Learning from Bildung Climate Schools - A Conversation with Ginie Servant-Miklos and Rutger Engels

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

We do not have the skills and we are not educating people and we are not valorizing these very hands-on vocational skills. So at the same time, we are putting all these children from lower socioeconomic classes into these very necessary jobs while at the same time devaluing them.

Hi, thanks for joining me for this week's episode. My name is Tim Logan and the podcast is produced by Good Impact Labs. I really feel that we need to ask ourselves some tough questions about what our education systems are really doing to support young people to live in a climate-changed world of at least 2 degrees of warming. What are the hands-on skills that they will need, but also how are we supporting them to regulate difficult emotions and build community as we relocalize? This week I'm so happy to have Gini Servant-Miklos learning to the podcast, this time with her colleague Rutger Engels to talk about what they're learning through their work implementing critically important ideas in their Bildung Klima School pilots with young people across Rotterdam. You can find out more information about the school in the show notes, as well as contact details for Rutger and Gini.

So I'm Rutger Engels. I'm I'm a professor in developmental psychopathology at Erasmus University Rotterdam. I'm primarily interested in resiliency, so resiliency of kids, of youth, young adults, and educational reform and innovation. And I have a background in developing interventions, so for resiliency. And I have been in leadership positions, like at the University of Rotterdam, but also at the National Institute for Mental Health and Addictions. Brilliant.

Thank you. And Jenny?

So you know me, Tim. We've spoken before. I'm still an assistant professor at the Erasmus School of Social and Behavioral Sciences. I work on climate issues related to education and psychology, well-being and resilience. I do most of my work within a societal context rather than, let's say, within a lab context. And besides that, I also work in the nonprofit sector, and I have worked in the nonprofit sector for 15 years. I'm I'm still the founder and chair of the Fair Fight Foundation, which provides educational opportunities and martial arts education for girls in Zimbabwe, Zambia, and India. We had a previous conversation about my forthcoming book, The Pedagogies of Collapse.

Absolutely. And iné, thank you. And so I would really encourage people to go back and listen to, I think it's episode 102 with Ginny. So we've covered quite a lot of the useful theoretical background and terrain. So this conversation will be hopefully much more focused on the applied. Realities, so understanding what you've learned. But just for a bit of context, one of the things you said in the first conversation was, we see so many teachers giving their lives to this crumbling conveyor belt to collapse that is the public education system. So there you go. That gives a bit of a taster of the kinds of things we covered. And so perhaps firstly, could you just give a little bit of the context, maybe Gini, from writing the book and then thinking about how you might put some of those ideas into very clear practice. And again, something you said in the first episode, you really emphasized multiple times is how much this needs to be about action. And it defines a lot of what you do. And by definition, the action is imperfect. So there's a lot of learning that happens as you start putting these really quite challenging, often existential ideas into practice. And that's where we hopefully will talk about the Building Climate School, which you've just been recently. Doing, which is a super exciting project.

I think it also led to how I started working with Rutger. I think it's worth going back to—

Perfect.

—working together because Rutger used to be in, as he said, in a leadership position as the rector of, which I think in English is vice chancellor, of Erasmus University. And I used to be at Erasmus University College. And it was around the time that we both changed jobs where he left the rectorship and I left the college. That's when I started writing The Pedagogies of Collapse, and it was congealing all the ideas and all the experiences that I'd had in education over the previous 10 years, uh, both as a pedagogical expert, but also as someone who had increasingly been delving into sustainability in a broad sense. So not just climate, but really all the issues around civilizational collapse, effectively. Yeah. The book was born out of my frustration with the fact that education wasn't seriously grappling with its own entanglement with fossil fuels and energy, wasn't seriously dealing with the mental health crisis of young people and how they're affected by the prospects for the future, and wasn't offering the kind of education that was relevant to prepare young people for what's coming. And that's what we talked about last time. The book is mainly looking back at the lessons I've learned, and it's looking at ideas that I got from out of the frustration of the things that we shouldn't do. And then the question is, what exactly should we do? And As you know, I had been talking, or we had been sort of involved with Lina Andersson for some time. And around the time when we did the first podcast, I had been talking with Lina at one of the, I think it was the Copenhagen European Bildung Day, telling her we should really just start an action project, actually put these ideas, combine my expertise in critical pedagogy and pedagogical innovation with the Bildung philosophy and try and actually build an educational program. And for me, obviously it's easier to build it in the Netherlands. So I had already started thinking about how could I turn these ideas into something positive, something action-oriented with an education program for young people here in Rotterdam. And I didn't have, I hadn't gone like kind of beyond that, I should do this kind of thing when, so Rutger and I had actually been for some time in the same research group at the Faculty of Social Sciences, but Rutger somehow had a habit of always taking his meetings in his car. True. So I hadn't had actually the opportunity to really talk to him. And there was this one research meeting, and Rutger tells the story better than me about how we realized we were interested in the same thing. So yeah, we were both presenting our research. And maybe, Rutger, you can take on from there. Yeah, so the—

because I made a good transition from being director, so being full-time responsible for the university, to, yeah, going back to her regular professorship position. So I took a little bit of time off as well from the university. I did some work with my PhD student, but not so much. And then I started to read about liminal learning, and in that context, I read The Nordic Secret, and I was super excited about it. Yeah. So when I had to present my work, one of the things I talked about was The Nordic Secret, and it was so funny because I said, well, that's— it's an amazing book, I really love the philosophy and how they actually got it to work in Denmark and Sweden, etc. And she writes, Lena Enso writes beautifully. And then, but of course I never met her and I said, yeah, that's amazing. And then Jeanne said, I know this woman, she's a good friend, I work with her. And then, okay. And then we started to talk. No, that's great.

And yeah, I mean, for people listening, Lena's been on the podcast a couple of times as well, and I'd love to weave in the Bildung concept a bit more for people that haven't read The Nordic Secret or don't perhaps know anything about Bildung. I think it's an important idea and obviously it's part of a core part of the concept of the Climate School, but also maybe setting the context. When I was in Rotterdam with you not that long ago, it was really interesting to me to learn more about the, the stratification within the Dutch education system, which also felt like it was a really strong piece of the context of what you were building in terms of what you were seeing locally. In the Netherlands and also wanting to respond to. So it's not only the kind of climate-related things, but actually also this, this thing that happens socially through an education system that creates some pretty fundamental rifts in the kind of social fabric. So, but yeah, perhaps Gini, could you speak to that a little bit?

Yeah. So actually when we decided to work together on a project, I had just completed a research project on the perspectives that young kids who go to what are called now VMBOs, which are vocational middle schools, on their perspectives and resilience throughout the COVID period, with an idea of developing more kind of critical pedagogy projects for them to work on. And that's, for me, it was quite a shock coming from France where there's no, in France, there's no separation until you're about 16. Some people go for bac technique, but otherwise the majority of people will make it to seconde before they separate. Whereas I found out that in Holland this separation happens at 11 years old, and I think, Jotro, maybe being embedded in the Dutch system, you can explain more how this division happens.

Yeah, so at the end of primary school, you, based on a test and based on the advices of your teachers, you basically can go in 3 tracks. So one is vocational, one is basically preparing people for applied university, which we call habilleau, and then for university. And the first track, certification tracks, is 4 years, the applied is 5, and the preparing for university is 6. So what we do based on the performance of kids— and there's huge developmental variability at the end of primary school, yeah, huge variability between boys and girls— and then we divide them in these 3 tracks, and it's really hard to move across those tracks. So then you, after like the 4 years of doing in this case it's called VEMBO, the vocational track. You can go to the vocational trade colleges, and then, and then at some point you might go to applied university, or at some point to university. The problem, of course, is that people from lower educational backgrounds, low, from poor areas, from people with migrant backgrounds, more of those people go to the vocational track, even if they have really good scores.. So it's basically setting up them for a specific career, which is absolutely not okay. So I think we have a really big problem in our educational system in the Netherlands, and we select kids into a specific track way too early, and that's highly problematic.

Yeah. And I mean, the thing that it throws up for me is the concept of imperfect solidarities, which, you know, Gini, I love and I keep using all the time. But the fact that we tried to somehow clean things up and sort things out and let, you know, as you say, these tracks that run that are very difficult to move across into into a different track. And the thing that perhaps we're being asked now with all of the ecological challenges is something else, which is more messy. And how do we actually build imperfect solidarities between and across groups and in society? And as I understand it, there are not many initiatives in the Netherlands that try and do that and bring young people from the three different tracks into the same space for whatever discipline or focus, but into a university context.

So what I wrote in Pedagogies of Collapse, and I stand by this, is that the Dutch education system is a finely tuned class reproduction machine. And it works because of globalization, and it works because of fossil fuels. And if I can explain that briefly, highly specialized, highly segregated education system works when you have a high surplus of energy, which means that people who work in finance, people who work in law, people who work as doctors do not have to produce their own food. Do not have to drive their own garbage trucks, do not have to, etc., etc. So in a high surplus society, you can afford to have a class of people who just sits in front of a computer the whole day. The challenge we're going to have with collapse is that there's going to be a sudden massive shortage of energy, either because of energy shortage or because either because we run out or the EROI becomes too high, or because we deliberately turn off the taps to not wreck the climate or because of geopolitical instability, one way or another, globalization goes into reverse. And then all these things, we export a lot of these services. So we produce high value, let's say consultancy, high value, of course, is very subjective, right? How much are people willing to pay for it? So banking services, all these, you know, headquarters of companies, tax consultancies, and all of that. We export that. And in We import a lot of them. Of course, we also export agricultural products here, but our farming system is notoriously unsustainable in the Netherlands. It's highly mechanized. As soon as the price of energy got up from the Russian invasion of Ukraine, they closed off quite a number of these greenhouses in the Netherlands because it wasn't profitable anymore. And so the real challenge we will be confronted with is— and we're not the only ones, by the way, Switzerland and other countries that are very dependent on services industry will be confronted with the same, is how do we relocalize? How do we fix our own solar panels? How do we produce our own batteries? How do we manage a farming system without cheap energy? Yeah. How do we grow tomatoes in winter if we can't have cheap Russian gas? You know, like these kinds of very basic questions. How do we manage the services that nature provides when we are choking nature with ammonia and with what we call in Holland the famous "dijkstoff crisis," which is nitrogen. We are making our own soil incapable of producing food. That's going to be a big problem in the future. And we do not have the skills and we are not educating people and we are not valorizing these very hands-on vocational skills. So at the same time, we are saying we are putting all these children from lower socioeconomic classes into these very necessary jobs. While at the same time devaluing them. Right, exactly. So the government wants to, so they say, pull up these vocational kids into higher education university. But I mean, Aldous Huxley was quite clear that the society only filled with alphas cannot feed itself. And that is the conundrum that we're going to face. So we need to revalue vocational. And this was the kristen kold from the Nordic Secret that really inspired me, the idea of Christian Kolb that Bildung is not about telling farmhands, don't farm anymore. It's about telling farmhands, here's how you can farm in such a way that uses the best of the scientific knowledge we have. And also here's philosophy, citizenship.

Right. No, absolutely. It's amazing. And another corker of a phrase that you used in the first conversation was collapse will not be very kind to the manually inept, which nails it, right? So what you're doing though, is not necessarily just a purely vocational training program, right? And, and I think that's important to draw out. So this idea of a building climate school, and I think let's come back to the building concept as well, you know, cuz I think that's a core part of it, but what is the nub of the actual program when, as you're bringing these young people from these different tracks, there's a recognition that manual and hands-on embodied work is really important. And there's a skills element to it, but what is the nub of the concept of the Climate School?

So there are a few things innovative about it. First is that we indeed put these kids from three different tracks together, which never happens before, at least not in our country. It's actually not allowed by law to do that. So the pilot we just finished is a non-degree program. So they get a certificate, but then they don't get credits for it. Because we are not in a system in which these— we can cross the boundaries between the tracks. And the idea is, of course, that the kids can learn leadership skills, green competencies, learn with their eco-anxiety to deal with the eco-anxiety by also working on projects together with other people from the other tracks, and vice versa. So the people that also only work— use their left part of their brain they learn a lot from the kids that are more hands-on. So if you let them work on projects, you have— it's like if you look at the concept of design thinking, to deal with wicked problems, you need people from different disciplines, but not only academics that are— can think with their brain, but also in different ways, but also with their hands. And I think that is— that's one of the innovative parts of it. The other is, and that's really due to the philosophy of Genius, embodied learning. So what she did really well is first starting, but you can explain it better than I can, is that first starting with things like dance, martial arts, working with your hands to build something creatively, work on arts. So then it's a way to become more aware of your emotions, because if we talk about climate crisis and we talk about these issues in an educational context, it increases in the beginning the anxiety. Because they get more aware of it. And how do you deal with that pain or that stress? And you have to give kids tools because otherwise they become more passive and, and more depressed. Yeah. And that, that idea that the thing she's doing with embodied— not only her but also with our teachers, with our dance teachers, with martial art teachers— to create that in an embodied learning context as a start is really interesting. Yeah. And really provocative. And actually really effective.

So yeah, no, I agree. And I'd love to hear about what you've learned in terms of the efficacy for sure, cuz now you've been through one supported one cohort. Could you perhaps, Ginny, could you speak a little bit more maybe to the green competencies that you've kind of woven in? And as I say, I'd love to dig into the, that embodied pieces a bit more as well, but what, as you're layering all these different things, these recognizing that young people need tools, but beyond just knowledge and skills instrumentally, there's also the emotional kind of processing, etc., that go on. But perhaps you could say just a little bit more about the green competencies.

Yeah, so alongside our pilot program, we ran an action research program because we found out actually that there was very little scientific data on the efficacy of Bildung as an educational tool in general, and absolutely nothing on its efficacy for dealing with environmental questions, right, or sustainability. It's very important, of course, if you want to make a concept durable that you do have some idea of why it works, how it works, and what exactly it does. So we used three frameworks that we got from the literature to develop quantitative and qualitative tools, and that includes the socio-ecological resilience framework that was developed in the Environmental Education Research Journal The eco-anxiety framework of Susan Clayton and the GreenComp framework, which was put together by the European Commission. However, the GreenComp framework did not come with any research tools. So it's freely downloadable on the European Commission website for anybody who's interested. And it outlines 4 broad areas of competencies that break down into further competences, but they'd never created any tools for people to research this. So we've gone now through the first step using interviews to get data on these. So we developed an interview protocol and based on the data we get from that, we will create quantitative tools that people can use to measure improvement in green competencies based on those 4 areas outlined by the European Commission. So it's quite a technical thing for people who are interested in research, but broadly speaking, the competencies that they outline are about leadership, of resilience, dealing with your emotions, thinking creatively, being able to manage problems and those kinds of things. So how we've measured that is with a baseline and endline interview with the students. Yeah.

And I think, I mean, it is technical, but I also think there's something interesting about the fact that there is a reflectiveness and a learning built into the whole concept, right? That is not just about, we know the answers, we just deliver. And then, because then you get very much back into the transmissive mode of, oh, we figured it out, we've designed a framework or a set of competencies in a curriculum, and now we just need deliver this to our young people. And given the fact that you're coming from a background, I'm— both of you, I'm sure, but Jeannie, I know more from you about critical pedagogies. And as you, with your framework of experimental pedagogy, it can't just be a reproduction of that same model of, well, we figured it out, now we transmit it to the young people. There's something else happening that is— so the, the medium becomes the message in a way. So that reflectiveness, research, kind of stance, inquiry stance, somehow feels important philosophically to the idea of, and the design of the program, not just technically to, so you can show that it was effective. I don't know. Would you agree with that?

I mean, I wrote in the book that I didn't design experimental pedagogics as a, here's what I say you should do now, or do this. It's, it's not how it works. And there are a lot of sustainability programs out there where people are just like, we have the answer. Buy our package and implement. And I had seen this happen with some educational methods in the past, but I think I was inspired by Rutger about just this constant drive to have data. I mean, basically any question that you ask Rutger will end with, where's the data?

So I was, when I read The Nordic Secret and dived into literature on micro colleges, which is some kind of building approach, but also the building programs in the Scandinavian countries, I asked for the data. So I talk with different micro colleges in the US primarily, and with Elena, with the Folk High School Association in Denmark, as where the data— and there are not many data. And the data are not only needed to show effectiveness, they're also needed to know how the program works. Because if you don't know how the program works, so what are the underlying mechanisms of change in kids, then how do you improve it? Yeah. And I think with Eco-Insight or with programs on sustainability, It's even more important because we know that if we talk about these kind of issues with kids, it also can increase their anxiety. So we had a 9-week program. My expectation is that in the first 2 or 3 weeks, the anxiety goes up because they become more aware of all the problems and they can't ignore it anymore. And then hopefully, because of our program, the tools we deliver, the competencies they acquire, it goes down. And lower than on baseline, than at the start of the program. If we would show that, then it's not showing only the effectiveness, it shows how the program works and how we can iterate on it.

Yeah, no, absolutely. And just to go back a couple of steps, just for people that aren't aware, could you say perhaps a little bit more about what you learned about the micro colleges and what they are? Because I think that will lead us slightly into a building space that, again, for people that aren't aware, because I think those micro colleges create something similar to, or you're, there is an influence from those onto what you've built in the Netherlands, right?

Yeah. So the micro colleges are primarily in the US, or there are programs which are basically gap year programs where kids follow a program between 3 months to about a year, or they are accredited programs where you actually get a, like some kind of 1-year, 2-year bachelor degree. These are schools are often in very remote areas. In the US, they're on the countryside, often farms. So they're in Alaska, they're in Deep Springs, is really in the desert of California. So they are different in different places, often remote, where small— it's place-based education. So the location where the school is is actually really important. So the history of it, the cultural aspects to it, the community and like Bildung, in most of these programs, it's partly the academic work, it's part of them is more skills-based, or like they work on the land, they do service learning, so they work in a community. And the third is in many of these programs, it's based on leadership skills. So how do you— they are— these students are partly responsible for running a program. Yeah, even up to selecting, in some cases, selecting the faculty Faculty that are teaching those other type of courses. And these three components are really important and in most of these micro colleges. So it's, I'm fascinated by it.

Yeah, no, me too. And I mean, there's resonances with democratic schooling, but there's also, there's obviously the link with the folk high schools in the Nordic countries, which obviously Lena writes about in the book and often they're residential spaces. And so I'm, I'm quite interested in what you say about the play space. And the residential aspect, because neither of those— or the residential you did not have in, in the Netherlands. And also you're working in a place which is very much a city with people coming in for the day from different backgrounds across the space. So how did you interpret that kind of idea of place-based learning, but in a, in a city with non-residential students coming in?

Important to note that this was a pilot program for us. Yes. So we were not able to test all the aspects that we planned to implement in a 6-month full-time program, which is where we're ultimately going. This was a 9-week, 4 hours per week extracurricular program. So the students had their regular university applied sciences or vocational program running alongside and then came to us afterwards between 3 and 5 o'clock on Mondays and Wednesdays. Therefore, we also will run 2 other pilots to test some other aspects of of the program before we launch into the full 6-month program. So my answer is different to you as regards to the pilot programs compared with the bigger program. However, I don't think we should discount cities as places where place-based learning can take place. For instance, one thing we did in the pilot is we invited Josué Amador, who is a soundscape artist from the the School of Performing Arts here in Rotterdam, the Codart School. And he sent the students out into the city to make notes on the sounds that they were hearing from the city. And then they came back in after walking around the city and recording in a WhatsApp group. It was very funny. Everyone was recording. So they would have to record, for instance, if a car goes by, you'd have to type into the WhatsApp group, woosh, or something like that. And then everybody came back in and developed a kind of collective soundscape composition with all the cars in there. And some of the students were very confused about why we were doing this. And some of the students found it— one of the students, it was her favorite workshop of the entire Climate School. For me, I suddenly became overwhelmed with how much space cars take up in our auditory landscape. We kind of tune them out, but this constant shh humming sound of cars is always there in the city. Right. Agree. And that kind of thing that really brings you into, this is the place where we are. And also brings these questions because a lot of the students, a lot of the questions we get from students is planetary boundaries. You know, the rainforest is burning. What on earth can I do about this? And then when you realize in this very street where we're learning, there are so many cars going by, we can barely hear the seagulls and it is right next to the Maas River. So there are a lot of seagulls there. You can't even hear the water because of the cars. Well, that is something that you could do something about. And then they found out that the, there's a little beautiful community garden just behind us where the school was. And one of the student groups did their project on the community garden. They went to interview the local people, really from all kinds of nationalities were tending to the gardens there. And now there is a question because it's on now increasingly gentrifying land to destroy the Hef Park, as it's called, and build residential units there to help with the housing crisis that we're facing. And so the students suddenly feel like, hey, that's something I can't fix climate change, but like, yeah, something to defend this community garden. So even in a 9-week pilot where we only saw them 4 hours per week, we already had a sense of how Rotterdam is important as a place of learning, as a place of empowerment, as a place where action can begin.

That's amazing. Yeah, and I mean, that was one of the things I understood firstly, how much you'd collaborated across different organizations, like the dance school, as you say, like the arts. And I think there's something important there about connecting and collaborating across institutions, which is interesting, across disciplines. But then also, as you say, what you're saying about that real felt connection with the place that you are in through these different kind of multimodal experiences is incredibly powerful, right? Because, and again, as you said in our previous conversation, it's, it's not a knowledge problem. And the knowledge, sometimes only the knowledge leaves people feeling lost and depressed because they don't know what to do. But actually the action and the agency comes when you start connecting with really local lived realities and, and thinking, how can I play a role there? So that's, yeah, that's fascinating and I think really important.

I mean, one of the things I learned from Rutger, I'd never been to an MBO before. MBO is the vocational college. It was the first university president to really make a connection with the MBOs. Correct me if I'm wrong, but like, you saw something in the collaboration with the MBOs that is really valuable for the university that I think others didn't.

I think it's partly because my own, one of my own kids after primary school went to vocational school and then finished that and went applied to university and then went to university to do a master's. So she did the whole, yeah, 4 more years, but also she's a wonderful person. So, but I saw the differences and also the how we lack appreciation for vocational schools also, especially in academia. I just wanted to say, respond to what Jeanine is saying about the how a school like us can be in a metropole, in a city context. But there's one advantage advantage if you do it in a remote area, and that's more from a psychological perspective, is that the kids are— they have to be then residential. Yeah, because you can't, like, you can't commute every day to home. That's impossible. So the fact that they are there and basically locked up, and all the peer dynamics that are going on, and they have to deal with it with that specific small group of 20, 25, 30 kids for from 3 months to 6 months or even a year. That is in a period where they are in a transitional period in their life, which is a huge transitional period, has some benefits. Absolutely. Kind of internal process going on on its own.

I mean, that's, that's where the building happens, right? You know, the pushbacks that Lena talks about and just the, you know, a lot of that emotional regulation, learning the vertical, learning the ethical, you know, just the challenges of living with people you don't necessarily like or agree with or Yeah, that's the building, I think. Yeah.

And it makes a difference if you can be full-time, like during the day in a program like ours or something, or in a city, and then in the evening you still are connecting to your friends from high school or whatever, and your family. That's different.

That's quite different. Different, but equally valuable, perhaps, just in a different way.

Be a leska on your own. It's right. Benefits. Also, scalability is of course higher. If you do it in the cities. But it's, yeah, different processes are going on.

It's also about inclusion because a certain kind of socioeconomic group is able to lock themselves up in the desert for— and this is something you saw in the micro colleges that, you know, you don't get people from the Bronx. For me, either we are inclusive and we have people from Rotterdam South and from the more excluded parts of the metropoles, or we don't do it at at all. I'm not interested in doing a replica of the University College experiment, which ended up being highly elitist institutions because they were charging twice the tuition fees of the normal Dutch universities. And they were excellent quality programs, you know, fully English and very small-scale learning, excellent learning opportunity. But under those circumstances, even if you provide like grants, say, for people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, the echos that I got from working-class students or first-generation students who came to the university colleges was that they felt out of place. Yeah, right. Everybody else comes from families where a lot of them have like cooks or maids or drivers, especially, you know, if they come from certain parts of the world where that's more the norm. That is not at all what we want to replicate. And we noticed this in the, in the climate school program we ran this time, that after a week and a half, some of the vocational students came to me and said, "I feel out of place here. I feel dumb." Because the university students were already imposing their cultural capital on everyone else in the group, so I had to do a full reset. And I sat down with all the students, 25 of us sitting in a circle, and I said, "Okay, I want you guys, if you're okay with that, to say out loud what you just told me." And some of the more, let's say, vocal vocational students said, "Yeah, we feel like we're too dumb to be here." And I said, why do you feel that? I said, because the university students are talking theory at us because they're sharing about how they've lived in the US and how they've like, uh, traveled all over the world. And we haven't done that. And the university students had this moment of reckoning with themselves with like, oh, I'm part of the problem. And you can do that because we actually had the largest group was from the vocational. We had 10 students from vocational, 7 from the university and 4 from the applied sciences. So accessibility is a real challenge that also the folk high schools face.

No, 100%. I mean, and the progressive kind of elite bubbles and it's all very well, these important ideas work there, but that's not really where it gets interesting. Where it gets interesting is how do you make these things really work in the real world? But I love what you're saying about— I mean, that just feels like that is exactly the moment of part of the work of building imperfect solidarity, right? And comes from having to have those tough conversations and develop a bit of that sense of, yeah, critical reflexivity on your own positionality. What are you bringing in? What are you imposing? What are you not seeing? It's so important and so interesting. And so I'm really curious, how did it— I know it's only 9 weeks, but what did you kind of learn and how did the group change and learn from each other across the 9 weeks by the end?

So that's interesting because I was there for the whole program and Rotor dropped in at various points in the program. So I have more kind of like insider and you've been able to see them like different time points. So from my perspective, I felt that there was really a shift in the social dynamic, particularly when the vocational students invited us to their gala that they were organizing at the school. And that was like a social occasion where students from the university and the applied science Went to Rotterdam South to the playground, let's say, of the vocational students where the vocational students could shine and show like, this is what we do. We organize galas because we're event management students. Amazing. And from there on, I saw a big shift in how they worked together. They laughed together. And in all the different workshops, there were opportunities to change the pairings and the groupings. Right. So I, I thought by the end it was harder to tell who was from which institution. I don't know how you experienced it.

Absolutely. So it became more group and with more appreciation of the differences and the backgrounds of everybody. On the other hand, I mean, the— so I have some qualitative impressions of how these students developed over time. Whether that's actually— we will find that in the data, right? I have no idea. I mean, I have a lot of experience with running interventions on depression and anxiety. And often you have the feeling, oh, this is really going to work, this is really effective. And then you analyze the data and you think, oh my goodness, this is a completely different picture. So we have to be a little bit cautious.

And in the fall, we know. Yeah, I suppose it's easy to get wrapped up in the romanticism, as you know, the Hollywood narrative that everybody happily ever after, right? But yeah, you've got to ask some tough questions and look at the data. And really, yeah.

And second, also to think about a more longer-term effect. So this is only 9 weeks. I don't expect make so much from 9 weeks. It will make a difference, but the longer-term effect, you need a more intensive program.

Absolutely. Yeah. And I just wanted to ask about the, the embodied aspect because I just wondered, you, you mentioned briefly about Ginny, how about how some of the young people dealt with the soundscape work. But I just, I'll share the program that you shared online because I think it's really useful for listeners to see some of the tangible, you know, the week-by-week schedule and some of the real, the content that The art and self-expression in nature, dance workshops, self-narratives in times of ecological crisis, like loads of really fascinating stuff. But I just wondered, what did you learn about how they responded to that less kind of instrumental knowledge-based, skill-based stuff of like, why are we doing this dance stuff? You know, how did—

Yeah, there was definitely a lot of, uh, crossing outside the comfort zone. I bet. There was definitely some differences, some gender differences in terms of comfortable with moving with their body and who wasn't. But there was also, it's so uncommon, to be honest, in all the levels of education to use your body in any kind of way that we had the martial arts workshop. We had the dancing workshop. The reflection workshops are also run by a young lady who combines combines boxing with therapy. So it was a lot based on moving. And for instance, we had this exercise in the last reflection session where we asked them to embody the climate leader they want to be in 15 years. And they had to walk around as if they were already that person, literally have the body language and movement of that leadership. And those are very powerful ways to manifest your potential for action. And for some students, this clicked kind of after the fact. We had a couple of students who said, oh, I started getting— because in the experimental pedagogics framework, we end on the really tough stuff, you know, where we did the implosion workshop where they had to deconstruct a Shein or whatever you call it, these fast fashion brands, these horrendous fast fashion Chinese brands. They had to deconstruct some items of clothing and just realize that everything is child labor, everything is fossil fuel. And everything is massively unsustainable. And then they realized, oh, but I know how to calm myself down because we had a breathing session in the martial arts. I know now that with the movement, just being present, being in the moment helps me to, to deal with that. I think ideally when we have the 6-month program, the embodied stuff would be throughout the program so that they'd get movement, breathing, being in your body. This is something that is increasingly recognized in sort of the more the trauma literature. They often cite Gabor Maté or Bessel van der Kolk about how the body holds onto stress and especially stress that you can't evacuate. Like you're not going to solve the climate crisis, right? We're heading at least towards 2 degrees of warming and there will be consequences. And you can see it. You just turn your TV on and you see it. You just look outside. You see it and that creates chronic stress. And one of the students said something very powerful. She's like, "Oh, I don't feel like I have a right to dance because there's people dying of heat waves in Pakistan." And I said, "But if we lose that right to dance, and this is really a core of the Biodanza philosophy, then we lose our humanity. Then what exactly are we trying to save?" And I'm very inspired here by my work in Zimbabwe where, you know, they dance at funerals because that's just the sign that life goes on. Yeah, and through tragedy, through hardship, through the most difficult of times, if the music stops, if the dancing stops, then we've already lost. Then there's nothing to fight for. The power of reconciling students that there's beauty in human life that's worth saving. Absolutely. That's the Bildung ethos. That's why Bildung is so fundamentally opposed to the capitalist logic of accumulation, because it's about beauty. It's about the fundamental things like what is the meaning of a human life? Not in money terms.

Yeah. To add to this, one of the more powerful exercises in the dance workshop I attended— that I also dance, by the way.

Good, man. Yeah, love it.

What they did is very smart, is they showed first a 6-minute clip of a program on the heatwave, the effects of the heatwaves in India. And that's a very powerful emotional clip, like 5-6 minutes. So it increases negative emotions within those things. You feel the stress, you feel the— you already think about when you feel it, when you see it and you feel it, you feel the long-term effects of this. What will happen? How many people will die? You feel it. And then how you regulate those emotions, because you have to regulate it, otherwise you can't take action and it will lead to inertia and depression. And the dancing exercise really made it like possible to to integrate those emotions and deal with them relatively effectively. The nice thing is you first have to increase the negative emotions, otherwise you can't do an exercise like this. So you increase emotions by showing the video, and then you teach people how to regulate it.

I have to mention what it is because Susan Tunca, the dancer, dance teacher from Codarts, again the School of Performing Arts, she uses an exercise called double skin, double mind. Which is from the ICK in Amsterdam, from Emilia Greco and Peter Scholten, which are dance choreography teachers. So as with a lot of the things in the Build on Climate School, we didn't reinvent the wheel on all the pedagogies, right? Brought in a lot of experts in their own fields who had pedagogies developed for specific purposes. But one thing that I added is at the end of each one of these classes, I provided between 15 and 30 minutes of integration. So then I facilitated, you know, students standing in a circle and discussing how this affected their ability to cope with anxiety. So it was a bit like what Carl Rogers describes in his group encounters, a way to process what had been learned, because if you just give the workshops, it might not land with students why exactly we're doing this. And the why is the way our brain makes sense of this.

Yeah, no, absolutely. And to your point, the integration over time as well, not just in that moment immediately after the workshop, but what happens then when they go back into their lives and, you know, the next 3, 6 months. Yeah, fascinating and unknown but important.

So at one point, I think it's very— so it's very delicate. So, um, so these are very tough topics we discuss, and I think for most of these schools, I, I think mostly they are not aware of what kind of negative emotions it can lead to in, in students. So you have to be very careful, right? Careful doing this, and even maybe even providing some mental support afterwards.

Exactly. I mean, it's like an ethical and a safeguarding responsibility around it, right? Because, I mean, of course we're all holding these big topics, but if we're intentionally focusing in on them in some kind of facilitated environment, yeah, it can definitely raise a whole load of challenges for young people. Yeah, fascinating.

The informal learning moments where students came to see me after class and needed 15 'Just to talk things through with me.' Those are very important as well. And that's doable on a small scale. It will raise the question of having very trained staff working in these programs that is able to respond to these kinds of anxieties, because it's not like you can reframe, you know, say, 'Oh, don't catastrophize about climate change,' because it is catastrophic. People are going to die. And so we need to really think about how we train staff to deal with more existential questions where there is no way to make it nice. So how do we have these very difficult conversations in which accepting that some things are just not going to be nice, but human life and all the beautiful things and the meaning and everything that goes with that, it must go on.

Yeah, no, definitely. And so then just, just to kind of finish off, there's the, the kind of immediate next steps of a 6-month program building out, as I understand it, you know, a bit more deeply some of these things. But then there's also a bigger future piece of what— where would you like this to go? And also associated with that, how can people listening engage or learn more, or then maybe support over the long term if there's an intention to go into multiple places with this and get people to start their own? Or yeah, so what's next and how can people help?

Yeah, so I see it as a kind of startup. So the— and startup means that you have some ideas from the outset and then you start to iterate. So based on the first pilot, we also— we, we plan to do two more pilots because we need to have some kind of components to the program. We didn't solve it yet. We want to first see how that works and then refine it and optimize it and then start with a 6-month program. Yeah, the idea is we will have a 4-year project where we do 2 pilots in 2 cohorts of 6 months, and we do a lot of research next to that. And to be honest, how, how, where it exactly will lead in terms of whether it will be accredited, non-accredited, we don't know yet. And that's the honest answer.

And good, that's a great answer.

Yeah, I think it's good that we don't know it.

I do too. Exactly. Yeah, because you have to learn. You have to be open to learn. Well, again, it's the same kind of thing, right? The medium is the message. It's like if we keep presenting this idea that we— it's possible to have it all figured out from day one and just you need to learn X, Y, Z, like that's the thing that's got us— or that's one of the things that's got us into the mess that we're in, right? So, you know, it's interesting to, yeah, be learning, iterating, and reflecting as you grow. I know there are many, many passionate people out there who listen to this podcast who would be really interested to engage somehow. Is that— I mean, is there anything that people can learn more from or somewhere they can go to look or, yeah, how could they?

We're definitely publishing, so we were discussing that our first publications will come out somewhere around the end of this year. There will definitely be a follow-up book to the Pedagogies of Collapse that is more focused on the practice and what we learned at the end of a 2-year period of actually taking action and running these programs. I'm always interested to talk to people who have ideas about what kind of pedagogies, what what kind of ideas we could include in such a program. We of course want to hear from the community here around the Randstad in the Netherlands if there are businesses who think, wow, we want these students to work with us because the kind of work experience project part is very important. If there are some people who think, wow, I would love to have project groups of students from the vocational, applied, and university like working together on a kind of problem that I have within my business, then of course we want to hear from these people. It makes a big difference when you have people who come into this and who want to work on this because they are passionate about it. Of course, yeah. All the teachers we had, the project supervisors we had, everyone who was involved in this pilot loved to be there. We had teachers who came in when they weren't scheduled just because they wanted to see the workshops. Amazing. And that makes the whole difference. So the call goes out to people who really care about creating a sustainable future for education, for the area that we're in. I mean, right now we're starting in Rotterdam because it's the place where we have our networks and where we know, you know, this is what we know, our community. But ultimately the goal is to have this in the whole of the Netherlands. And definitely I can see this being, you know, very interesting in the UK with the trade colleges and I could see that this could be interesting in France with the BTS, IUT, and universities. I could see that this could be interesting, you know, between community colleges and trade colleges in the US. So really, if the concept works, we have to make the ideas as accessible as possible so other people can— our idea is not to like trademark a thing and then like hang on to it and go like, no, nobody else can do this. The planet is on fire. It's how can we make as much impact as possible. Amazing.

Absolutely. And also just wondering about what does it look like when it's in a, you know, higher education sector or, you know, vocational training sector in the Global South, you know, what is it where people are perhaps coming up against much more urgent realities of the climate impacts in their own lives? So yeah. Yeah.

And we love to learn from others internationally that run similar programs. Are their experiences there, all the faults they make, all the lessons learned. And so I think that's, that's certainly if people want to reach out to us through email, that's wonderful.

Perfect. Yeah, I'll definitely share information and contact in the show notes. So yeah, thank you, Rico. Thank you, Jeannie. Amazing. Beautiful. Thank you, Tim Logan.

Until next time.

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