You know, that's an illusion.

Yeah.

The system does not promise you anything. You graduate from college, who cares about you graduate from college? You know how many college graduates are unemployed and underemployed? They're not.

I guess it takes, yeah, it takes time for people to acknowledge on a wide scale that that deal that they've signed up to isn't quite— it's not delivering anymore. Right.

Yeah. Well, that means that's another thing is that for most people, there's no alternative. There's no choice. Of course they are in a system. I mean, like when you reach age 6, you are supposed to be in school. You're supposed to be in school for 12 years, then you're done. You know, so, but there's no other possibilities. So I'm really talking a lot about I hope your podcast gets to people, to parents, to students, to rethink the process.

Yeah, no, I was having that exact conversation actually with one of the other speakers at Relearn about that idea of the biggest hooks for parents to actually look around them and look at the alternatives and make a different choice. But I think part of the problem is that there are not many different choices that are seen to be credible. I mean, I don't know, you know, is that, do you see that that's one of the best ways that this will perhaps move forward over the next decades is actually developing more of those kinds of lighthouses or credible alternatives to the system?

I hope so. I mean, there are people, don't get me wrong. Again, there are a lot of people trying to come up with different alternatives. Like Google has come up with different alternatives. $8,000, you get a career and a certificate, then you could go find a job. You know, Microsoft has done this, you know, and there are people offering different, you know, opportunities. Singularity University, universities are reflecting. I think it ultimately needs to be grassroots.

Yeah.

So that's why Unlearn is a very important conference. You need opportunities. I said it's not there yet. When I'm, when I'm attending conferences like this, podcasts like this, I'm also reading a lot of government documents. I also interact with, with a lot of government officials, but governments are not ready to change. And also, most of the stuff are not that actually old. If you look, most of the writings of the so-called 21st century skills only started after 21st century started, you know. You notice that, you know, because in the 1980s and 1990s, we're focused on reading and math. But you know, it's 21st century, we're still talking about reading and math. It's really, most countries test that. PISA, you know, claims to test the future knowledge. It tests reading and math and the most basic. It's just really shocking.

It is. So tell me, I would love to know, because I heard you speaking to the Game Changers podcast about the student autonomy kind of metric that you were developing to get some rankings of student autonomy. How is that project coming on?

Well, you know, it's, it's coming along. I will say this. So, because, you know, I don't really do it myself. I have a service. They— I'm always trying to spread to individual students. So we have students in South Australia trying to do that. Recently a student from Wisconsin is trying to do that. We have school in Hong Kong trying to do that. So I just want to spread idea and you can develop your own. I mean, actually I was talking to a school yesterday in Hong Kong that's going to develop and interview students to say how they change from, you know, their student autonomy self-regulation, self-determination, how they change. I think different schools, different individual students are picking on this, but I don't think it's massive, you know.

No, no, sure. But just in a kind of philosophical sense, do you feel that that approach is going to kind of add value to the transformations happening in terms of just trying to get better at measuring different things in order to leave a change in the system? Because, you know, we've obviously been obsessed with measuring things for a long time, but we've been measuring maybe the wrong things. And, you know, do we just need to get better at measuring different things, or do we need to kind of move away from the whole framework of the idea of trying to measure?

Because, you know, I'm not a big fan of measurement, but right now, you know, as you said, we got obsessed with that, you know, test scores are D&As, you know, all this stuff, whatever you test gets taught, you know. And so I am working with actually with the at University of Melbourne, a group of faculty trying to work with a group of schools to do a student profiling, not to measure, you know, using one test to assess hundreds of thousands of students, but see what, what kind of unique profiles we can build for individual students as a way to assess that. And that will of course include, you know, autonomy, uniqueness, passions, creativity, and— but, but none of this is easy to measure. So we want to emphasize that, try to get there. And I think, you know, one of the reasons probably we are still assessing literacy and numeracy is because that's what we, we know, we think we know how to assess.

But I think also one of the things I observe is that from, from a more traditionalist perspective in terms of education, there is a recourse to research and evidence as a justification for it, whereas I see still a bit of a lack on, you know, as you move towards the more progressive end of the spectrum, is because we get into more qualitative ideas, it's like the research isn't seen to be as robust and therefore not used so readily, proof of concept, if you like. Do you feel that there's a lack of research base there to support what those types of educational models are doing in terms of student autonomy and entrepreneurial mindsets and these kinds of things as outcomes?

Well, I mean, I think, you know, you're absolutely right because we call something evidence-based. But evidence-based is very hickey. I wrote a book about evidence, quote, that's why the book is called What Works May Hurt: Side Effects in Education.

Yeah.

You know, you've come up, seen that book. If you look at it, the evidence people do use, what's been measured, like we said before, if the measurement is wrong, no matter what evidence you got, it's not going to support you. Right. If, if like, for example, if reading and math, that's what been our problem. We've been using that as evidence. We only measure that. So students like on PISA, for example, China, Shanghai, China does best, you know, but Chinese students' life satisfaction is very low. But if you think life satisfaction as outcome, PISA says that's an outcome, it's called wellbeing outcome, social-emotional wellbeing, they go against each other. So which evidence do you want to pick? What would you like to have? And then that's one area, right? They go against, you know, the higher the test score, the more miserable the students. So do you want miserable students? You want higher test scores. That's one way. And another thing, it's been historical that students with test scores go up high, but they're less interested in the subject. So the more you teach them, the better the score, but the more they hate the subject. Why do you want to do that? You know, so where do you get— and now another thing, of course, you say, okay, we want creativity. Yeah, where does creativity come from? Creativity comes from diversity. But then all the PISA scores— oh, this country is doing great because it has great test scores and smaller variation. Yeah, so if they have the same score, high average, small variation, I think that's good. But that goes against creativity because creativity says students should be interested in this area. If you're interested in that area, you won't be able to do this area. So anyway, that's even the evidence is wrong, but very few people are willing to acknowledge that, you know.

Yeah, yeah. And I guess we, you know, on that front, you end up with a monoculture, right?

You end up with a very barren landscape and where you would not get innovation or creativity.

No, exactly. And I mean, that's why I love your concept of the entrepreneurship, which I think is often misunderstood, right, as, as an economic or business-related entrepreneurial idea, but actually it's— I mean, I've heard you say this before, but it's about, you know, it's really about creating value, right? And that value is human value and it's all sorts of—

Tim, you're absolutely right. When I write about entrepreneurship, it's not like entrepreneurship in a traditional economic course, go set up a business, go sell some lemonade, you know, that's not an interest. My interest is that you have developed strength passion. So you are Tim Logan, you are different, you are Tim Logan, you are special. But how do you create value out of your specialty? You create value for somebody else, you solve other people's problems, which can be social, emotional, can be policy, can be economical, or can be socially, you're just helping other people. So this is about value creation and you take the responsibility for doing that.

I think that's such a powerful idea, right? Because it is that, of course, then that's all the self-directed and intrinsic motivation and autonomy and all of those things that we want. It's all part of that same concept in a way, right? Because I mean, exactly.

Yeah.

That's what we want for our children.

Yeah. Well, that's what I want for myself, right? How am I using? What problem I'm doing? Actually, people say in the future, you know, for example, For example, if you follow Andrew Yang, he said, okay, everybody gets universal basic income because of automation. Then you don't have nothing to do. So what are you going to do? That's a miserable life. You got to be valuable to somebody.

The meaning question, right? Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. No, that's interesting. And just one final question I would love to ask you because my background is actually as an anthropologist and I'm very interested in this cultural dimension. And I think, and in a way it comes back to this idea of a monoculture as well. With PISA and the OECD and, you know, and on all of those things, we, we seem to be all looking for this kind of monolithic educational landscape where everyone's essentially, you know, kind of doing the same thing. And as you say, the creativity and the innovation comes from this biodiversity in the landscape. And do you see that things are moving in that direction to become more, more diverse and varied, or does it feel more that we're moving more towards this even more of a standardized model?

Well, Tim, I'm so happy you're anthropologist. I kind of, um, I'm serious, I think anthropologists probably of the people who have lost their value by society, they forced you guys to lose, you know, because, you know, anthropologists were in the 1956, they were very valuable, you know, but you know, right now people say, oh God, what is that?

Exactly, yeah, it doesn't get you a job, I can tell you that much.

But you guys I actually think right now all tech companies are hiring anthropologists. That's actually serious because you guys really know a lot more about people. And so let me just answer your question. I think first of all, this, this economic downturn plus COVID has caused a lot of geopolitical problems. You look at China versus other countries. You look at the immigration has become a big target. Xenophobia is on the rise, isolationism is on the rise, and all those kind of things. Because when you are losing, you try to blame other people. You know, that's just, you know, it has to be the immigrant. That's what's happening, you know, which is wrong. And but I think people, because of the the misbehaviors of the politicians, I think people may be reckoning about that. I think maybe we're reflecting that may be a bad idea. But in terms of education, I think like PISA, it's just a stupid idea, try to create one culture of school. It's just, it's impossible. It's just, how can you even think about that? You know, cultures have existed for so long, but also what's, what's I was shocked is there's so many countries believe in that, you know, they're in different countries like China, countries like Japan, countries in Saudi Arabia and Chile, Argentina. Why do you even believe it? You are in a different culture, you're in a different economical situation. So what I think, I'm hoping what will happen is we do not build one vision of education. Education does serve culture. You have to be culturally responsive. I mean, you know, when we have one type of education, that's why we have the so-called achievement gaps. Different groups play differently. People have different varieties, you know. So I hope we'll try to come to the point to say individuals are different. Individuals form groups. Groups are different. Individuals carry on, transmit social cultural values. That are different. So, so, you know, we have a globalization, we can connect globally, we can form new groups, we can form new communities, new cultures, but they are different. You cannot have one culture. So what, you know what, when people talk about— I remember many, many years ago when the internet just got started, and the one question was to say, will English dominate, kill everything? Because, you know, it was at that time was only English. In English it was like dominant in all those things. Yeah, you know, we said No, it shouldn't. You know, it's global mechanism like this creates more possibilities for individuals, more possibilities. And so, so yes, I think it's getting more diversifying. You probably in France you might see, or in the US you see fewer younger people belong to only a few churches anymore. They cannot create their own groups. Now you would never had LGBT, you know, all these different groups. I think it's diversifying, but schools are still being controlled by international testing.

Yeah, yeah, no, it's true. Yeah, it just, it makes you also think, I often come back to this idea that the, I don't know, maybe this is just a step too far, but that we take the unit of education as the individual, and you were talking about there, about, you know, the individual and then groups, and, and actually, you know, I've done quite a bit of work in Africa, in Tanzania and Zimbabwe, and, you know, they're just really deeply philosophically, epistemologically, there isn't the same sense of the individual in the same kind of very bounded entity that in the West that we, you know, we certainly have. And I wonder, you know, what an education option would look like that used some kind of the group, the collective, as the unit of learning rather than the individual.

Well, I've been thinking about this. So again, I would just go back to individual and think about broader things. So let's see, so recently, you know, in my new book I've been talking about What kind of personalized curriculum we can have? Let's say Tim Logan, you go to school. So first thing you got to do, you're a citizen of that society. So that society, that government has the obligation to prescribe something for you to learn so you can basically function. In France, you know, the government just say, okay, if you're here, you should learn this, this, and this. That's our responsibility. That's what your response mean. You would agree. But that will not make you successful. That, that just make you function as a member of a society. So that society determines that. That may be like 30% of the time of the curriculum. But then if you go to school, a school located in a local culture has a local group, local values. So the school should have the school-mandated curriculum, maybe another 30%. So you got 60%, then the 40% is what makes you stand up. That's you. You can determine what curriculum you can do. So in essence, you got that connected, and then you just have to— government says, yes, you owe me 30%, that's the public good, I should do it, you know, I'm supposed to. The local school should have its own features, characteristics, local culture. They should do it. You're part of that. But then I, as a person, if I want to be good, I have to have the floor expectations from the government and the local school. But if I want to thrive, I have to have my 40% of me choosing what I want to be.

Interesting.

Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. And then you— yeah, I mean, it's then very complexly multi-layered and very nice. Good. Well, Thank you, Jung. I mean, it's—

I love talking to you, Patrick. It's a pleasure.

I mean, huge privilege.

I love you anthropologists. I wish I could become one. Thank you so much. Great talking to you.

Thank you.

Brilliant.

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