Purpose in Education - A Conversation with Dr Kevin House

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

If you come at it from that perspective and think, well, if I was to say a big part of my purpose is to create an environment and a life that functions as a work of art. So in a sense, everything I try to do, I try to do it in a way that's creative, in a way that communicates to others, and in a way that is the best I feel I can do.

Hi everybody. Thanks for joining me again and happy New Year as we start the first episode of 2022. My name is Tim Logan and this is the Future Learning Design Podcast brought to you in partnership with Intrepid Ed News. This week's episode was a fantastic and deep conversation I had with Dr. Kevin House, who is the Education Futures Architect at Education in Motion, which is a growing family of premier education brands, including Dulwich College International, and the Green School. As part of this work, Kevin is leading the development of a new and innovative high school concept called SE21, which you can find out more about in our conversation and in the show notes. Kevin is also Associate Professor in Practice in the Education Faculty at Durham University. Prior to this, Kevin led quality assurance processes for the IB as the Head of IB World Schools, and previously he was Head of High School at the German European School of Singapore Director of Curriculum at Suzhou Singapore International School and Head of English at the International School of Valencia. You can connect with Kevin on his email or on LinkedIn, both of which are in the show notes.

Thank you for joining me. It's absolutely brilliant to have you on the podcast, Kevin. I know we've been talking a lot about the podcast over the last couple of years, you as a listener and, you know, discussing different—

an avid fan. And so finally I managed to get you on, which is Brilliant.

But you're doing some really fascinating work, which I'd love to talk to you about. So firstly, I was listening to a keynote you gave very recently, and I was very intrigued by this idea of output and capital seem to be two core concepts that you're playing with at the moment, just related to the purpose of education. So maybe we could start there and I'm sure it will, will disappear off into the ether of abstract purpose discussions around education. Apologies in advance to all the listeners, but we're gonna have some fun.

So yeah, starting with the premise of what's the purpose of education, I think for me particularly, somebody who's been in education over the last 30 years, and I don't know, you just get older and you go, what's the point? What am I doing? And it got me thinking more seriously about, well, education and purpose. I know an academic I used to work with, Andy Stables, did a lot of work around the moral purposes around education, and I've always been a fan of what Gert Biester writes around the different functions within education. And it got me thinking around, well, where is it at the moment? And in that keynote I referenced really many of the aspects institutionally of education and what we've built over the last, particularly last 30 years, I think are specifically aligned with the kind of what I call that neoliberal narrative, which we'll talk a bit more about in a moment. But that got me to the point around output and capital. And so for output, really what I kind of mean is what we've got in the post-20th century model is a kind of narrow set of academic outcomes that are very aligned to the 20th century industrial model around compulsory education and the purpose of education there. And I suppose that got me thinking, well, if the outputs in the 20th century, if you like, in the way in which we do business and build industries, we're realizing that's not sustainable, then arguably some of those linear models of output in education possibly are also not sustainable. Sustainable and not meeting our needs, particularly when you think about things like OECD, UNESCO, WEF, and those kind of think tanks and policymakers that are suggesting that the future world of work, the educational models that we have, is not really giving students the skills. So that's kind of the output bit. The capital piece for me really goes back to a phrase that Stephen Brownhill used around 2010 around credential capital. And the notion of accumulation of credentials and the networks and the institutional recognition that goes with that capital have become more and more of a core driver in education with things like league tables, which are, which are a kind of analogy for things like, you know, the FTSE index and other kinds of financial metrics. And I think those models have created a kind of specific learning narrative, and fundamentally it's an inflationary model, right? And we're seeing that in the pandemic. If you take some of the curricula that's out there now, I know You and I both know the IB well, and it's not a criticism of the IB, it's more a practical reality. I know when I started teaching IB in the late '90s, you could access a well-regarded university in the UK to study medicine on 36. Now you won't get a look in for less than 42. That's an inflationary paradigm. And I think really that accumulation of credential capital has led to that inflationary mindset. And, and really what we're seeing is that's creating more and more pressure for the student. And I think that also means that in some shape or form, education itself has become disconnected with some of the complex problems that we face in the 21st century. So I guess for me, that's really where I'm coming from when I talk about output and talk about capital.

Yeah, no, interesting. And is it— because I've obviously spoken with people like Andy Hargreaves talking about different forms of capital, social capital, human— you know, this idea of capital is quite prevalent in the way that we I suppose we use it as a metaphor to examine other aspects of life. Do you think that's come from a kind of an instrumentalist idea about the purpose of education and what we try to kind of box it up into these forms of capital that then provide the, the future purpose? And, you know, there's a lot of focus on what education can do to either serve the economy, serve society. That narrative is still very, very strong, right?

Yeah, I mean, for me, that kind of instrumentalization feeds into an even deeper issue around— I think fundamentally power is the fuel of human societies, and we build our institutions and knowledge systems to maintain specific iterations of power in certain particular eras of human development.

Yeah, this is going back to your research on Foucault, right?

Yeah, I'm a bit of a dyed-in-the-wool Foucauldian, and I guess I'm just getting too old to change. And I think what that's done for education is that it's become a core aspect of a specific type of dynamic in both creating the institution, but also creating knowledge systems and that instrumentalist knowledge system, that kind of linear notion that we're within the moment where we block discrete or specific periods of people's lives, where you accumulate knowledge, move on to a next step, maybe come back to another linear engagement where you block up some knowledge. So, you know, compulsory schooling, university, you might pop back into university or develop professional capital at different times.

Yeah.

And I think a lot of that goes back to really the models that evolved and the systems that evolved out of the Enlightenment, for me at least in the West. And I think, you know, in a sense it's that Cartesian notion of kind of the objectification of the self and the inside and the outside. And I suppose in terms of instrumentalization, it's that process model where I engage with knowledge and I accumulate things. So it's very much that Cartesian— there's something essential about me and I accumulate additional bits to me. And I, I've had real problems with that. And I think specifically these days with things like, you know, like Judith Butler and others who talk about the notion of the performative around one's identity in the self. And I think in things like digitization and social media young people, I see it in my own kids, they inhabit different personas on different platforms, engaging with different people for different purposes. And so I just think that kind of binary idea of some core idealized self and some externality, it doesn't work for me.

Yeah, that's interesting. But I don't know whether there's a danger of a loss of a core identity, I suppose, if it's kind of skirting too much back and forth to different— performing different identities, inhabiting different identities. Quite postmodern and quite rootless, I would say, in some ways, right?

For me, I think, I think the classic argument is that it's kind of relativism on steroids and the self can get lost in that.

Yeah.

So of course, I think for me, a core purpose for education is to prioritize, in 21st century at least, to prioritize critical curiosity. I think of it as— so in other words, you're giving the tools to critically be curious and to evaluate where that curiosity takes you without necessarily losing some core sense of what you are. And that's why in that keynote you referenced, I was talking about purpose. So in a sense, the purpose of education being to help us define what our purpose is. And I don't necessarily mean— I borrowed that from Siân Moran, and she talks about life purpose learning. And I don't think really it's that grandiose notion of a great purpose like some of the, you know, marvelous historical figures. But it's more about how do I see purpose in what I do and where I take myself.

Yeah.

And I think that in a sense can be something that you anchor your values and so forth around, because again, I have a bit of a problem of where values-based education's gone. Again, not because in and of itself a kind of Aristotelian model like that's bad, it's just within the context of the current paradigm that I talk about with output and capital, values have become another form of output and capital in the classic example and I've always been critical of it, is the learner profile where in many models, you know, it almost becomes a, how do we define a measure in a school community and be able to tick off that someone's shown a particular attribute? You know, that's what, that will be interesting to see that research the IB is doing around, I think it's creativity, curiosity, to see where they're going to go with that in terms of how do you evidence that?

Yeah. It's a short walk, isn't it, from an individual, you know, a school, a system, defining the things that it thinks is important in terms of its values to actually starting to say, well, these are the outcomes we want and we're going to measure them because we've got to demonstrate that we're effective. You know, there's, there's a noble ambition in that, but yeah, no, where you end up, you end up back in an output and capital. It's just a different kind of capital, right? That credential capital you talk about, we credential the things that we are valuing, whether it's knowledge and skills, or maybe it's more dispositional outcomes, traits, values, we're still going to end up credentialing them, and therefore we still end up stuck in this model of output and capital.

That's the— I mean, that's the danger. I mean, it's what Foucault would call an episteme, or Kuhn would call it a paradigm, where in other words, your way of understanding a certain form of reality or creating a reality actually influences what you see and how you see it. And I think that's the danger. What has happened in certain contexts with values-based education is that it's become a lens, or a mirror rather, that actually reflects the way we go about evaluating accumulation of knowledge. You know, Biesta talks about that idea of we're in an epoch now where we've come to value what, what we know we can measure. And I think that's the danger with what some call soft skills or 21st century skills, is we might end up doing the same thing. And of course, for young people, particularly at a very important part of their life where they're still growing, figuring stuff out, we could end up creating regimes of kind of micro-assessment, which would be even more awfully stressful than, than what we've created now with this inflationary sort of knowledge environment.

An interesting perspective on it, actually, because you— yes, there's a reaction against these high-stakes moments of standardized testing, but actually, as you say, you could end up with an alternative landscape of a load of micro-assessments which all, you know, accumulated together still feel like you're constantly under surveillance to improve. And it— you are then judged on that later on down the road because obviously you, you take this digital portfolio with you to university and they're going to see, you know, well, have you developed in your empathy or in your critical thinking or X, whatever it is. And there's still a hierarchy of those who have developed more than others, grown more than others, achieved higher than others. So it's, as you say, framed by this particular paradigm. It almost doesn't matter what the nuggets of value are.

Yeah.

There are always gonna be some, and then that you'll end up with a hierarchy and a competition around those scarce commodities.

Yeah, and, and again, it's not— with so many things in education, it very quickly becomes a polarized conversation between conservatives and progressives, and yeah, one's good, one's bad. And that's why I really enjoy talking with people like— I had a recent conversation with Rob Coe because I think Rob's really interesting because he's quite— in many respects, he's perhaps portrayed as, you know, being very empirically driven, and I think he is in terms of understanding assessment measurement But I think it's important in these sorts of conversations to have voices like his own, because what one of the things Rob said to me is when we were talking about dynamic or durable skills, he was like, well, of course the danger there, it's not to say you want to stick a number on it, but the danger there is if you don't have quite forensic conversations about, well, what do you mean by creativity in a specific context?

Absolutely.

Then really it doesn't have much meaning in terms of creating validity for any kind of evidencing that you might want to provide. And I think that's important. And then another conversation I had earlier this week with Bill Cope. So Bill Cope and Mary Kizlanzis do some really cool work out of University of Illinois, and they, they developed an approach— but going back to this polarized arguments that we often get into in education, particularly around pedagogy— they talk about what they call reflexive pedagogy. And that really is a combination of mimetic, didactic, constructivist and connectivist pedagogies. And basically they're saying that's a toolkit.

That's some big words there.

Yeah. And they're saying basically it's not that any are good and any are bad. It's about based on the context of what you're trying to do with the learning community you're working with, you would leverage different forms of pedagogy to do different things.

I think that's, that is something that really deserves exploring more. Cause I think it sometimes gets framed as this just adaptability or agility or whatever word you want to use. We need to prepare students to be able to adapt and respond as things change. That often feels a bit empty because what are they adapting to? It could be really positive. It could be incredibly negative, but there is an important insight about understanding context and then using the right methodology or right approach in a particular context, right?

Yeah, no, I think, you know, to use the VUCA idea, to just be flexible I don't think is really enough. It's, for me, the key is how do I find purpose in that? If VUCA is a reality, and if we can agree that perhaps aspects of what it tries to encapsulate is a reality for the future, how do I create purpose without being overwhelmed? Being flexible or agile and nimble, you know, these are all good attributes in and of themselves, but they're not they're not necessarily going to give me a sense of what's my part to play in all of this. And I think that's where perhaps making that relationship falls a bit short for me.

No, they're necessary, but not sufficient because there's not, there's no driving force, is there? There's no, there's no direction or purpose, as you said, to take you anywhere. You're just constantly responding to external stimuli, which leaves you dizzy and lost.

I'm pretty tired, I think.

Right.

Well, we've covered all sorts of things already, but one of the things I'd I'd love to just briefly pick up on, and I, I do sometimes think this is an issue and you've kind of referenced it a little bit already, but sometimes I think people calling for alternative approaches in education get a bit stifled because underlying it there is a political change or, or even deeper than that, a societal change that they're also looking for. And, and that idea about an instrumental education system, which from what it sounds like you're saying, you are pushing back against. But then is there an instrumentality to that idea? So one of the things you said, for example, in that recent keynote was that the education's role was to balance the inequities and moral excesses of neoliberal capitalism. And whether I agree with you or not, there is an instrumentality to that in terms of using education to right the excesses or wrongs of an economic model, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Do you see it? Just, I don't know, is there a tension there for you?

Yeah, so if I step back a bit and maybe define what I meant by that, I suppose neoliberal inequity for me is the tightening around the pools of the haves and the have-nots. Yeah, you know, the pool of have-nots is expanding at quite an alarming rate, and it's largely around access, whether it's, you know, financial access, bandwidth access, educational access. I guess in terms of neoliberal moral excesses, I suppose that relates to the notion of that 20th century industrial production model being unsustainable. And continuing to create business models that are unsustainable and lifestyles that are unsustainable. So if I go back to the idea of the purpose of education being prioritizing the development of critically curious individuals, I guess if I'm being instrumentalist, this, it's in the suggestion that if you do that well, they would then question many of those aspects of the status quo as it is at the moment. And I think, you know, politically we've seen evidence of that in terms of discussions around various forms of inequity. In the last year or two. So I suppose in a strict sense, education has to have an instrumentalist output in terms of trying to define what the next generation and its society needs to look like. However, my attack on instrumentalism was more about the way in which learning is done and the way in which it's prioritized. So I'm not really— I haven't got a problem with it being an instrument, to bring about greater equity, access, and those elements of developing a more sophisticated understanding of what society and the power relationships in society should and could look like if we're going to be a sustainable species on the planet, fundamentally.

Yeah, no, interesting. There are, I mean, there are some obviously some strong moral arguments which are, you know, smacking us in the face as we speak in terms of climate emergency or the way that we're interacting with our environment, which creates pandemics, et cetera, and the inequity. And just, you can see that one of, I think one of the things I am interested in and struggle with sometimes is as somebody who is very much, you know, supporting and campaigning for a shift in education, I sometimes wonder whether there is a political kind of mapping of those debates. And yes, it's not either or, but often there is a more, a left-leaning propensity within the progressive parts of education? For example, make it really, make it really concrete. Have you ever met a highly conservative progressive educator? Like, and I know these are categories which you could debate forever, but, but can you think of somebody who is very much on the right politically, but very progressive educationally?

Yeah. It's an interesting question. I suppose what I would say is I've met evangelists in both camps.

Yeah.

And I, I'm always suspicious of evangelism because there's— I think what happens is you see that pragmatism disappears, open-mindedness disappears. So obviously having spent the best part of 30 years in, in the IB world in, in really its big growth period, I think there were many I would put in that evangelist camp. So in a sense, though they would be seen as progressive educators, I would say their mindset was quite conservative in that there was an unwillingness to look at— going back to that reflexive pedagogy, for example. Yeah, you know, when I was doing school reviews and evaluations for the IB, you know, you, you would meet educators are quite vociferous, quite strong-minded about it's got to be PBL and any of the mimetic or didactic strategies that you, you may have been taught as a teacher in teacher training. You had to jettison those. And of course, the reality is, I think, as an experienced educator— and again, I, I think many of those were often educators in, in the earlier parts of their career where there's an enthusiasm and perhaps an idealism that maybe gets knocked off as you get older, I don't know. So I suppose that's the answer really. It's that you can have a conservative mindset, but still be an educational progressivist.

Yeah.

Because that's, that's a political narrative. Yeah. Whereas the notion of how much you hold onto that political perspective and how, uh, how little flexibility you have is a, in a sense, a conservative value set.

Yeah.

So I suppose that's how I see it playing.

No, it's interesting. And you know, I'm quite happy to admit that maybe it's a completely unhelpful question because, you know, you're using all sorts of categorizations that maybe don't exist. But I think that's a really interesting perspective on it that I've not thought about was, yeah, I mean, it's a different use of the word conservative, I suppose, but just that idea of remaining open to alternative perspectives, which as we know is a fundamental tenet of the IB anyway, right? That the idea that other people's perspectives might also be right, that does get lost in a lot of the debate. I think that's what I'm getting at is that there's, it's not just an educational debate. There is an underlying ideological and philosophical and, you know, right down to ontological debate about what it means to be human. What do we value about being human? How should we treat each other on the planet? All of those things underlie actually how should we educate our children? And so it becomes a very fascinating conversation to have, but it becomes a very difficult one to have if people are not able to as you say, inhabit somebody else's perspective or, or be open to different approaches that might be relevant or necessary at a particular time or a situation.

Yeah, I mean, a couple years ago I did some workshops with Peter Senge with the compassionate systems stuff, and what I thought was really interesting there was the way in which he described why they'd moved beyond empathy to compassion. Because of course empathy is like One approach to it might be that, you know, like Atticus Finch, I'm trying to get into your shoes and walk around in them, but I don't necessarily have to— I can still get back in my own shoes and I don't really have to care about them. Whereas I think Sengai's move to compassion was, I not only have to see and understand in perspective, but I also have to have a sense of feeling about that, in that that's quite precious to you. And I think to your point around debate, debate's absolutely crucial in education. It has to stay there. But I think we could all do with a much bigger dose of compassion about what we bring to the table when we have those debates. Yeah, I suppose really it's very easy to get sucked into becoming part of an ideological political narrative, which really is, again, for me, it's not— yes, it's been prioritized as one of the purposes of education, perhaps to create— I think Foucault talks about defining, classifying, controlling, regulation. In terms of the citizenry and formation itself, and there's a lot of politics in that, and I don't deny that's there, but I don't know that that necessarily has to be the priorities. They're always going to be there, but it doesn't mean they have to be the priorities, and I think maybe we've fallen foul, 20th century and beyond, of just overemphasizing those aspects of an educational journey.

Interesting. Just as a slight aside, you mentioning Peter Senge is really interesting because I hear Dave Snowden referencing Senge a lot as a kind of what, what you shouldn't do in his view about the dealing with complexity. Cuz I think one of, one of the things that happens a lot, and Senge and the learning organization and all of those things is they map out the end state of where they're trying to get to.. So we define what the end state is of this utopian society. And then we come back to where we are now and we try and change the people now in order to realize that end state. And you listen to Dave Snowden talk about it's questionable morally perhaps, but also it doesn't work. And people figure out how to play that game. Whereas actually maybe there's a more interesting approach from the math or complexity stuff to look at where you are now, look at the direction you want to go in, and maybe that comes back to your idea of purpose. What's the direction we want to travel? And then what are the interactions that we can facilitate between the people we're working with now that can take us in that direction? And get away from this idea of let's visualize and let's wordsmith this perfect vision of this final end state and utopia that we're all trying to get to, because it doesn't work anyway, but it, sometimes dictates some narrow approaches to how we are going to operate.

Yeah, I think the workshop with Peter was really interesting. It didn't give me all the answers. And back to that notion of critical curiosity, I think there's a premise that sits behind that is that there is no definitive answer. Same with Snowden's work. It's going to give you some tropes and some models and ways of thinking through some complex stuff. And this goes back to what I was saying earlier about evangelism. You know, we want to believe in something and go, oh God, I can relax now, that is the answer. And of course, none of it is, you know.

Absolutely.

It's another piece. And the same when I read, uh, Dave Snowden's work. I was like, wow, this is some mind-blowing stuff, some of which I'm going, I'm really gonna have to engage with it again because it's really dense. But at the end of the day, I always kind of go into that enthusiastically because I am just naturally inquisitive and curious. But I also am not looking for some kind of answer to everything.

No, it's good. It's good to remember, isn't it? Because we are, you know, we have comfort in certainty. Yes, the U of VUCA, and we're trying to combat that, but actually we somehow need to embrace that uncertainty. But there are some interesting, you know, life rafts we can hold on to in that uncertainty, right? That give us some stability.

Yeah, that's why I talk about in that keynote you referenced about aesthetic.

Yeah, I wanted to get onto that because you, yeah, you said true human flourishing needs a more open-ended and aesthetic education as its core purpose. So yeah, that word aesthetic I was interested in.

Yeah, I mean, open-ended, I guess, pretty simply put, is just that it's a continuation. It's never closed, it doesn't finish. But the aesthetic piece, again, it's me, Foucauldian roots coming out. His late work that he didn't really finish because he passed away was going back to of pre-Christian Greek philosophy and doing a kind of interpretation. And he talks about what he calls care of the self, and that really for him a real purpose of life and living was to make oneself a work of art. Now, of course, that's— you living in France would know that's a very French way of coming at it.

Maybe, yeah.

That's empirical Anglos going, oh, I don't know about that, sounds a little bit too airy-fairy. But I mean, fundamentally it's like And if you come at it from that perspective and think, well, yeah, if, if I was to say a big part of my purpose for myself is to create an environment and a life that functions as a work of art, so in a sense everything I try to do, I try to do it in a way that's creative, in a way that communicates to others, and in a way that is for me the best I feel I can do. I think those are some pretty deep and fundamental ways to approach what you do. And I— don't get me wrong, I, I didn't get to that point, and I'm still not at that point. But I would say probably now I've got more of an awareness of what's that aesthetic approach. So, you know, think about classic work-life balance, for example. I definitely grew up as an industrial kid, working-class kid, and for me, work was about earning money. And that was pretty much it. And I did jobs that did that, and then later in life engaged with learning and found that I really enjoyed learning stuff and being curious. And so then beyond that, work life became more about, well, what new stuff can I learn to try and improve the artwork, which is my living? And, and I suppose, and obviously there's going to be people who go, ah, don't buy into that at all, makes me feel uncomfortable, I think it's daft. But for me not being someone who would adhere to a religion specifically, I think having an aesthetic sensibility around what you are and what you do for yourself and for others, what Sienna Moran calls pro-social, I think is really important. So I guess that's kind of where I was going with that.

Yeah, no, it's an interesting point. It's a kind of a qualitative dimension to life. There's a care and a focus that you just want to do things well. You want a life well lived, but not just well as in luxurious and pleasure beautiful, but actually well in the sense of there's a deeper quality to it. And interesting that you mentioned pro-social, because I suppose what I find beautiful and qualitatively good might be different to somebody else. But actually, we also need to integrate a more pro-social aspect into that definition of aesthetic. Otherwise, we just get back into this atomized, individualistic, well, I'm living my beautiful life.

Sure.

You lot.

Right, yeah, it has to be a connected mistake. And again, you know, the problem with words like beauty is that automatically becomes a binary term in that something's not beautiful implies that. Whereas I guess, I don't know, maybe I'm naive and wrong in this, but I, I see aesthetic more as a continuation or a process.

Yeah.

And so for me, it's more of a sensibility, I suppose.

Yeah, no, very nice. I mean, and the other thing I was thinking was we don't know, but the way that things seem to be moving, that there will be more of a need to find meaning and purpose outside of work, just to earn money.

Yeah.

Because in a world of AI, machine learning, et cetera, all these things that we know, there's a kind of an existentialist question. If we're not spending our entire time working, where do we find our meaning and purpose in life? If we're all on universal basic income and you're spending your days in reflection and wondering, like, where are you finding that meaning and purpose? And so that shift towards a less instrumental and a more aesthetic sensibility maybe is a preemptive thing to prepare us for that.

Yeah, it's a great call out because it's something that I think about a lot. When I look at my own family. So, you know, I'm a bit like Andy Harper, he's first generation working class kid, went off to university, albeit much, much later in life. I left school with no qualifications, went to university about 26, back in the old poly days in the UK, where there was a society that gave me access. Because of course, if my time then was now, I wouldn't be able to afford it, yeah, or I probably wouldn't want the debt that comes with it, so that door wouldn't be open for me. So I'm hugely appreciative of that, but that sent me on a journey which meant that I became divergent from the rest of my family, and their lives took very different trajectories. And so to your point, yeah, I'm really mindful of the fact that, um, yeah, I can do all of this hypothesizing about having an aesthetic self because of course I'm financially reasonably comfortable, and some of my family are not. And I can be altruistic and help them where I can, but I can't give them an aesthetic sensibility in their lives. And I suppose for me, what's the answer there? I guess it brings me back to private education. Ironically, I think private education has a role to play in society in that it's more agile, it has an ability to innovate, and it should be doing that so that lessons can be learned about what learning could become. Not to try and give people access in that system of collection of credential and networking social capital, which, you know, England's a classic example. When you look at the political arena, for example, how many of them went to the same school, the same universities? It's not that I'm talking about. It's, could some of the more innovative spheres of private education create new ways of creating different purposes for education that parents are willing to engage with and pay for? Let's face it. That could create innovation that might have— and these are very long-term ideas— could have some sort of impact in the public sphere as well. Because at the moment, if you look at it in terms of public education, for many people who are in that expanding pool of have-nots that I talked about, or they're trapped in institutional regimes that mean that they're supported financially to a very low level and to actually get into another financial model is just a step too far. I've got a couple of family members who are in that trap, been in that trap for 20 years. And I don't think it's a case of you could do something now to change it tomorrow. I think it's more a case of could we do something now that might mean in 50 years' time we've got different systems and ways of building communities through education. Yeah. Um, and of course, particularly in the West, we don't think in notions of 50-year plans. It's all about democratic cycles of, you know, 5 years.

5 years if you're lucky.

Yeah, 3 years in Australia.

Yeah, exactly. It's interesting though, isn't it? Because you're absolutely right, we can sit here and, and ponder, you know, up in the clouds of all these ideas, but we're very both very privileged now and fortunate to, you know, be able to do that and have the means. But there are some fundamental structural realities to the world that allow us to do that. And we have benefited and worked, but also benefited from privilege in relation to that. Whereas many other people have the opposite. And I wonder, just back to where we started, that idea of output and capital. If we maintain that system, as we know, capital attracts more capital economically. And if, you know, educationally you see that as well, you know, those with more capital to start with, whether it's cultural capital from their family background, that will give them a leg up within an education system that prioritizes educational capital. And then they will ultimately win, right? They win the credential race and they get those scarce places at Ivy Leagues, Oxbridge, et cetera, because, you know, they are at an initial advantage. Perhaps if we were to question those ideas of output and capital and begin to build an alternative, let's say, then you question the fundamental attractors of capital that maintain these inequities. Yeah, interesting.

Look, with an aging— not only an aging population, I mean, people are staying healthier for longer.

Yeah.

So therefore, we're already starting to explore, well, maybe working for longer makes sense. If that were the case, does that mean that we could potentially afford to extend education? And access to an education for a longer period of time to everybody? I don't like the term compulsory because it makes it sound like prison, but, you know, could we just open up access and have institutions where if I felt I wanted to, I could stay in education comfortably for a longer period of time? But if you moved away from a batching model where, you know, cohorts are based on when you were born sort of day of manufacture, I think Ken Robinson used to call it. But, but if you could move away from that age and stage sort of mentality and just say, well, you can diverge, you can go off into different pathways, you know, who's to say that at 14 you couldn't go, you know what, I'd really love to go and do some experiential stuff, and you go off and do it, and then you can come back in later.

Yeah. And I know, I know you're exploring the online and kind of hybrid spaces as well, which I'd love to ask you about briefly, but there is also a potential resource in terms of increasing access and increasing, as you're talking about there through that as well, because you potentially get lower overheads of the ability to provide that access and that, that learning experience possibility to more and more people. If you've got more and more effective online and hybrid offers, you know, we're not there yet, but I know you're, you're out there at the kind of avant-garde of that, trying to figure out how we get really effective online education, but that has a part to play in increasing that possibility of access for people at a lower cost.

Yeah, no, I mean, that's what really attracts me to high— specifically hybrid. I think pure online, it's a very specific type of learner, I think, that manages to thrive in that environment.

Yeah.

I think many, many learners, the hybrid element, you know, to have a cadence where there is some sort of human connectivity and coming together is really important. But I think that, that low cost, no cost environment, if it's cloud-based. Of course, then the challenge becomes around the world access to education and fine— and economic and finances, really, in 20th century. Maybe this century it's about access to bandwidth, and how do we make sure that almost becomes one of the SDGs in time, is the access to bandwidth should be a fundamental human right in a sense, because that's the direction of travel. That then means that really you, you could be able to have a really quite marvelous approach to accumulation of different forms of learning in different contexts.

Very good. And then just to finish off, because we've been up in the clouds for a long time, but it's fascinating. I mean, I love it. I'm not sure how the listeners will feel. Let's find out. But, you know, I think it's really important ideas, but then And also it's important to bring it back down to reality in terms of, you know, we've got to create something now. And, you know, I'm creating my own things, but I know you are also creating something to provide an alternative to actually put, you know, some of these ideas into action. So at the moment you're calling that SE21, right? But perhaps could you just briefly, and there's a lot of detail to that, and I'm sure you can point people to where they could find out more about it, but just what are the core ideas about about that as a high school model and how have you put into process some of those kind of ideas that we've been talking about?

Yeah, so I'll talk about 3 fundamental parts to SE21. And obviously, you know, I know you put in the notes my contact and really would encourage anyone to reach out and get in touch, even if it's just curiosity or they want to see if there's something worth exploring to us partnering or whatever. I think networks are hugely important in what we're doing. So we, we started with the notion of literacies as opposed to competencies. So we, we went to literacies partly based on some of the work, again referencing Bill Cope, Mary Koslanczys, some of their earlier work around multiliteracy. So in other words, in a ubiquitous digital environment, as we more and more it's become, you need multimodal ways of understanding things. And so there's that aspect to the most multiliteracies. That they talk about, but then also sort of Paulo Freire's notion of critical literacy. So again, that for me goes back to the idea of critical curiosity. It's that ability to have very sophisticated critical faculties but an open-mindedness to explore. So we landed on two sets of literacies, what we call transdisciplinary literacies and dynamic literacies. Transdisciplinary is our approach to reskinning the disciplinary environment of traditional academic knowledge. Trying to revisit some of those disciplines and say, is there certain concepts within that, that with a digital environment become unnecessary because so much is in the cloud now and the mobile device has become— I think Bill Cope calls it a prosthetic part of the self, right? So that, you know, effectively it seemed daft 10 years ago to go, you know, I can find it out on my phone, but now it's becoming less and less because really if you've got that bandwidth and access, most people have got those devices in many countries now. So does that mean we could bring in new content or new concepts, sorry, in disciplinary learning and then also new disciplines? So future studies, nanotech, biotech, things like that, but then also the transdisciplinary lens. So always trying to leverage thinking models and conceptual models that move across disciplines in a way that allows students to see the connectivity of disciplinary knowledge. Then the dynamic literacies are really our approach to those durable the soft skills, 21st century skills.

Yeah.

And really trying to bring those not to prominence, but give a sense of balance in that those skills are as important as the traditional academic knowledge and skills. So that's one element. Second element, we build it all around what we call Provocation Based Learning. Provocation Based Learning is really where we have external partnerships working with the school community. So those are drawn from industry, tertiary, and NGOs. They bring in real-life provocations that they're working through, and they may have, have solutions or scenarios for how they're going to approach them. They do case studies with the students for the first 4 weeks of an 11-week sprint, and then the students iterate their own provocation questions, spend 5 weeks exploring those, and create a variety of knowledge artifacts. Could be a research paper, a documentary film, a business plan and pitch to launch a business, or whatever. And then they have a communal sharing at the end of that sprint where they bring together the external partners, their peers, the faculty, and the parent community to look at what they've got. And then the final bit is the credentialing ecosystem. So, you know, you have to work within the environment you find yourself in. There's no point trying to say it's a revolution and we're going to create a brand new way of credentialing that's— that no one's going to understand, because it's pointless, particularly for high schoolers. So we've looked at people like MTC, you know, Mastery Transcript Consortium, looking at their platform. Could we put the literacies into their competency framework? Could we use credits? Because obviously there's a divide that runs down the Atlantic with North America defaulting to transcript and then arguably the rest of the world being qualifications driven. So we have this ecosystem that's transcript, digital portfolio, and then I'm exploring microcredentials and the digital wallet because I think that is the future of qualifications credentialing anyway.. And then also we're having conversations with the big credentialing bodies that exist globally to say, well, do you have an interest in exploring digital wallet microcredentials as a way of creating a new qualification?

Fantastic. And it is, as you say, you have to work with the current reality, even if you have the ideas about where you, where you might want it to go. But the, I think I agree. I think that digital credential kind of wallet or portfolio, whatever you call it. In not the too distant future, our driving licenses and our, you know, all sorts of different credentials or identity documents or whatever they are with the COVID passport around the world at the moment, even that will just become a complete norm that our key pieces of paper that used to be pieces of paper will no longer be, and they will be this digital ecosystem. And that's, that's a fascinating thing to be exploring for a high school, where do you see it going next, or where would you like it to go next in terms of the implementation of the model?

There's a kind of continuum, really. I think the ideal would be to have an online-first model, a hybrid, or various forms of hybrid model, yeah, and a face-to-face environment. So in an ideal world, we'd have a bricks-and-mortar high school that runs this as a face-to-face leveraging technology and having hybrid elements, but largely a face-to-face community. Then forms of either larger hybrid hubs or micro hybrid hubs, and then pure online. So we're exploring whether we do that alone in Education in Motion with this project, or whether we maybe partner with other providers that are interested in aligning. And we have good alignment with Yeah, I hope that in terms of when and where, we'll have more clarity on that in the first 6 months of next year.

Yeah, I mean, there's a phenomenal amount of incredible work, and I know you've been collaborating with a bunch of very bright people for a long time on all of this work, so it's a phenomenal piece of work. But there are, as you say, there are many different organizations thinking around these same problems, and one of the things that I would love to see is, and it comes, you know, in a way it comes back to some of the things we've been talking about, is people trying if possible to move beyond this proprietary mindset and actually think, yeah, there's, it may not be our idea that we've trademarked, but actually this is a really good idea by bright people that have done, you know, really caring, have created this thing. Let's align around it. Cause otherwise my fear is that we have all these different people trying to jump in and do their own thing. And you end up, nothing quite happens because there's different people with the, you know, strength in numbers, perhaps, you know, that networked idea. I think that will be where something might shift, and I would love to see that happen, be a part of that happening. I think that's a really powerful idea.

Yeah, I think the idea of associational affiliation, so identify where, where the commonalities lie in these new forms of educational disruption. I don't think of it in revolutionary terms, you know, education is not really about revolutions. It's far too glacial for that, and probably rightly so. But I think really for me, I see it as a diversity narrative that we need to evolve, that we all learn differently. And of course there's limitations to what you can do in education to meet that need, but I do think we are entering an era where we can see be much more agency for the learner, much more authentic personalization and differentiation, you know, because personalization, differentiation have been around forever in education, but we've not really, I don't think, used them or lived them in authentic, necessarily authentic ways, but I do think we're entering a period now where things like AI and machine learning and VR and so forth, they're opening potential worlds that allow for different learners to engage with those technologies and with the humans that they work with in learning communities in, in far different ways. And so it'd be really great to try and explore that diversity.

Brilliant. It's like Hanan Tanaja talking about mass personalization, right? I mean, he's primarily in healthcare, but exactly. But yeah, that idea of the technology is there for mass personalization, and now it can be a design principle of the way we set up the systems. Whereas before, I think, yes, differentiation, personalization was there, but the design principle was standardization. And, you know, the others were window dressing around the edges at best. But what we actually need is a design principle that is about mass personalization. And then therefore that will necessitate diversity, right? You can't have mass personalization without diversity.

No, and you know, not to be cynical or overly critical about 20th century industrial model of education that we've inherited, that was an— it was an efficiency. It created efficiencies. And I think the thing is now what we need to embrace is that with the right kind of thinking and design, a lot of the technology we're creating can build in the efficiencies. You know, some of the technology companies that I've been engaging with over the last couple of years The efficiencies they've created for the teacher to focus on the relational far more than be some basically having swathes of their time taken up with admin and the standardization and moderation of student evidence of learning and assessment, you know, a lot of that could be taken away now and done in other ways that also personalize it and are far more— can offer forms of formative feedback that a teacher never could because of scale.

Absolutely. No, brilliant stuff. Thank you. Well, this has been amazing. Been a good old tour through some pretty intense ideas. I hope people are still with us.

Brilliant.

Thank you, Kevin. I mean, it's amazing stuff and I would really hope that it all becomes the proper reality that it deserves to be because it's an incredible piece of work. So yeah, brilliant stuff.

Thank you.

Thank you. Great.

Always great catching up with you, Tim Logan.

All the best.

Cheers, buddy.

Bye-bye.

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