Regenerating Economics Education - A Conversation with Jennifer Brandsberg-Engelmann

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

There are some real fundamental problems with the basic models and assumptions that are made in economics. And so we cannot keep sending kids out into the world with their first impressions of economics being something that is actually so detrimental to the world we want to create.

Hi, and welcome to this week's episode of the Future Learning Design Podcast, brought to you in partnership with Notosh. My guest this week is Jennifer Bransberg Engelmann, who has been teaching economics, business management, and environmental systems and societies for 26 years in 3 countries, mainly with the International Baccalaureate. Jennifer is an expert in developing and executing educational strategies, projects, processes and curricula. Her core focus is training young people to take action for sustainable and regenerative societies. She has worked with the student changemakers in the Sustainability Action Lab at Strothof International School in Germany, as well as developing knowledge, skills and passions through the Youth Mayors Field Guide, a curriculum that she led, developed with colleagues from other disciplines and other international schools. Jennifer has co-authored Economics, Business Management and Environmental Systems and Societies textbooks integrating new economic thinking and social enterprise themes into those works. She has also delivered webinars on sustainability and works to shift curricular systems to new paradigms to address 21st century problems. Recently, she turned her attention to advocating for regenerative economics to be taught in secondary schools. You can find the regenerative economics syllabus she developed with Kate Raworth and other academics and teachers in an open letter posted on the Doughnut Economics Action Lab website. She is working on a prototype of the course in the coming months So if you'd like to offer help or feedback on this emerging work, please contact her via LinkedIn. And you'll find links to all of these resources in the show notes. Hey, Jennifer.

Good morning.

How are you?

Yeah, excellent.

Fabulous. It's really great to be able to talk to you. I've been waiting for a little while for this conversation. Quite a few different people have recommended your work to me. And so I'm really happy to finally get around to, to have the conversation. So if we could think about just a little bit about your background coming into the work that we're going to talk about today. What's your, the kind of big picture of what motivates you as an educator to do this kind of work?

Yeah, I guess I would first like to talk about the strong sense of purpose that I've got around creating meaningful learning experiences, both for students and teachers. I just recently left my position as a teacher after 11 years in my previous school, but I've been around for more than 2 decades in the classroom. And so I'm keenly aware that the learning experience not only needs to be better for students, but the teaching experience needs to be vastly improved for teachers as well.

For sure.

But yeah, so my purpose is really around creating more meaningful learning experiences for everyone. But I'm particularly interested in the area of economics education, where I think that both the content and the methodologies that we're using to teach that content aren't really fit for the 21st century. And my sense of purpose was really strengthened about 5 years ago. I kind of underwent a personal paradigm shift, which we can talk about in a little bit. And I guess on top of that, on top of thinking about just purpose, I find this work really fun. It really allows me to use all of the competencies that I've got, the knowledge that I have after more than 2 decades teaching mainstream economics, but also the new learning that I'm doing in the field, as well as curriculum development skills, textbook writing skills, the work I've done around changemaking. So it feels like really the right kind of work to be doing right now with all the competencies that I have. And so it's quite fun to be able to make use of all those.

Brilliant. So lots, quite a lot of different things all converging to this, yeah, to this space. But so one of the things I find really interesting, we haven't done a lot of focus around specific subject areas, if you like, in terms of education. A lot of the conversations on the podcast so far have been quite generic, right? You know, teaching and learning, pedagogy. Leadership, systems change, all of that stuff. But what I find really interesting about your lens of economics education is that obviously it's a school subject and, you know, you've got vast experience of teaching that, but there's also this kind of underlying piece of, of the kind of social fabric that is, seems to be so important and so pivotal really in terms of talking about systems change. It's the economy. Often it's people come back to, well, is the economic structures that actually aren't moving. And that kind of limits the choices elsewhere that can be made around educational change or these other things. So often you come back to that kind of the dominant economic paradigm. And so I think those two layers as to why this is really interesting to get into, obviously from a inside the school, the pedagogy, the curriculum, and which we'll get into, but also as I say, this kind of meta layer is a really challenging one to do some of the work that needs to happen in relation to climate and and all of those kinds of things that we— and regeneration.

Yeah, I mean, just like the economists are really the gatekeepers to government policy as well. I mean, they really hold the keys to the kingdom. And it's really problematic when the paradigms that many of our economists, and then by definition also politicians and business leaders as well, and even us as individuals, are framed by degenerative ideas. And, you know, we're working hard, like lots of people are working hard to change these economic perspectives in the world. And yet education institutions, both at the secondary level and also in the tertiary level, are sending out still every year hundreds of thousands of people into the world with the same ideas that have gotten us into trouble in the first place.

Yeah.

And as an educator, I've been waiting— as a secondary educator, I've been waiting really for tertiary education to make the big shift. But that's very slow for, you know, reasons that have to do with the entrenchment of worldviews and their ties to social networks and everything else is very hard to shift. And so I think it's really time also for secondary educators to become a lot more active in this area because we cannot keep sending kids out into the world with their first impressions of economics being something that is actually so detrimental to the world we want to create.

Yeah, interesting. And, and that was, I think the development of your ideas around that seems to have been quite pivotal to where you are now. So maybe if you could just talk a little bit about how did you come to those kind of realizations around that kind of dominant neoclassical paradigm? Sure. Yeah.

I mean, I've been teaching economics, as I said, for more than two decades now. And, you know, when I first got into it, I was quite happy to teach it. I really liked the subject. Kids liked it. We had a lot of fun in class. They did well on their exams. You know, it was fine. But the financial crisis for me was, was one shock in a way that started disrupting my thinking about economics. And shortly after, the financial crisis, I also had a year out of teaching because we had moved, our family had moved, and I was still doing some economics work in the background, but not full teaching and not like fully immersed in the subject in the same way. I wasn't swimming in the water of the subject like I had been before. And when I came back to it, I was really able to come back with a much more critical perspective. So I started to really see the problems in the fields, in the discipline, and things that I was teaching. And I think you and I have talked about this, but I mentioned, you know, this one particular The thing that really bothered me in the syllabus that I was teaching at the time, and my hands were tied really, that I spent one day on the issue of equity and 7 to 8 weeks on theory of the firm with all the cost curve diagrams and different market structures. And the amount of time that I just spent on all this diagrammatic analysis, which just didn't seem to add that much to students' understanding and was taking away from time that we could have been spending engaging in real-world issues. And that just over time from, say, I don't know, 2011 on to 2018 or so, you know, I was really kind of struggling with that, this sort of cognitive dissonance. And I started reading more widely in economics and different schools of economic thought. Like many people at the time, immersed myself also in behavioral economics because it's just so much fun to read and think about. But really the kind of pivotal paradigm shifting moment for me was when I picked up Doughnut Economics in early 2018. Rae Worst book for me was really a crystallizing moment in my own understanding of all of these issues. You know, she pulls together lots of thought from different schools of economics to critique the mainstream economics education. And the way she lays it out is really done quite well for shifting paradigms because she really reveals the problems with the mainstream economics. These 7 ways to think about 21st century economics. And she then goes on to talk about what 21st century economics should be, should look like in these 7 areas. And that was just, it was great. I mean, I, for me, that was almost like an epiphany. And from that moment on, have really been trying to take every opportunity I can to, to work on, on shifting economics education while still teaching it. Sure.

I mean, that's the, that's the cognitive dissonance, right? It's so interesting. I mean, there's, So much going on there. I find it fascinating, the kind of evolution of curriculum, right? How, how does curriculum evolve to really answer to the needs of the current kind of conditions that we're in and thinking about the future conditions and the, the world that we're sending our young people out into. And I think that's a, that's such a, an important thing that's going on there. But also I think one of the things you also mentioned previously was how much it was dominated by kind of these linear, as you said, kind of diagrammatic representations of the world. It feels to me, I've never studied economics myself, but it feels to me there's this kind of very narrow two-dimensional version of the world being taught very explicitly, you know, this is how the world works, Homo economicus, and all of these kind of very reductive decontextualizing ideas, which as we are learning more and more now are potentially really quite dangerous.

Yeah, absolutely. There are many, many problems with the mainstream economic paradigm that we are kind of stuck with in economics teaching in secondary schools. That's one of them. It's a big one. I mean, there are a couple of areas in the syllabus where we do get slightly more complexity, where you get a little bit more, you know, feedback loops, for example, you know, talking about the multiplier, for example, or wage-price spirals, you know, that's where you kind of touch on these feedback loops just a little bit. But mostly kids are being trained to use very linear, very mechanistic, reductive analysis. And I think We need to stop doing that. And I'm not advocating for an infinitely complex treatment of this in schools because, you know, you can, it can also be quite paralyzing. But I do think that including systems thinking, complex adaptive systems in these courses is absolutely vital.

Yeah. Fascinating. And so given, as you said, you were kind of hamstrung to a certain extent by the current syllabus that you were teaching, just as you know, that's one of the the constraints that we work with, right, as teachers. Given your immediate inability to change that, we'll come on to what you're doing now, which is really exciting. But in that meantime, there were other things you were kind of working on, it feels like, to try and shift the experience of the young people you were teaching in different ways. So maybe could you say a little bit about what you've been working on since that moment of that kind of epiphany of reading Kate's book?

Yeah, I mean, I guess the first thing I'd like to say is just the point that you make about being unable to change the syllabus at that time. I mean, I think it's worth knowing, I mean, for people who might not be be familiar with these processes, but curriculum change in the International Baccalaureate, but also in many national systems, is an extremely slow process. It can take 7 to 8 years for these curriculum cycles to result in a new syllabus, and the changes that are made are often really incremental for many, many reasons. But, you know, oftentimes the people who are involved in that syllabus revision process don't have a lot of incentive to radically change it, and they're scared to change it. You know, it's really, it is a risky endeavor to go out there on a limb and make a big change. So yeah, these, the syllabi are hard to change. And this is one thing that we're working on right now with the current project with regenerative economics, which we'll come back to later. But at that time in the IB, it was too far along in the development of the new syllabus to really make radical changes. And so I thought, okay, what's the next thing I can be doing then to get these ideas to students? And I started working with Cognity, which is a Swedish textbook publisher who publishes IB textbooks. Also now they've moved into the American market. With some new books and that they also publish some IGCSE books. Yeah. Anyway, I got together with them because we had to write after the syllabus was published for economics, then there needed to be new textbooks. And so I decided, okay, if I can't change the syllabus, then maybe if I can get involved in the textbook writing, we can weave in some of this as a complex systems thinking as well as, you know, some sort of deeper ideas around sustainability into that book. And that's, that was successful.

Yeah.

So I got involved with that and that was really fun. I found actually that I enjoyed doing that kind of work a lot. And I'm quite good at finding those places in the established curriculum and the established practice, the kind of footholds for the new content and the new ways of doing things. So—

Love it. Smuggling them in by the back door.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

It's like going in the back door a bit. Yeah. So I wrote, I co-authored the economics textbook for Cognity and then the business management syllabus was also revised. And to the IB's credit, they included as two of the four key concepts in that course were ethics and sustainability. And that was really interesting for me because it, I could see how as a textbook author, then it gave us really the license and the lenses to really be looking at the entire syllabus and thinking, okay, you know, if we were to take this perspective of ethics, if we're to take this perspective of sustainability, what would that mean for the content that were writing for this textbook. And we were able to get the donut economics model woven in through that entire book. But it also, you know, we were able to do things like, you know, the ethics around advertising, around advertising things for goods and services that people don't need, you know, sort of thinking about the role of business in providing for human needs. And so anyway, that was a really rewarding project. And I'm about to start a third book for Cogniti now for the new Environmental Systems and Societies course. And there Yeah, great. The Doughnut Economics model is actually in the syllabus. And so for me as an educator and sort of thinking about kind of the pressure points and how much time I've spent talking about this on webinars and at IB conferences, and it took a while for this stuff to get into the syllabus, but it's there now in one. Yeah. So there's that textbook writing. It's been great. And the webinars that I've done, particularly there was a group of them with a group called Sustainability Education who I'd just like to give a big shout out to Andrew Watson and Niles Catallo and John Cannings. They gave me a platform to talk a lot about this over the last few years, and, and for that I'm really grateful because they were instrumental really to helping me build a wider network.

Excellent.

And, um, yeah, I mean, aside from that, in 2019 I started working on trying to build a school in Frankfurt focused on sustainability. Yeah. And I, yeah, I was able to build a business plan and you know, went quite— not quite far down the road. I mean, it didn't take long actually after building a business plan and talking with a lawyer and talking with educational authorities here in Germany as well as the IB before I figured out that it wasn't an economically viable project. But that too was just a really interesting experience for me as a business management teacher, as an economist, to be trying to build a business plan and get that going. And really actually quite happy that it didn't work out because the pandemic hit shortly after.

Sure. Yeah. Yeah. But, but it's interesting, isn't it? Trying to take the ideas, quite progressive ideas, and then build an educational concept around those that is, I mean, it's, it's higher stakes than a textbook, right? I mean, sure, you can weave some of these ideas into a textbook, but if you're gonna build an educational concept and actually go to market with that in terms of a school and trying to talk to parents and get people to sign on and join and bring their children and that's a higher stakes moment and a really interesting experience. Speaking from experience, you know, having been out there trying to do the same, you realize some of the challenges, very real challenges to take some of these more kind of progressive, innovative ideas out into the marketplace.

Yeah, absolutely. And I was just, I was, you know, this was the time when the Fridays for Future marches were really at their height and I was just so motivated to create some. I just wanted to pull all those kids together in a school and work with them, you know, and help them become the best changemakers they could be. I mean, it was just really, it was such an interesting and fun time and fun project to think about. But when I decided that it wasn't, you know, really possible to do that at that moment anyway, I pivoted and decided to just start a program inside the school where I was teaching at the time, the Sustainability Action Lab. So, you know, developing a smaller program inside the school, which was infinitely more manageable.

Sure, but still not, not without its challenges, right? I mean, yeah, absolutely, different challenges, but interesting. Yeah, yeah.

And I guess, you know, sort of the last piece of that had to— and it was a, it was a nice coincidence actually, this, this pivot to creating this program, because our school at that particular moment had also, uh, become part of an Erasmus+ grant with a number of other schools in Europe to develop a changemaking curriculum. So I don't know, it felt almost meant to be in the end that those things came together.

I'd love to, yeah, if we can, I'd love to dig into those two things a little bit more, just the curriculum and then the Sustainability Action Lab, because I think that is more of an adjacent possible for a lot of people in their schools thinking, well, how could I do something in this context. And so setting up, you know, microschool or whatever you wanna call it within a, a broader framework is potentially an interesting thing that people can learn from. So I'd love to talk about that briefly, but if you could say a bit more about the Youth Mayors Changemaking Curriculum, the Erasmus+ project, 'cause I think again, that's also a space that I've been talking about a lot with Festival of Hope and, and lots of different actors in that space thinking about how do we empower young people to kind of step into their agency, do that kind of changemaking thing. So yeah, what was your experience there?

Yeah, so that project was actually initiated by the United World College Maastricht and Lodewijk van Oort, the head of school there. And he had started what he called a Youth Mayors Program in their school. And it was, yeah, I guess the idea came from Benjamin Barber's book, If Mayors Ruled the World, and he talked about the power of local action and, you know, the ability of, you know, at the local level of making substantial change. So yeah, he had this idea to develop an entire curriculum around that to support his students in that kind of work and brought in a number of other UWC schools. So UWC Red Cross Nordic, UWC Robert Bosch College down here in Freiburg in Germany, and the International School of Brussels, and then our school, my— the school where I was teaching, Strathof International School outside Frankfurt. We started working on this curriculum. It was very clear to us one of the things that challenges that we wanted to tackle was this tendency that we saw with students to just dive right into, you know, change-making work without fully understanding the communities that they're trying to serve and also the systems that are involved with, you know, whatever problem they're trying to address. And we wanted to develop a process that would encourage students to be a little bit more careful and considered and to use research and investigation in order to strengthen ties with communities and understand communities as well as understand systems. And so that was the, the point that we started out with. Yeah, we quickly hit on sort of design thinking in, in that approach because obviously, you know, to, to design products, then the designers also need to understand people and the systems in which they operate. And so design thinking seemed to be really a great way to go. So systems thinking and also design thinking. And we also were aware that there was kind of like this increasing trend to implement design thinking strategies for social interventions as well. So it's not just for product design, it's also for thinking about how you can make change at all kinds of different scales. We started working on that curriculum when we had just gotten the framework going, is when the pandemic hit. So that was really challenging to get that sorted. We wanted to have a curriculum ready to deliver to students already by the following autumn in 2020. So that was a really challenging but also quite interesting because it forced us to think about flexibility.

Yeah, sure.

Yeah, so we were all online with kids and it became really clear that we wanted to develop a deliverable, a product that was actually online, that it was open access, that it was completely flexible so that teachers could be using it with students in myriad ways, that students could be even using it themselves, right? So we decided to write a student-facing piece of work. So not like a series of lesson plans aimed at teachers who would read them and then execute them, but really to develop a resource aimed at kids and to be kind of outline a process for change making and provide like a whole suite of tools that kids could be using in a very— and teachers in a very flexible way. And that's kind of the design, you know, what the process that we came up with.

Yeah. Well, I'll definitely share the link to that curriculum that as it's publicly available online. But I just would love to pick up on what you're saying. I mean, it's almost an inevitable aspect of the name Changemaking, right? It's like this rush to make change. You've gotta get out there and start changing the world. You know, all this kind of big rhetoric about that, obviously coming from a good place. But I think what you were saying about kind of falling in love with the problem, like really immersing yourself in the problem and the community engagement and where are the needs and what's What's possible here? What is my role to do here? And all those kinds of reflective questions is such an important reminder when we start doing that kind of work of changemaking, because I think that does sometimes get lost as people kind of rush to the implementation and the imposition, which isn't necessarily always a great move.

No, and it's, I mean, it brings a lot of humility to the process because it's only when you start doing that, you know, you've got the engagement with the community and you start to understand systems that you really understand why things are the way they are. And the challenges that you might face in trying to make change. So it's a really, it's a humbling situation, which I think is really— humility is a good attitude or perspective to come into that kind of work. And I think, you know, it also, by going through that, you have a much better chance of success in the end. And, you know, changemaking is fun work, I have to say. But if you rush in and you go for kind of all the fun bits and the action and doing things without really understanding what's going on to begin with, the chances of are really, really high. And then when you fail and you fail again and again, you know, it could be that, that students get quite easily discouraged over time. I think, you know, encouraging that deep reflective process and engagement with communities and systems helps students approach this with humility and respect.

Yeah, great. And I think actually the, the way that the IB is moving with their kind of service and action and service as action curricula are are moving in that direction towards that kind of idea of community engagement, which is really a positive thing, I think. But yeah, it's, it's much needed. So then to move on to the second piece, you, you were kind of involved in your own changemaking work of actually setting up this lab within the school. That's a slightly different piece, although some of the, perhaps the projects that you were working on there were still focused around those same kind of changemaking competencies and, and the same kind of real-world issues. But from a perspective of a passionate teacher within a school trying to kind of create this new entity within the school, what was, what were the things that you learned most from that whole process of trying to implement that Sustainability Action Lab?

Yeah, so I guess just a first, a little bit about the approach that we took. I mean, so first of all, I'm somebody who thinks that it would be better if we had all of this, these approaches and sustainability work embedded into all the courses that students were teaching, right? So I'm fully in favor of, of, you know, that kind of full embeddedness in the students' experience. But sometimes that's difficult to do because of curriculum mandates elsewhere or inherent structures in, in the school. So, you know, this approach, what the approach that we took was to have a set of modules for students to be doing. So this first courses that students would take, so the first one was this Youth Mayors Changemaking course that we had students working on. So that was a nice synergy, like we worked on that for a separate project and then it became like the first piece of the Sustainability Action Lab with the students. And then the second course that we developed for students was on biomimicry. So I do think it's really important that students have an understanding of how nature works and how we can be mimicking nature. And that goes again back to complex adaptive systems. Yeah. And understanding yeah, how nature works, because we can learn a lot not just for product design but also thinking about social interventions. Really amazing. It's so interesting, the work. And I developed this biomimicry module with our biology teacher and design teacher, so that was also just an amazing collaborative experience to put that together. And then the plan was to develop a series of other modules as well. We developed one on sustainable fashion that then our visual arts teacher was going to take on and teach, and had the ambition also to create one around food. And we were thinking about all kinds of other topics that students were interested in. Now eventually, you know, we had the pandemic and then our school went through some difficulties because our benefactor passed away and budgets were cut, etc. And so the original kind of very big ambition for lots of different modules had to get pared down in the end. We also had a process where the students who were involved in this had to apply to be in the program, which was important to me because we wanted to work with kids in these areas who really wanted to be there. We wanted to go where the energy is. But the, the application had a very low bar. They just had to write a motivation statement, and there was no critique of their motivation statement, but they just had to take that step. And that was actually a really good, um, it's a good hurdle to jump over because even just taking that little step ensured that we got students for sure.

And what's the age range that you're talking?

Yeah, so when we started it the first year when we piloted, we had a mixed age group of MYP 4 to DP 1, which is about grade 9th, grade 11, depending on the systems that you're in. In the second year though, we changed things a bit because getting the students from multiple years together was very difficult logistically, and our school is extremely small, so we have, you know, a lot of issues around timetabling and staffing. So originally it was that, but then eventually we decided to move kids through in separate grade levels. And another change that we made in the second year from the first year is that instead of having this changemaking curriculum delivered just for students in the Sustainability Action Lab, we decided actually to make a core part of MYP 4, so the Grade 9. So actually all the students go through this program now, and collectively the way we've organized it now, also for simplification, is that the students collectively decide on a problem that they want to tackle, and then that also allows them to split up some of the research work. So it's a little bit easier to manage than having, you know, lots of different students go in lots of different directions with their projects that are all moving at different paces listen. So they all get introduced to changemaking through a collective project that they're working together, and then the idea that they take those skills on into MYP 5 or grade 10 where they're working on their personal projects. And then— but you asked me about learnings, and I'll just say just very briefly, just a couple things that we learned from that. And one is that I think it's really important to make time, both make time in the school day, so not to treat something like this as only an extracurricular, because then it ends up competing with all the other things that kids want to do with their time outside school, sports, life. So making time inside the school day and making time for kids to actually do projects, which takes an incredible amount of time to do, and teachers having time to support them. This is all— and really importantly, teachers having time to bring more teachers into that kind of teaching so that you've got some resilience in your program. Because one thing I hear from a lot of schools who are doing this kind of work is you'll have somebody super passionate about it who brings it in, who runs it, runs it, runs And then they leave and everything falls apart. Yeah. So making time for all of those things is important. Yeah.

And that is not only making time operationally, it's also you are making real your values in terms of by giving it that time and not just sidelining it to an extracurricular, you're actually embedding it and saying, no, this is something we genuinely find important enough to have a place within the, the main school day, right?

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it's, it's the signaling as well, for sure. And, you know, related to that is the role of senior leadership. I think it's really important that they're fully on board and not just in a way like, you know, where they say, oh, we're so happy to have this program, or even just making time for it. But there's certain kinds of changemaking work that students really need adults to participate in, and sometimes they need, you know, if they're trying to make change in their school, They really need people at a senior leadership level to take action. And so it's really important that your senior leadership is really fully on board and willing to also spend time doing changemaking work with, with kids. I also think that it's really important that teachers and students, everybody gets comfortable with ambiguity and emergence and failure because these projects are messy. They're really, really messy. And there's a lot of learning that comes out of it. And reflection is important to make sure that you kind of capture and pay attention to the learning that's happening. But lots of projects will fail, at least in their ends, if not in the learning that's happening during the process. Everyone needs to just get really comfortable with not knowing how things are going to play out.

And I find that fascinating because it's a bit of a truism. Like, it's a bit of a kind of cliché that we say, let's get comfortable with ambiguity or failure or uncertainty, but there is a very real kind of skillset and awareness and noticing and all these different competencies that, that really are important that, that need to be developed and honed. And they can really only be developed and honed through practice of actually doing some of this messy work. You say messy, but messy, yeah, messy comes with a kind of connotation of negative, right? Unclean. But actually it's just, it's real. I mean, reality is messy. We try and clean it up, but that's reality. So there's a— I find that to get beneath the, the kind of cliché of that, there's something very important happening there in terms of that skill development and competency development for the staff as much as the young people. I completely agree.

Yeah, not everybody is able to do that. Lots of people are just very, you know, I mean, I myself am, I'm a planner. Yeah, I over-prepare for everything. But, you know, for me, it's just, it's been really fun to also try to develop a little bit more relaxed perspective about, about that kind of work.

But it's, I suppose I would also say it's no less rigorous, right? I think that's important to say that it's, it's not that the kind of the planning is the rigorous part. And, and if it's messy and, and things are emerging and it's ambiguous, you're underprepared or you've it's a deficiency. It's absolutely not. It's just as rigorous, but there is a meeting with reality that is, you've kind of built in, you've planned into the way that this process is gonna work and that's just part of it. You're allowing that in rather than trying to keep it out somehow.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I guess you can use the word resilience about it.

Yeah.

Because you know what you're talking about is, you know, you've, you make your plans, you think things are gonna work, they don't work as you thought. And, you know, at that point, it's really about your ability as a teacher, as a student, as a school to adapt, be flexible, come up with new ideas, you know, react to the feedback that you're being given in this complex system and come up with a, with a different path. And that is, you know, that's the essence of resilience, isn't it? And that's a very, very, very important thing for students to learn while they're school.

No, 100%. So we had a lot to say about these things, but I really, I also really want to get onto this, back onto the kind of economics, because you've been doing a lot of work recently on the regenerative economics syllabus, having, you know, going back to what you were saying earlier about that kind of epiphany of meeting Kate Raworth's work and what needs to change about economics. So perhaps if we could go there next, just in terms of how have you gone about kind of starting that process of because we've kind of highlighted some of the things that are wrong with mainstream economics, but then you kind of, as you try and bring that in, what's that process been like for you?

Yeah, so I guess maybe I'll talk a little bit about where this project came from actually, because it's an interesting story. Yeah. This project came about from the initiative of two student groups in the UK, SOS UK and Teach the Future, who have a project called Track Changes., and they have asked academics and teachers to look at the GCSE syllabi, the national curriculum, in every single subject to make changes to embed sustainability in every subject. And the way they did it is they pulled all the syllabi into a Microsoft Word document, put it on track changes, and then they, they had academics and teachers then make edits. And it's a really brilliant project. Project, actually, because, you know, there's this idea of, you know, you think it's so difficult to get all this into the curriculum, but really you just have to push the button, accept all changes, and then you've got it. Yeah, anyway, I just love that idea. But, um, I was asked to work on the economics curriculum, and economics is a little bit different from some other subjects. You know, in other subjects it might be possible to just tweak things a little bit at this very high sort of national curriculum level in order to embed sustainability, but there are some real fundamental real problems with the basic models and assumptions that are made in economics. And so it was clear to me that a much more extensive revision was in order to get a product that would meet what these students were really looking for. So I asked Kate Raworth if she would help out in terms of reimagining what the syllabus might look like. And she, and she said yes. And we worked on that for a number of weeks and she was able to bring in other academics who contributed as well, and I was able to bring in some other teachers to look at it. We had—

yeah, fantastic.

Yeah, there's a Dutch organization called Our New Economy. He's a young economist there, also had a look and made some nice suggestions. So yeah, we were able to kind of bring a group together and come up with this regenerative economics syllabus. And, you know, it addresses a number of really significant problems with mainstream economics education. So You know, one of the big issues, you know, if you open up most economics textbooks, they'll start out always with supply and demand in the market. And most of the course is devoted to market solutions. And there is this kind of sense that, you know, basically markets can solve almost any problem. And, you know, yes, we've got governments as well, and government and policy— government policy are also there. But the role that's assigned to government tends to be quite limited. And there is also kind of a sense perpetuated that, you know, governments are inefficient and as much as possible, we should be trying to push them out of market activity. And this new regenerative economics course takes a different perspective. So one of the things that it does is it includes more provisioning systems than just markets and government. Yeah. So, and this comes from, if you have read Doughnut Economics or you know about the work, there are two other provisioning systems that Kate talks about in the book and that are given quite a lot of attention in other schools of thought in economics. And one is the household.. And we use the term household here differently than a mainstream economics course uses household. In a mainstream economics course, you know, the household are consumers, or we provide labor, so we're either workers or consumers, and that's it. But the household in this context, in the new course, is really looking at all of the unpaid care and domestic work that's going on in the household that is so unbelievably vital for human well-being, even for the functioning of our market systems. You know, we need to regenerate. The idea here is about, you know, we, we go out into the world every day, we exhaust ourselves working, producing, engaging with others, and the household really is this kind of refuge, this place where people are regenerated. They were fed, sleep, they have, you know, close relationships with families and, and friends as well. And, you know, it is, it is the place where we as human beings regenerate ourselves. And so we have to give attention to to that. Because if we don't pay attention to all of that unbelievably vital work that's going in the household, it means that governments don't make policies that support that. It means markets don't pay attention to how they can be functioning, or businesses can be functioning to support balanced, you know, work-home life, for example. Yeah. So this is now, you know, we've got the markets and government in your typical course, but we've added this other provisioning system, and we, the Interventas, devote just as much time to that as—

Yes. And just to, just to be explicit about what's going on there, it's not that we're magically being regenerated by this household. Largely it's women who are taking on a lot of that invisible and unvalued social work, but which is fundamental to sustaining the rest of this economic and government activity that's happening. But so I just wanted to make that point explicitly. It's largely women across the world taking on that work, right?

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So there's a lot to do with, you know, the feminist school of thought in economics has really focused a lot of attention on that. And I can imagine, you know, I'm thinking about the kinds of work that students can be doing around this, but really, you know, thinking about their own home life and how labor is divided and, you know, trying to understand how that came about even in their own lived experience and talking with their families about how labor might be redistributed among family members in order to, you know, free up the ability of people to do other things that they might want to do anyway. Yeah, there's a lot. It's so rich there, you know. So those 3 plus 1 other provisioning system is the commons, which is something that tends to be quite dismissed in economics. We talk about the tragedy of the commons all the time, unfortunately. But, you know, we know from lots of experience over history, but also looking at Indigenous communities, for example, that that it is possible and highly desirable actually for groups of people to be self-managing and setting up systems for managing resources, not just physical resources, but thinking also about the sharing of intellectual resources as well. So really treating the commons as it should be, as a proper provisioning system in the economy and how commons can be designed to, you know, protect resources and develop shared resources. Is better.

It's fascinating, isn't it? Because one of the things I noticed as you are talking about those things is that the schools of thought opposing the dominant view, so let's say feminist economists or the people talking about the commons, their values are very visible, right? It's very clear because they're bringing their own values to say, well, hold on a minute, we need to remember this part or this part that's been forgotten. Whereas the values that are embedded in the dominant paradigm are somehow invisible, you know, like the invisible hand of the market, right? Is that somehow it's this, it's an, it's a values-free paradigm and it just fundamentally is not, right? It's just that the values that have been embedded in that paradigm are so kind of taken for granted by many that we just teach them as, as though they were somehow kind of accepted truth, right? Would, I mean, is that your experience as an economics teacher?

Absolutely. I mean, and I myself have taught these as accepted truths and not as choices that have values attached to them. But, you know, that comes from the way economics is presented as a discipline. You know, it is, it relies on models, but these models get taught as truths. And I think, you know, if anybody who's been in the IB and taken a theory of knowledge course, like, we all know that, you know, all models are wrong, some are useful, and that every single model involves choices about what you're going to include in the model and what you're going you're going to exclude in the model. And those choices obviously have to do with what you value and think is important. And so when we present students with, for example, the circular flow of income, which, you know, shows the, the transfers of products and, and financial resources around an economy, and that includes markets and government and, you know, banks, and as well as the households as it's traditionally represented, as well as international exchange. What we're focused only on those money monetary exchanges, and we've left out, we've left out all of society in which the economy is embedded and all of the natural environment, which is so vital to everything that we're doing on this planet. And so by focusing only on that, you know, you've made a choice that that's what's important to you. And by making that choice and excluding everything else, then you make it almost impossible for people in the discipline to even start thinking about society and the natural world. And yeah, so it's got a strong sustainability model embedded in the course and ecological economics focus. So this is another school of economics, and the whole introduction to the course is really about that embeddedness and, and thinking about those, those enhanced and enlarged number of provisioning systems and, you know, really framing the economy in an entirely new way focused on human and ecological well-being rather than on growth, for example, which dominates every mainstream economics textbook. So anyway, there are lots of differences between mainstream economics and this current course. Many changes. It's quite a different content. And anybody who wants to, you know, understand more about it can go onto the Doughnut Economics Action Lab website where we have this open letter where people can show their support for the development of the materials, but the, the link to the syllabus is there, and also happy to hear feedback from people.

Yeah, and we'll share, we'll share that in the show notes as well. And so then thinking about, um, the kind of opportunities to get that into the hands of young people more than we are now. Obviously there's the open letter out with, in terms of people can can show their support and, but what I suppose what would be a dream for you in terms of where it goes next?

Yeah, I mean, so right now, just to give you kind of an idea of where we are in the process, um, you know, we had this sort of first stage where we developed this syllabus originally for these two student groups in the UK and this Track Changes project, but the syllabus now as it stands, the aim is to develop something that's applicable globally. So we're not now focused just on the UK, but in trying to develop a resource for teachers and students that could be used in many, many contexts around the world. And the plan at the moment is to develop a textbook. So I'm very practical. I mean, I'm idealistic in terms of the content, but I also want to produce something, you know, we've written the syllabus and we'll be writing specifications also for the syllabus, which is a format that national education institutions can understand. The IB can also understand but we want to develop a resource that is familiar. And I think a textbook is the right approach here because, because so many teachers have not been exposed in their own education to these ideas. I think it's really important to have kind of a narrative framework around that in a way that a textbook can provide. And so the aim here is to create an online open source, free textbook available to anybody in the world that is also, that, you know, contains all the kind of content and things that we want everybody to know, but also lots and lots of ideas for engaged activities and learning, you know, for teachers and students. So, you know, the assessment models that we'd like to develop around these are going to be more about change-making, active learning, project-based learning, using portfolios to develop evidence of learning, etc. But I'm also quite keen to create something that is examable as well, because I know that not every school and not every teacher in the world is going to have the flexibility to completely adopt these sort of more progressive assessment forms. And I, I wouldn't want that to stand in the way of these ideas getting to kids. Yeah, so that's, that's the resource that we're planning right now. And the, the point where we are at the moment is that we've got the syllabus. I'm starting to play around with the specifications, but the idea is to get some experts in these various areas to help with the development of the specifications and levels of understanding expected from students. I want to be working with specialists in project-based education to really come up with assessment models that will work well with that too. But what we're planning right now is to develop a prototype. You know, to just put together a little bit of the introduction or maybe the entire introduction so that we have an idea how long it takes to develop it and that we can use that then to seek larger amounts of funding to get the entire project done. And the plan is to have, try to have the resource ready by next autumn. So it's quite ambitious.

Nice.

To work quickly to get it done. And in terms of your question about where is this going to go, and you know, first guess, make the case that that, you know, without this resource, these ideas have no chance.

Sure.

Right. And so the very first step is actually having this out there, because I think there's lots of people in the world who would like to be teaching economics differently, but they don't know what that new thing would look like. Right. So having this out there is a first necessary step. But in order to show support for this so that I can get financial and institutional and technological support to make it happen, we created an open letter that explains what this project is and what it aims to do. And there are now more than 100 signatures on that letter from schools around the world in lots of different contexts. So state schools and private schools, as well as national, you know, schools in national systems and International Baccalaureate schools as well.

Yeah.

We also have a lot of support from tertiary education who I think are also kind of looking around for inspiration.

Sure.

So we've got lots of schools out there who have actually already said we're willing to pilot, and you know, there's lots of ways that it could get into schools. So first of all, like, I was speaking with some schools in the UK, for example, who said, look, oftentimes we have students doing, you know, 4 A-levels instead of 3, but maybe some students would like to do 3 A-levels, and then we could offer this course as a non-A-level course, but just, you know, something to take, you know, because students are interested in. Or, you know, private schools and academy schools are not as bound to the national curriculum, and so, you know, they're able to weave in a course like this somewhat more easily. MYP, there are options for taking pieces of this and establishing and using it to create units of instruction, for sure. So I'm hoping to develop this in a modular way that, you know, it would be possible.

Yeah, great.

Out pieces of it and try things out.

Nice. It kind of almost needs those, you know, million different points of entry, right? From depending on where you are and where you are in terms of your system and the constraints you're working in, you need to be able to reach at the right level for you to pull it in. Otherwise it's just, you know, if it's only— it doesn't necessarily work for everybody. But I think one of the things I wanted to ask you about, because I think it's really important and interesting how firstly, that you've open sourced the textbook, right? So I think that's such an interesting tension for people when they have these kinds of ideas and they're regenerative ideas or, or kind of anti-mainstream ideas, but then actually what they end up needing to do in order to get leverage and get them out there is to kind of put them into this same package of a commodity to sell in the marketplace. And then suddenly, you know, it's very, the constraints of the market then influence what what is possible there, right? So I think just the fact that you were talking about these different provisioning systems with the commons, putting it out there into an open source space, which I think is a really vastly underrated method of exchange. I think it's really powerful. So it's something around the idea of kind of living the values that you have, right? And I think, and I wanted to ask you as well about the way that this is taught, because you've kind of, you've talked a bit about the content and the concepts and how they challenge the mainstream. Kind of concepts, but there's also this other piece of, does education need to shift away from the content paradigm towards a kind of more regenerative way of being, let's say. I mean, that, that starts to get, sound a little bit abstract or hippie or whatever, but, but this kind of idea of, of like, how do I live my values in a way that, that, that feels necessary and right in order to, because this kind of systems change work won't just happen from sharing concepts and talking about it at the propositional level, right? So it feels, it feels like there's a dimension to that as well in terms of how this is taught. And you've said a bit about it in terms of project-based and change-making type work, but is there any, I don't know, are there any other reflections you had there in terms of the way that this might actually be experienced differently by teachers and by young people in classrooms that isn't just the kind of the expert teacher with the concepts imparted imparting the knowledge to the students who need to learn the concepts.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and I, thanks for pointing out to the audience about this thing about putting the curriculum in the content, the materials in as open source, because that was a conscious decision. And, you know, it doesn't have to be that way. I could also write all this up and sell it and exactly have some nice royalties for a while, but I'm instead taking a different path and looking for foundation funding to make this happen and to put it out there. And yes, living the values is really important to me. And I think, you know, one of the things that drives instructional methods is assessment. You know, you and I talked about this in the past. I mean, I have, you know, felt very much that my teaching in these courses has been corrupted over time by the kind of assessments because I have to teach things in a certain way and I have to teach kids how to write for exams rather than, you know, doing much more productive work, you know. So at the end of the day, how a teacher and students might experience this course is going to be highly dependent upon what kinds of summative assessment structures they have to use and whether they're bound to certain types.

Absolutely.

And so, you know, my perspective ultimately, like, you know, I, I'm very aware and want to embed as much as possible you know, more student agency, you know, more place-based learning, engagement in nature, a greater focus on formative rather than summative assessments, not focusing on high-stakes standardized exams, project-based learning, you know, showing learning through portfolios, etc. And also, you know, more focus on well-being. You know, all these things are really important for, you know, making education much more regenerative. And my plan is to try to embed as much of this into the course as possible, while at the same time making it possible still for teachers to teach this course even if they are bound to, you know, a high-stakes summative exam at the end. So again, just trying to plan with the utmost flexibility to really make it likely that this course can find footholds in lots of different contexts around the world. But I hear what you're saying, Absolutely. You know, the current dominant mainstream economics courses, kids are just passive receptors of, you know, supposedly values-free knowledge and they have to reproduce that on the exam. I don't want that. Yeah. In this course, I think it's really also for students' own well-being. I think it's just so important that they feel agency and that they feel like they have some ways to make a contribution to engaging with these polycrisis that we face.

Yes, exactly. And, and I think there is a necessity to that in a way, right? If we're really serious about the depth of what regenerative really means, you're not gonna get that only at the, just that level of kind of propositional knowledge about the world. I mean, it's about, it is about a generosity and a way of working in partnership with life somehow, you know, in order to kind of just generate the conditions for more life to, and And that's not just something you can do in terms of the way you understand the world. It also has to be about how you relate to each other and the world, right? But I feel a lot of affinity with your pragmatism because I think there is an idealism that, as you say, in the ideas that's really important. But they're also, I think, it's my choice, is that the pragmatism in the approach is necessary because you've gotta meet people where they are right now. And people, you know, they're really committed educators working within highly structured and rigid exam-based paradigms. And that's, that's just where they are. And if we can work within that system and provide them with the resource to pivot slightly away from the neoclassical and the, you know, Adam Smith and all of that, then that's a good thing, right? But I think obviously there's this other grassroots kind of development of, of alternative ways of doing education. But just lastly, is there, what's the kind of call to action in a way. I would love to support in terms of being able to get this message out to more people and what, what are the ways that people could interact with this to support or bring, bring their own kind of commitment and energy to help and support with getting this out to more people?

Well, I mean, first of all, we have this open letter, which is on the Doughnut Economics Action Lab website. And so showing your support for the development of the materials and willingness to pilot, doesn't commit you to piloting, but, you know, showing an interest. And it will also help us then, you know, in later stages then start to contact schools and educators who might be interested in testing out the materials. So signing that open letter is a great first start. We already have lots of signatures, but the more we have, the better. Beyond that, you know, if you are listening to this and you are an educator interested in new economic paradigms and you've got some skill sets in terms of writing, project management, graphic design even, or any other kind of contribution you might be able to make, then please do get in touch with me. I'm on LinkedIn, that's the best way, and love to hear from you. Or you can even, if you sign the letter, you can also write a note in the, the form about this. Some people have done that. So yeah, so I'd love to hear if you think you're, you're somebody who can contribute to this. We're also looking for partners and help with that. And then, um, yeah, thinking about talking to your school about whether once these materials are moving forward and have been created, whether you can get a pilot going so that we can get some feedback and make them even better would be great. I think probably we'll know by kind of December, January whether things are on track to, you know, have a good useful set of materials by the following autumn. So autumn 2024 in the Northern Hemisphere, but also schools in the Southern Hemisphere then the following February. Where it would be aiming for initially.

Fantastic. Yeah. Amazing. I'll link to some of the other resources from Kate Raworth as well. I mean, she was with us at the Festival of Hope. She spoke to a couple of students from IB school in Namibia talking about her work. So, and there's obviously lots of other resources for people who maybe aren't familiar with her ideas, but would like to find out a bit more. And obviously the book Doughnut Economics is, is out there, an important read for all economics teachers. So amazing. Thanks, Jennifer. This is, I mean, such important work and thank you so much for talking about it. It's really, really inspiring.

Well, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

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