Regenerative Education - A Conversation with Bas van den Berg

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

I would much rather be on the side that sees the potential or potentiality of higher education, what higher education could be in playing a part in the next century or centuries of our species, which I think goes beyond, or which I hope goes beyond, just instrumentally generating the next batch of workers.

Hi, and thanks for joining me again for another episode of the Future Learning Design Podcast with me, Tim Logan, brought to you in partnership with Intrepid Ed News. In this week's episode, I'm speaking with Bas van den Berg, who is the educational coordinator at the Center of Expertise Mission Zero at the Hague University of Applied Sciences, where he leads large-scale educational innovation projects such as The Challenge, coordinates the Mission Impact course, and lectures in other courses related to sustainability, circular economy, ethics, and regenerative futuring. Bas is also the host of the fantastic Regenerative Education Podcast, where he explores these ideas in much more depth with many other great guests. Bas was awarded the accolade of Sustainable Higher Educator of the Year in 2021 in the Netherlands. He is also a fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts. Bas's PhD research focuses on how higher education can be redesigned to tackle wicked eco-social problems. And what this type of regenerative learning asks of educators and educational design. You can read more of Baz's work on his Medium page or connect with him on LinkedIn or directly via his email, all of which are in the show notes.

Thank you, Baz. Absolute pleasure to be able to talk to you on the podcast.

Thank you for having me.

We've been in contact for quite a while now and we've been thinking about making this happen. So I'm really happy that it did, but But first, perhaps we could just give you an opportunity to talk a little bit about where you are and what you do, because you work in the higher education space. And as I've been saying, a lot of my podcasts tend to be K-12 educators or focused on that area. So perhaps, yeah, if you could just give a little brief overview of Mission Zero and what you're doing in the Netherlands, and then we can get into some of the substance of regenerative education.

Yeah.

Well, first of all, thank you for having me. And also thank you for all the previous guests who have definitely been more focused on K-12, but have been extremely inspirational also for my own work. So from the bottom of my heart, thank you to all of them. Yeah, so like you said, I'm primarily active in higher education universities in the Netherlands, although our work more and more also touches throughout the educational system in the Netherlands. We can go a bit more into depth about that later. But Admission Zero is one of the research centers at the Hague University of Applied Sciences. We've sort of created research, well, centers of expertise we call them, where we bring together different research groups. So for example, in our group you have like the energy transition people, which are like primarily, you know, electrical engineers, and then you also have like the Circular Business Group, which are more like business-oriented people, to come together to tackle some of the grand challenges of our time. Within that center, I'm responsible for anything and everything that has to do with education, and it's also the primary focus of my own research. How can we rethink, redo, redesign higher education so that it can actually contribute to the public good and not just, well, be an extension of a neoliberal system to create people that can work.

And do you have teaching programs within that graduate, undergraduate teaching programs?

Yeah, so we partner up with our undergraduates and graduate programs, so we don't offer full programs by ourselves, which is also not really the intention or the goal of our research center, so to say. So we, we try to help our undergraduate programs to, to rethink their curricula, hopefully also get them together more and more so they're sort of disrupt some of the disciplinary siloing that goes on, especially in higher education. And then on a personal level, I'm also a teacher, of course. So I also teach a course called Mission Impact, which is like a 30 ECTS or a full semester length course. And on a national level, I'm leading an innovation program called Leadership for the Circular Transition, where about 10 universities are coming together to rethink higher education.

Fantastic. Yeah, wow, no small challenge, but amazing work. Yeah, so let's, let's get into some of the substance then, because you talk and you run your own podcast, which is great, but also all your research work is around the idea of regenerative education. And this is something I've been, you know, talking about with some people thinking about kind of a roundabout, but not specifically giving it that name of regenerative education. And today, it's quite a nice coincidence, I suppose, the International Day of Education from UNESCO is is today, 24th of January, and their, obviously, their Futures of Education report came out just before Christmas, and a lot of that is focused around some similar ideas. And I just noticed as I was reading this morning, one of the things they say is about redefining our relationship with the planet. Learning must empower students with the mindsets and competencies to care for it through education for sustainable development. So it's just that interesting juxtaposition maybe of education for sustainable development and regenerative education. So maybe we could just kind of play with those two for a little minute. Are they the same thing? Are we just talking about environmental education, which has obviously been around for decades, centuries, back to way back to Rousseau even? Or are we talking about something maybe a little bit different when we use the word regenerative?

Yeah, well, great question, first of all. And you can actually see in the historical sort of record of when regenerative design, which is where the sort of regenerative thinking or regenerative sustainability paradigm emerged from, that there was a strong connection with sustainable development initially. And I think when the concept of sustainable development was initiated, it was also initiated as perhaps a more radical concept than it's now being used with. A lot of times you see sustainable development basically just means we're going to become more efficient, we're going to use more advanced technologies, sometimes even in the case of like the IPCC reports, we're going to use technologies that don't exist yet, which is a very unearned optimism about what technology will be able to do. And perhaps they're right. I think gradually that sort of perception has changed, and that's also one of the reasons why education for sustainable development in the literature has also been changing, or there's been sub-branches like education for sustainability or education as sustainability, as part of that sort of critique. So I think From that perspective, regenerative education fits more on the critical radical side. And one of the big assumptions, or I guess what we would say the starting points of that paradigm, is that we're already causing quite significant damage to the Earth and also life on Earth, and we need to rethink the systems that do that, redesign the systems to do that, and redo the systems that do that so that we can create futures that are more life-aligned, that are capable of still maintaining all of us. And I think that's where regenerative education is the biggest difference between education for sustainable development and education for regeneration, is that we assume that's already the case and then we try, okay, if that is our baseline, and I think we get that represented in some of the challenges that we face collectively, like the ones I highlighted about the transition towards renewable energy or circular economy. What happens if we take those challenges and those goals, in a way, those normative goals, as the starting point for higher education thinking and design? And then you get a radically different approach than the one that we now use, which in the context of sustainable development, you don't necessarily need to change the underlying thinking about higher education that strongly. And with environmental education, I mean, obviously a lot of education within regenerative education links to the environment, But what you usually see with environmental and nature-based education is that it's quite limited to more ecological sciences and the relationship with nature-human systems. And with regenerative education, our main focus of work is in the current system and trying to disrupt or transgress or go beyond it towards a more healing system, which doesn't necessarily exclude technology, probably even includes a lot of advanced technologies, it just doesn't you leave from a position that there's an unearned degree of techno-optimism that's going to save the day. Like, yeah, we are going to have to be the change so that we can actually all change and live meaningful lives. Yeah. Interesting.

It strikes me, I don't know, just as you're speaking there, this kind of sustainable development paradigm is more kind of still a progress-oriented paradigm, but let's do it more sustainably, have less, have a zero effect on the environment, or, you know, just let's try and make what we're doing last longer or be ultimately sustainable. Whereas the regenerative paradigm is much— I mean, I like the fact that it contains this word generous in the middle of it. I've heard Kate Raworth talk about that, you know, in relation to regenerative economics, but I like that idea of the generosity in there. That means there's something else that you're giving back. You're giving more to, you're enhancing, which maybe means a change in the way we do it rather than just trying to do the same thing more sustainably.

No, absolutely. And that's also the sort of the healing element that we try to link to regenerative connotation with, because obviously, you know, some people make that connotation quite strongly. I think that's sort of, you know, within the work of regenerative design, they always call that, or in the future thinking discourse, they call Horizon 2 and Horizon 3 type thinking, where you need both. We need both better technologies and better logistical systems to reduce the impact of what we're doing. And at the same time, we need to move towards that regenerative or generous approach of how we are in relationship to the Earth, in relationship to each other. And education in general, so not just higher education, but that's just my focus, but education in general can play a much stronger role in that sort of transition. And I think we have to play a much stronger role as a moral responsibility. And if we don't, If we don't, then we're pretty much just doing what David Orr has called, you know, creating more effective vandals of the Earth. Is that really the best that we can do as educators, as an educational system? I like to think it's not.

Yeah, it is interesting, isn't it?

Because I mean, referring back to that Futures of Education report from UNESCO and the, you know, also the European Commission that just got an advice report as well. That's very strongly, I would say, regenerative.

Okay.

Yeah.

Good. Cause I'm not sure I haven't read it so closely, but the UNESCO one, I'm not sure it's using the language of regenerative, but as you said, it is still claiming that there is a major role that education can play in this transition, right? Whether you call it sustainable development or regenerative, but the challenge for people often is translating that very high-level kind of propagandist almost language about what education should be doing. Mm-hmm. You know, instrumental perhaps language. We'll get onto that in a bit, but obviously there are things that we can think that are great ideas, but then we have to go back to work tomorrow, back into a classroom. We have to do something. And so one of the things I was hoping you could speak to a bit was when you talk about regenerative education, are you talking about a, a shift in Content specifically? Are you talking about a shift in structure or pedagogies or the way that it operates or both, obviously? So maybe we could get into some of the practicalities of what, if we were going to make this transition, what does it actually mean in practice?

Yeah, so, well, first of all, thank you for that question. There's this wonderful quote in the latest book of Pisa, Earth-Centered Education. It's somewhere both at the beginning, at the end, and I find it such a perfect quote where he says educational sciences at their best should inform the artistry of others, because education is a fairly practical art, and I really very strongly relate to that perspective. That's also why my own research is both theoretical and empirical by doing it myself within a smaller context of the Hague University. What we usually see is that this sort of regenerative work does ask different things, so it does ask specific contents, you know, okay, so what's the difference between sustainability, restoration, and regeneration? It asks, for example, to learn how to deal with more transdisciplinary approaches that combine, for example, engineering with business, because if you only have one, it's not enough. It also goes a bit deeper targeting our relationships with each other, with the Earth. So that's a strong individual or relational component where I at least draw heavily from the field of eco-psychology and humanistic psychology, like purpose-driven learning and those types of things. So there's both a content element, but then the second The question is, so how can we actually do that? And that's where we're running into a system now that doesn't really allow, at least as the standard approach, to engage with those types of things in the real world. And that's what we want, because if we're only working in, you know, the ivory tower in academia, then it's not really going to contribute to change. And it's also not going to be felt and lived by the students as something that's meaningful.. So we always try to then combine that with, okay, where are we regionally connected? What are the big challenges that are in the live worlds here? A bit aligned with the work of Barnett and Jackson in Ecologies of Learning. And for some regions that may be the energy transitions. In another region that may, for example, be the vulnerability that entrepreneurs feel in the region because the real estate prices are increasing. Dramatically as foreign investors are buying up the real estate. Well, they want to try and find more sustainable regenerative ways of doing business. So all of these sort of really complex wicked problems, they usually form the basis for regenerative education. And that already causes a lot of clashes with the current educational system. If you start from predefined learning goals, intended learning outcomes, and then suddenly you have to tackle a real complex wicked problem that shifts and changes and dances in a way, in the sort of Firi'ut type language that you have to learn how to dance with the system. But if you're stuck in a system that doesn't give you the flexibility to engage in that dance, then there's no way you can. So there's a lot of sort of clashes that come from bringing these practices and principles. And there are others like cultivating personal transformations, connecting locally, or tackling urgent and relevant transition challenges, and a few more. They all cause clashes with the educational system. So it's not just the matter of doing things differently, it's also about using that to critique and transform the existing system. And in there, there's a huge challenge for educators because, you know, like you said, they're full with a day's work, they have to navigate existing systems while building something new, which is extremely difficult.

Yeah, there's loads of things I'd love to pick up on there. I mean, the first one is the context element. So the idea of the kind of regenerative framing ideas allows you, or encourages you, to look very specifically at the needs of the specific context. Is that correct? Is that what you're saying?

Yes. Yeah, absolutely. To act on a specific context and also to learn through and in a specific context, which then of course comes with different challenges and difficulties because even in a 20-week course like the one that I'm lucky enough to teach, you cannot really transform an entire system, especially a complex system like energy or vulnerability.. But you can still learn a lot about what may be possible and what future trajectories are we currently headed towards and where would we like to go. And also for the individuals involved, they may learn quite a lot at a much deeper level, at the level of values and norms and perspectives that really changes them. I've had one student last year who ran so hard into herself that she decided to quit her undergraduate degree in the last year. And restart something else because she felt she could do more good with that particular education, which from the perspective of the current higher education system is extremely inefficient and bad. But from my position or from the position of educators like me, I think it's a good thing because it shows that particular person that they have a role in making a better future, a better world, and also creates a sense of agency, maybe even a sense of courage that they can take those types of steps. And so it's both personally more revitalizing and hopefully changing the system as context of learning, which isn't— it's not as easy as I just made it sound, but I warmly invite anyone to try and do that. And there's many examples of great educators that are already engaged with those practices.

Yeah. A part of what I'm hearing there is there's an experiential element that's really vital to that process, partly to experience the as you said, the connection with the life world that you inhabit in that particular place at that particular time, but also how you experience the interaction as a unique individual yourself and how you come up against those things. So if you're just talking about these ideas, it's very difficult to have that experience.

Absolutely. And from this sort of perspective, I see also a shift in, well, perhaps the purpose of university in a way. Away from producing extremely generalizable knowledge, where really they just happen to be in a place, with exceptions of course, there's always exceptions, towards being really embedded within a place and being part of that community and co-designing with the broader ecology of learnings, and not just students and teachers and researchers, but everyone involved, perhaps even non-human life, but that's really something we need much more research about. Maybe even more practice instead of research, but together to co-design, co-develop the futures that we want to move towards. And that alternative system, which is possible, that, you know, for a student going through that, and then of course there's a lot of debates about like individualized learnings and portfolios and blockchain-based, you know, microcredentials and all of that. But if we just ignore that for a second and say, well, they go through that system for 5 years, they may not be able to radically transform that ecology within 5 years because it's inherently unpredictable, which it's a nature of reality, unfortunately, or fortunately, because there's also beauty in that unpredictability. But that can be the place where they can not just learn about topics and the contents they need to learn, but it can be the place where they learn how to become fully human in the sense of Biesta, but also someone like Scott Barry Kaufman, fully human as an ecologically mature human, with a well-developed sense of more responsibility towards the Earth.

Yeah, no, fascinating. And the other thing that strikes me is that there is a— and this is one of the challenges that I, you know, kind of wrestle with in educational change generally, I suppose— is that the people who see the need for it gravitate together, and then there are other people that don't see the need for it who have very little interest in these things. And I wondered whether you see that happening, this kind of homophily of, you know, like-minded people flocking together around— of course, you know, I get excited about something called a regenerative education course in The Hague. I live close by. I'm going to go and apply to that course because that really excites me. And so in a way, you're already preaching to the converted, you could say, rather than actually— you could argue that there's a role, or maybe this as a question, what is the role to then reach out further than the people who because, you know, it can become a little bit evangelical, these conversations.

Ja, that's true.

So what are your thoughts about kind of bridging that divide, I suppose?

Yeah, I think this is one of the paramount questions that any field really that's trying to disrupt sort of the normativity has to deal with. And for me, the answer is extremely political. Like, I'm active in The Hague, which, you know, is our seat of national government. I'm also I have a master's in political science, so I tend to think in political systems, so that may be a weakness. But I think the answer is also a political answer. So there are people that you've highlighted, right, that are already intrinsically motivated, maybe even already engaged with these types of groups or literatures or discourses. And getting them together, I think, is a really— an important part of the total change, because very often they still feel quite alone because they may be the only one or two within their university, and they may use different language and different perspectives. But so getting them together is important. Then next to that, the language itself becomes extremely important. So how do we communicate this? You know, if I know that I have a team of teachers in front of me that I can help redesign their curricula, but I know that they just want the best teaching experience for the students, I may change the language that I use. To focus on that. If I'm targeting students to apply for these roles, I may really zoom in on, oh, are you interested in discovering who you are? Or I may zoom in on, would you like to contribute to making the world a better place? Because you're reaching different audiences. So strategic communication here becomes a big one. And then I think the big responsibility, which I also realize requires a certain degree of privilege to be able even able to say that, but that's becoming activist in a sense within your own organisation and beyond. I am luckily enough in a position that I can potentially have a small influence on stuff like, you know, the future policy documents. And those are really documents where if you can get the right type of language, the right type of starting blocks in a way, like you were also saying with UNESCO with their Futures Programme or with the EC with their new advice,. If you can get those elements in those central documents, eventually that will change the system because the system wants to manage based on what they want to achieve. And if they think they want to achieve something, that's what they're going to lead towards. And then of course, not everyone is in a position to, for example, lobby with ministers, but I think anyone who is should. So there's both a political answer and I think also a strategic communication answer.

Fantastic. Yeah, no, that's really interesting. And I guess your context in the Netherlands,— I mean, I'm British but live in France. Both the UK and France are quite different contexts to the Netherlands, clearly. And do you see, with Netherlands being stereotypically, let's say, from an external perspective, a bit more progressive when it comes to many of these ideas, do you see positive signs of change, of these ideas coming into key policy documents or, you know, within the national context?

Well, you're asking it at a very paramount time, really, because we've just got a new cabinet after like a year of having a demissionary one. I think we even beat the Belgian record, but I'm not entirely sure. I see a lot of those positive signs or transition niches emerging in practice in the Netherlands, but also in the countries surrounding us. So I think, are there enough signs? You know, if you know where to point your antennas, then yes. Are they already moving towards the more municipal, regional, or national level governments? I'm not I think the European Commission is really pushing forward. I think some of the institutions are really pushing forward, or people within institutions. We just got a new minister of education who actually comes from higher education, Robert Dijkgraaf. He came back from Princeton to become our minister of education. So there's hope for sure. But generally speaking, if you sort of take a multi-level perspective, I think the individual level, there's a lot of people that are trying to to move forward. And at the political level, at like European sort of context, you're starting to see some pushing, and it's going to be a big challenge to align the layers in between so that we can actually topple the system.

And as, I mean, as one of the layers in between in your university, I imagine you're having some quite contentious conversations at certain point with some of the management and leadership in your organization. Obviously, you know, I don't want, I don't want to get you fired or anything by discussing this, but I'm interested in those conversations as well. Because as you say, there's the individual level, there's the high-level political and policy level, but then there are these organizational levels in between. And how is that for you sitting within a much larger organization as a kind of an incubator doing this work, but wanting to see ripples of change and obviously most resonantly locally in your organization? What are those conversations like for you?

They're challenging for sure. We have this thing in our culture called 'polderen,' which essentially means that all our political decisions sort of end up in the middle because we have a very— our culture is very much based about finding the mean, I would say, politically at least. Now, that's great if you want to perpetuate systems. It's not so great when you want to change them. So that's, in the Netherlands at least, a cultural difficulty. Now, what you usually see is that students are quite okay with these forms of education. Maybe not initially, because it does ask them to do a lot more work, especially, you know, social-emotionally and spiritual-psychological type work that they're not used to. Most teachers will get it, depending on if you choose your language right. The big challenge that we have more sort of the administrative side or the management side is that Yeah, they sort of regress to the mean. I think there's also a little bit of courage lacking across the system to really embrace these types of changes on a larger scale. And there are, of course, exceptions, but yeah, they're really difficult chats.

Yeah. And are there specific conversations around— because obviously you spoke a while ago about shifting away from these predetermined learning outcomes to something more emergent. Let's say, are some of the conversations around the concern about where that ends up? Because there's clearly with that kind of emergent idea, by definition, there's a degree of uncertainty to that.

Yeah, absolutely.

And to accountability structures and to what are the students going to get at the end of this? Are they going to meet all the required outcomes, et cetera? That can be a challenging dissonance between those two things.

No, absolutely. And that entire sort of system of making all of the learning predictable. And I think in a way, that's the drudgification that Bista also speaks about. That stems from my perspective, at least, not so much from efficiency, but from fear. Because it's very scary. I think one of the guests on my podcast described it, well, it's a leap of faith every time, because you genuinely don't know where it's going to end up. And you may be disappointed. You may even run into times where you as a teacher are the thing that's holding back the further development. Like, am I emotionally equipped enough to deal with this situation? I've had times where the answer was no. And then you also have to be mature enough as a person to be able to say, okay, I need to get a professional psychologist, for example, to help, or I need to get a professional coach or whatever. So I think that sort of fear-based system that we have now, which from my perspective translates to everything that— how we normally organize higher education. That's one of the main systemic barriers, even though it's a psychological barrier. But I think it's so strongly lived that to really transform that is going to take a lot of very conscious work. It's also going to take a lot of personal effort from those people that are caught in that system. Now, what I used to think strongly was actually, you know, the entire system is completely broken and we need to just get rid of it and just start again. And you're seeing that, you know, some universities are emerging that are really embracing, you know, alternative methods completely. I've become a little bit more reluctant to think that way, although sometimes when I get frustrated I still do, because I also— I do see that there is value in making sure that everyone has a certain degree of basic knowledge or even disciplinary knowledge. It's just that if your entire system is built around it, then you get really one lopsided development. So it's about How can we find a better balance where we can have both that sort of control-based, fear-based, or intended learning as a basis, but then also engage with the more existential, the more emergent, the more living approaches within the journey that someone has through their educational process. And how we then organize and all of that is going to be a lot of different questions. They're probably also going to be different for each location and institution.

That's fascinating. Because I mean, that resonates a lot with me just in the relation, you know, many conversations about these dichotomous, false dichotomous arguments about, you know, as you say, system transformation, we need to go full throttle all the way to the other side. And I mean, I think personally, they're nonsensical because you leave behind so much good stuff. And actually, you, you don't really, you haven't fully thought through all of the different aspects of moving. And maybe it's a false argument. Maybe nobody's really arguing that, but that is what comes across sometimes. And I think I mean, in a way, it goes back to your point about context, right? There is a nuance that is absolutely necessary based on the context that we're in. And this is why I like Dave Snowden and his work on Cynefin. And, you know, the idea that, for example, command and control as a leadership style and management style is absolutely necessary at certain points. It's not that it's wholly bad all the time. Because in a particular context, for example, in a crisis, you need a particular style whereas in a position where, you know, things are much calmer or in a moment of innovation, you need a different style of leadership and support and coaching and etc. Just as an example, it's the same in learning experiences for kids, you know, sometimes they need certain things, other times they need a different experience.

And here you have that even twice because you have the context in the sense of the transition challenge and the local context that you're engaging with but also the individual context of the student that you're working with, the students that you're working with. How far are they in the process of becoming a fully ecologically mature human being also determines how much you can push them towards openness, towards emergence, towards knowing that they are safe in your care, in your temporary care as a teacher, but embracing uncertainty. And that's one of the scariest things that a human being can do, really.

Interesting. And that's also why we end up talking a lot about skills and competencies and, you know, agility and all these, these 21st century skills, because that becomes a language and it's a really poor language, I would argue, but it becomes a language for how we can talk about exactly what you're saying there. And I'm interested in what you said there, ecologically mature. What does that mean to you?

Yeah. So I think, I mean, there's a long history of people that thought about that, you know, particularly eco-philosophy, which I should acknowledge. But the way that I sort of see it is this combination of the works of someone like Biesta, who talks about education's purpose as becoming mature in relationship to society, where I would like to extend this pretty much the same argument. So education's purpose or job is to make sure that people become mature in relationship to a broader society. So that's not just a society of other humans, but a society of life that has to deal with very real ecological and social barriers, you know, the doughnut economic type work. We kind of exceed the carrying capacity of the Earth and learning to deal with that and learning to transform the Earth into systems that respect that balance, I think is part of the ecological maturity, which is just as important as becoming existentially or emotionally secure so that you can be a good partner, a good person, really, not just for other humans, but more generally for life.

No, interesting. Kurt talks about grown-upness, which I think is quite a nice way of saying it, educating for grown-upness, which is That's fantastic. But then also maybe another link to his work is also the idea of instrumental purpose we put education to, and maybe that's where we can finish, but just talk a bit about that. Because I wonder, is there a tension for you at all in that idea? Because so we often put education to work, right? To create certain social outcomes or political outcomes or economic outcomes. And that is a narrative that we discuss and we argue about which purpose it should be put to. Is there any tension there for you about the idea that by putting the prefix of regenerative education, we are essentially doing the same thing again, but we're just giving it a different purpose. We're giving it the purpose of regeneration and, you know, at the individual level, but obviously at the whole planetary level.

Yeah. Well, I think it's a very pertinent question and one that I run into quite often, because when I start speaking about these things with some of our more conservative colleagues, I guess you could say, one of the arguments that they will usually say is something along the lines of, well, but education is supposed to be neutral, there's no place for politics, etc. And I'm very much in the camp that that's impossible. I think what we can decide is what type of political directions or how much political multiplicity we invite, into our educational thinking. But to say, or to think, or to state that there is somehow a neutral form of education, whether it's K-12 or university education, I don't think that's possible. And if I take that assumption, then I have to make a choice, because if I don't make a choice, then, well, I don't really have a lot of character, I suppose. And then I would much rather be on the side that sees the potential or a potentiality of higher education, what higher education could be in playing a part in the next century or centuries of our species, which I think goes beyond, or which I hope goes beyond, just instrumentally generating the next batch of workers. So that's sort of my position.

Yeah, I mean, it definitely does that. As you say, it's a different horizon.. But it's interesting that even making no choice is still making a choice, right, in some way? Absolutely.

Yeah, no, absolutely. And, you know, there are times when making no choice— I think this really ties into the latest paper of Bistow about the Eichmann-Barks paradox, where Eichmann decided not to make a choice and therefore lost his agency.

Exactly.

So sometimes there are legitimate times when you say, well, I have to, you know, just wait and see. But I don't think we are living in conditions on the Earth right now where we can afford to do that. My main question that I always ask for myself when I decide to do something, and I also invite others, and sometimes people really don't like it when I ask the question, is with these choices, will we be able to look, not live, but will we be able to look ourselves in the mirror in 20 years and be proud of who we're seeing? Which I think is a much more pertinent question than will we be able to live with ourselves. So that's the question that guides my work. And from that perspective, I feel we have to radically change some elements of education so that we can create an education that's fit for a world that is dealing with multiple crises.

Amazing. And the other side of that paradox, the Parks side of that paradox, Rosa Parks, she made a very strong choice in a particular moment to make a statement, a very strong statement about what she believed and what she thought was right. And I, what I find about her, her is interesting is that often there's this slightly mythical narrative around her that she, you know, just one particular day decided to do that, ignoring the fact that behind her, around her was a community of like the Highlander Center. And, you know, a lot of educational work had gone on in a community supporting that kind of preparation for that moment, which I also think is fascinating. So there's a role for education to play there. But yeah, as you say, there's a lot of concern about that idea of overly politicizing education, which, as you have said, is impossible to take the values or the political kind of ideologies out of education completely.

Well, I believe so, at least. There's two things there really, is that I think that everything— I tend to think in processes. She stood up on a bus in a specific moment, but that was part of a larger process. Nested in a system of processes. I think that's the case for everything. So a lot of the work that we also do, you know, we in this, this broader community that's starting to move in this way, we are essentially taking leap of faiths because we don't know if— and I don't want to compare myself to Rosa Parks, that's, that's not what I'm trying to do— but we do have to take those types of leap of faiths if we really want to change something. And those leap of faiths come with genuine risk, right, to your career. You even, you know, started one of your questions you don't have to answer because I hope you don't get fired. Like, I'm not worried about that, but I also don't care. Because I think this type of work is more important than an individual job. I also have to highlight I'm in a privileged position that if I do get fired, I can get a new job and I don't have a mortgage. So that allows me some space to be a bit more activist perhaps, or to be a bit more politically outspoken. And about the politics, there is really no way that I can see we could ever have a fully neutral educational system. So either we have to be very clear about the values and the political choices that underlie the system, which I think many people have done now, especially in higher education, that have highlighted the instrumental nature, the neoliberal nature. Now you even hear that in some of the metaphors that I, at least I hear, but others have also described, you know, like we're a factory of learning. Like, why would anyone describe the university as a factory of learning when learning is so much more complex than a production line? 'And I should know because I was originally trained as a chemical engineer.' Like, that just used to be my job, right? It's like, that's so much easier. Or to really be spaces where we can invite a lot of different political perspectives and use that as a form of learning in its own right. And neither of those options are easy and both come with genuine career risks, personal risks, but we need people that are willing to take those risks because otherwise change is definitely not going to happen.

Yeah. Wow.

Thank you. And then just very finally, more practically with your, with Mission Zero work, and I know you're just about to go on writing retreat, what are the kind of strategic next steps for your work at Mission Zero?

Yeah, so for Mission Zero we're now, we're sort of running into our third year, so we're really consolidating. I think we've got the basics of our research center going and now it's about, you know, doing more of what we said we would do. Personally, I'm really excited that they're starting to, to get more communities are starting to come together of activists, scholars. We just happen to have one of our first community of practice meetings for regenerative higher education in the Netherlands last week, which was really cool. Personally, like you said, I'm going on a sabbatical from about May. Still looking for a place to host me. So if anyone here is like, oh, it would be cool to have a slightly crazy Dutch person join us, do please feel free to reach out. And after that, I'm working on a PhD. It's one of those things that the current system basically tells you you need to have a voice that matters. So I'm hoping to finish that relatively quickly and then we'll continue the mission of trying to transform higher education. And I've been asked this question a lot because if you look at the future, like the far future, you have sort of more of like a gentle grasp of where you're going. It always helps to have a sort of short, long-term goal. And I always say by the year of 2030, I want at least every student in the Netherlands, for them it to be a natural part of their educational journey to engage with a form of regenerative education, which I think is pretty audacious, but you know, why not?

Why not? Exactly. Amazing. Well, I'll be happy to be along for the ride with you and help you where I can. So no, thank you.

Cheers.

That's amazing. Really, really important work and just fascinating work. You know, as I said at the beginning, a slightly different context in terms of higher education, but it's, you know, some of the same challenges for sure in terms the structure and the predetermined outcomes that we're seeking, but need to be a little bit more confident and courageous to lean into the uncertainty a bit, right?

Definitely. And thank you for, for having me here and being such a great host.

Brilliant. Thank you so much, Wes. We hope you've enjoyed this episode. Please feel free to continue the dialogues with us on social media with the hashtag #futurelearningdesignpodcast. And on the Intrepid Ed News website, intrepidednews.com.