Strange Times for Educational Futures - A Conversation with Prof. Keri Facer

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

I think that story of schooling as an institutional endeavor to kind of funnel kids into particular ways of being in the world is dominant. I also insist on the ongoing moments of magic, transformation, wonder, care, relationships that exist in any school at any time.

Hi everyone, and thanks for joining me this week. My name's Tim Logan, and the podcast is produced by Good Impact Labs. This week on the podcast, we're time traveling with the fabulous Professor Kerry Faeser. How we think about the future or futures makes a real difference to the decisions that we make in schools today. And Kerry has been asking critically important questions about educational futures, pasts, and presents for the last 20 years. And they are still as important today as when she published her brilliant book Learning Futures: Education, Technology and Social Change in 2011. Kerry is the Professor of Educational and Social Futures at the University of Bristol in the UK, where she leads the British Academy Times of a Just Transition programme and is the co-investigator on the Centre for Socio-Digital Futures. She's also the Professor of Public Education at Black Mountains College, led by a recent podcast guest, Ben Rawlins. Previously, Kerry was a Zennström Professor in Climate Change Leadership at Uppsala University, expert advisory group member on UNESCO's Future of Education Commission, and also the co-investigator of Transforming Education for Sustainable Futures. She's doing so much to empower educators all over the world and bring these amazing ideas to a wider audience. So you can find links to all of her work in the show notes.

It's a real pleasure to meet you. Thank you. Firstly, I mean, so the connection really happily came through Vanessa. Mm-hmm. Because I know you wrote the, what, the afterword for her latest book, Outgrowing Modernity. So super exciting to, yeah, to be able to have a conversation about some of your interesting stuff. So it'd be really interesting to get into the time stuff if, because I know that's the stuff you're really working on now, but perhaps if we can firstly start with where you kind of how are you coming to this work, I suppose. So around time and futures and social futures and all of the amazing stuff you're doing. But what I've understood is that there was a care for the planet, let's say, that is kind of motivating some of this work. So perhaps if we could start there, I think that might be nice to just orient around where is this coming from for you in terms of what, like what drives you, motivates you around these kind, these conversations about educational futures?

Well, I've been working on educational futures for 25 years and it comes, it comes from a couple of places really. One, just a deep resistance to the idea that we should inherit the futures that are designed for us by technology companies. You know, the tech bros are not new. This has been going on for a quarter of a century, if not more. So my first work was looking at technological change and the sort of stories that were being produced around that and the implications for education. And it got me frustrated. And so we started studying the way in which those futures were impacting on kids' lives. And we started trying to figure out how do you How do you create different future imaginaries? So I started off in the tech field, but obviously if you do anything to do with futures, you have to take account of what's going on with climate and environment and questions of how we sustain a livable planet.

Well, you'd think so, right? You think you have to. Some people, it seems like, are trying not to, but yeah.

Yeah, I mean, you know, the, yeah, there's a lot of people trying not to. I think there are a lot of people also trying to work out how to do it, but they have different kind of theories of change and different practices. So one of the things that I feel in this whole field is something about recognizing the diversity of different ways that people are trying to construct futures that are livable. We might not agree with methods, but I think this— I like starting from a basis of listening to what people are trying to achieve and then figuring out where the points of connection are. So yeah, so anyway, so I got pulled into the climate side. And I mean, what's been astonishing to me working more in the sort of mainstream climate and sustainability transitions field is how little they engage with education.

Right.

So quite a lot of what I've been doing over the last 5 or 6 years has been trying to say to these guys, you know what, the climate challenge, the ecological crisis issue is an educational issue. Figuring out how we learn to live differently is the challenge. And so trying to create that connection between those framings. But I'm also slightly concerned that the climate and the ecological sits outside of any engagement with the technological. And so for me, it's thinking about the ecological, the technological, the social, the political, and the cultural all together. How do we deal with change in all of those different aspects? And then what does it mean to learn differently in those contexts?

Amazing. Yeah, absolutely. I hear you. And it, I wonder whether that's why some people have kind of struggled with Vanessa's work around the meta-relational AI, you know, her deeper engagement with the technology and with the AI because Yeah, I agree. Sometimes they are just a little bit conveniently separate, but actually the reality is quite a messy, or not quite, a very messy space that we have to navigate together, right? And that's going to involve a lot of people who definitely don't agree about some pretty fundamental things.

Yeah. And this is it. How do we figure out, how do we sit together? How do we learn to listen to each other? I mean, that to me is a critical thing.

Amazing. I mean, maybe just then as a way into the stuff on your more recent work, we could talk about your earlier work and particularly, I mean, I was struck by how resonant, and this is not just, you know, to fluff your ego, but I was struck by how resonant the content of that book is that was written in 2011 or probably earlier than that, but published in 2011.

Yeah.

Like it's, it's really resonant that the content of that whole book. And it just makes me think, right, we're in 2026. That was 15 years ago. Like, not a great deal perhaps has changed in the educational conversations around some of those things. But no, I mean, so without people realizing what the book is about, and obviously it's directly relevant to where the podcast sits, the Future Learning Design, this idea of orientations around the future and the present, obviously, but thinking about futures. And so, I mean, yeah, how do you reflect now, maybe 15 years later on, how does education often orient towards the future, the concept of futures, plural, but then also the past, obviously, in terms of tradition. And then the fact that we are here now together in the present.

Yeah, I mean, you're right. I mean, that book, the Learning Futures book, was written in 2009, 2010, and it's still disturbingly relevant. And I'm actually trying to figure out how you write a second edition of a book that is oriented towards futures, because the publisher like 'Please do another version.' I'm like, 'Okay, but it's talking about the future. How do you do a second edition?' So it's temporally quite complicated thing. I mean, in relation to education's relationship with the future and with time in general, it's just deeply dysfunctional, really. I mean, we've inherited with modern education a tradition of thinking about education as a time-bound activity, as something that operates within a concept of linear development. So the idea of regular linear development dominates so much of the educational imaginary. There's a huge emphasis on the future at the expense of the present and the past. So the worry is, you know, how are kids going to live in the future? And then it's a tiny bit of the future. It's always massively dominated by the question of how will people get jobs in the future? So a lot of what I've been trying to do the last few years, and I'm coming back to this again now, is trying to unpick all of that and really try to get to some of the deeper questions about the futures that we actually want that sit underneath, I think, some of those discussions around, you know, how do you prepare kids for the future? So the problem that we have is we tend to think about jobs and employment. That's what dominates school, future imaginaries. And actually there's a deeper set of questions that sit under that, which are about security and wellbeing and how do kids build lives for themselves. And so one of the things that seems important to me is to sort of dig deeper what sits underneath when everybody starts talking about future. Well, which futures are you talking about and what, What are the kind of deep longings and desires that sit underneath that? Maybe if we start working at that level, at the kind of mythic level underneath, that'll give us more points of connection and it will allow us to ask much deeper questions about the way in which we design education.

Yeah, absolutely. And sometimes it becomes a kind of a, just another battleground for what kind of future we want or this, and this idea of this monolithic future that somehow we are competing over. No, you know, the kind of tech bro version of what that might be, or the more, you know, the climate activist version of what that might be, or the— and I sometimes feel it ends up being a kind of a strange disconnected utopian war of words somehow.

Yeah.

Right. That it's like, well, of course what we care about is important, but as you say, what are the things that really are the longings and the yearnings that are underlying some of the things about how we imagine a future?

I mean, utopia gets a bad rep. If you look at Ruth Levitas's work, she talks about utopia as method and she talks about precisely that process of dreaming and longing and envisioning as a way of asking questions about the present. And that to me is really where I try to situate myself now in relation to education, is to recognize that our visions, dreams, desires are all actors in the present, as are our histories and our pasts. And so the question is, we can't ignore the future and the past and just focus on the present, but we, we need to recognize that they're all playing at the same time. So it's a very different temporal frame that we're existing in this kind of wonderful, interesting soup of past, present, and futures that are there. And how do we take care of what is emerging that we think is good? I mean, noticing that, thinking about how you nurture what is emerging that comes from all of these different perspectives, that to me is one of the critical challenges that we face.

Yeah, it's interesting because then you would have— there's other discussions about the fact that, I don't know, maybe you share this perspective that there's a kind of a lacking in the potential imaginaries of the way we talk and think, especially with young people about their futures because it's so rooted in what's happening now. And therefore, it's very, sometimes very difficult to say, to project out into this mythic 10, 20, 50-year horizon of, well, It could be radically different to what it is now, but I'm going to orient, I'm going to anchor around the things I am familiar with now in order as I think about, imagine what the future could be. And people like Phoebe Teakel and, you know, many others are out there, Rob Hopkins out there kind of talking about how do we fall in love, for example, with a different kind of future possibility. But so do you feel like, is that important educational work that you think needs doing?

Absolutely. I mean, I suppose there's a different, like you say, you know, we're not trying to get I don't think it is helpful to get into the terrain of kind of let's have a fight about whose vision of the future is best, but actually to recognize that we're always ongoingly imagining. And the question is what opens up possibilities for us? So, you know, the person I'm really inspired by is Hala Lotse-Sitko, who works at Rhodes University in South Africa. And I was with her just last year and her focus is on possibility knowledges. How do we create knowledge that opens possibility, right? So it's not just about locking into, you know, if only we get a great vision of the future, it'll all be fine. It won't. It fundamentally won't. We've got lots of great visions of the future. We actually have to figure out how to emerge possibility in the present. So, and also our inspiration comes from, yes, imagining futures, but also remembering pasts and things that we left behind. You know, we've done things before that we can draw on. We've got memories that we can use to help inspire us and to see what might be possible. The issue is to sort of pluralize and diversify our imagination in general. We don't need to get locked into whether the future future is the right place to do that or the past because actually different people are oriented in different way. There are fundamentally, there are a bunch of people that love talking about futures. There's a bunch of people that love talking about past, right? We need to work together. So our challenge is, as Halla said, you know, what are the possibility knowledges and how do we draw inspiration from different times to help us see how we act in the present? So absolutely love the work Rob Hopkins and Phoebe are doing and And it's always yes and, and it's also about drawing on the inspiration of people that might be working with a different temporal frame as well.

Yeah, I love that. I've never, yeah, not heard of that. That's brilliant because it is, there is also a danger that I see a lot that in a mechanistic present, we craft a vision of the future and then we backwards engineer a mechanistic future and it's like, I don't wanna live in that world. Thanks very much.

Yeah.

You know, so, and obviously that's overly characterizing an ideological that I recognize. But that idea of like orienting around where we are, because where we are is where we are, right?

Okay.

Yeah.

We'd like to disappear off into our imaginaries, but we are where we are. And so there is an embodied and an opening that if we can create those kinds of experiences for young people more, that feels, yeah, that's super interesting.

I mean, and the other side is, you know, there's been the field of future studies for what, 60, 70 years now, right? And One of the things that the field still struggles with is that gap between the imagination of the alternative and the reality in the present. Okay, so we know that there's effectively this canyon between the imagining and the practice. And so what we have to do is kind of close that gap and constantly see ourselves as in a dialogue between imagination and practice all the time. It's that iterative ongoing relationship. We're experimental. This is why I think Vanessa's work is so important. Because she doesn't get hooked up on a particular vision of the future. She talks about how do we gesture towards it? How do we open up space in the present to almost kind of find cracks or edges or possibilities that we can't quite see right now? Because if we can see it super clearly right now, the chances are we're not really disrupting our assumptions, you know?

Yeah, absolutely. And somehow becoming comfortable with that fuzziness, right? Because that's also part of the challenge, I think, is a kind of psycho-emotional level, spiritual level, whatever it is, you know, we as humans like to know to an extent, or certain cultural humans like to know. And there is a different threshold of how comfortable we are with that fuzziness of not quite knowing where it is we're going, but still feeling oriented somehow. Or there's some interesting questions there about how do we, and it's all in that language of preparing young people for the future, right? It's a really uninterrogated problematic set of language if we just assume, oh, we all know what we're talking about.

Well, I mean, yes, I suppose this question of orientation is a really interesting one to me. I mean, you'll have seen recently the poster that we, that Harriet Hand, my colleague, did on deadlines. Yeah, it was good fun. We've done a lot of work with local groups around that, you know, where is your deadline? Where is your orientation? And we had this wonderful workshop last year and we were working with a local councillor who'd been incredibly stressed by the sort of 2030 deadline for climate change. If we don't do this, you know. So he always had the sense of this orientation of this deadline, sort of creating this anxiety and this energy and this momentum and that sense of always being behind. And in that workshop, what we invite people to do is sort of draw timelines and then break them to pieces and mix them up and then say, well, where actually is your orientation? And he ended up centering it kind of inside himself in terms of the present. So he decided to reframe it so that he was aware that he was being driven by the values inside at present rather than this arbitrary deadline out there. And I know 2030 is not arbitrary, but in some ways it is. And this reminds me of, you know, the quote that I would share with my students is Václav Havel's quote about hope. You know, Havel was the kind of solidarity leader, you know, and you'll be familiar with it, but it's, you know, it's not the idea that things are gonna get better, it's that what you're doing makes sense. And that to me is again a different orientation. It locates it, connects you to the body, connects you to the heart, connects you to, to noticing. That to me, thinking about futures can be also a way of having blinders to everything else that's going on. It can be an escape sometimes. 100%.

Yeah, absolutely. I love that. And that you're going to do it anyway. I mean, in that quote, right? It's about you're actually going to act.

Yeah.

And in the acting, you're not saying, I've figured it out, I've got the answer, I'm going to act and this will solve the problem. You're saying, I'm going to do something, I'm going to step into this and then continue noticing hopefully what happens when I act. And that I think is really important. Obviously, I mean, I don't know if you know, we are doing this work with Festival of Hope with IB. So the concept of hope has been really important and interrogating that because absolutely, I mean, some people will, it's quite a polarizing concept. It's quite interesting actually. But I suppose maybe just briefly, the other dimension to this is the other yearning that many people have towards staying where we are or orienting towards the past in a way that holds, I guess it's, you would call it a conservative, a kind of a conserving of things we value. And I think in the polarized conversations that we're all in, there's something interesting there about where is that feeling coming from in a lot of people and it's getting expressed in some really personally, I would say highly offensive ways in certain contexts.

But I think we need to distinguish between the desire to hold onto power and privilege.

Nice. Yeah. Right, right, right.

And the desire to conserve what feels valuable and important as a kind of collective discussion. And those are two different things. And I—

So true. I love that. Yeah.

That's a great— I mean, that's why I find actually, you know, I've seen so many processes for thinking about futures, but this is why I actually really like Bill Sharpe's Three Horizons, precisely because the third horizon is also sort of dreams and longing and also what do we want to take care of? And, you know, I'm over, you know, I've spent too much time with environmentalists who are like, bring on the apocalypse 'cause then we can create something new. You know, I mean, it's an adolescent desire to sort of crash and break everything so that you can create something new out of it. I mean, it's, you know, we know who gets hurt in those situations. We do want to take care of some stuff. We do want to take care of some relationships. We do. I mean, to me, the critical thing we need to take care of at the moment is a kind of commitment to civility in our relationships with each other that involves listening and caring for each other. You know, there are some things that we want to take care of, but when that's mobilized simply as a sort of call to maintain power and privilege, it's a different thing. And we need to distinguish between those.

No, I love that. Yeah, completely agree. It's interesting how quickly it polarizes, but all of these topics do, right?

Yeah.

Anything, even if you bring in futures or you bring in climate or immediately there's a divergence happens very quickly.

This is why I turn to time 'cause we all live in time, right? So, you know, we are—

That's true. Yeah.

Ruth Ozeki's phrase is the time being, you know, we're time beings, we exist in it. So actually, you know, to me there's just a bit of space and a bit of freedom in saying like, how do we live in time? What is the, you know, what does it mean to exist as time-bound beings? What does it mean to use temporal ideas to make sense of the world, how do we recognize the different roles and contributions that can play in creating division, in building relationships? You know, it's almost why I turn to that because I think if we can figure some of that out, then we can figure some of the other.

Hmm. Interesting. Yeah. So just on Bill, we've had Bill on the podcast and the thing, one of the things I love about Bill is also the way he talks about patterning in the present of the future. And again, it's the same kind of thing. It's, it's easy to look at a tool like Three Horizons and think, that it's projecting off into futures, but actually he's really careful to talk about patterning in the present, which is, I just think is beautiful.

And actually the thing I think most people struggle with in that one is not horizon 1 or horizon 3, it's horizon 2. It's what's emerging. And that's where the pedagogic work needs to be done is how to support the perception of possibility in the present.

Yeah. Interesting. So, so yeah, then maybe let's get onto the time thing. Cause it, I mean, it's interesting just hearing you say that we all exist in time also makes me think We've done a few episodes recently about kind of embodied practice and different ways of like thinking and learning and critical thinking through the body, for example. And that feels like almost a similar kind of intent that we all have bodies and therefore, you know, there's a way of bringing us all back into this common experience of having a body, being in time, that maybe there's some peace or some sense to be found in those places. I don't know.

Or playfulness.

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Yeah. I mean, the, I think the time and the body are deeply connected. I mean, one of the things that I've started doing recently is when we start a meeting is just take a moment, take a breath, take a pause. What does it mean to settle in our bodies? What does it mean to know that we're here? How do we allow our kind of minds and energies to kind of catch up with the bodies that have got us to this place? And the dialogue is completely different. As soon as you've done that, as soon as you settle. So yes, I think the time and the body are deeply interconnected, not least frankly, 'cause our bodies are gonna end. So dealing with what it, to end, to finish, to die, you know, that is the heart of so much of what we are dealing with here as well is anxiety.

Yeah, yeah.

Death. So.

Yeah, totally.

Yeah.

I was in Helsinki earlier, or just at the end of last year with Gio and Vanessa was there remotely and Nora Bateson and Dave Snowden. And it was a really interesting gathering, Waves gathering. I had the feeling there, 'cause Gio, Vanessa's daughter, held a kind of a land acknowledgement and just a kind of landing with the land, she called it, at the beginning of one of the sessions. And there are some people who would, there's a sense of this is about something else. It's about an ontology or an animism or a set of beliefs or whatever. Actually what I experienced in that moment, and I've, you know, other reflections about the way that different religions might do the same thing, is like, creating some space for you to land with the land or to just be, as you say, like at the beginning of a meeting to just kind of check in and be like, oh, okay, we're here. And so there is a, there's something really, I think really deeply important about that, that we, we have been very quick to kind of erase somehow because it doesn't feel productive or it doesn't feel like a good use of time. Let's say, right? Because it, but actually there's something just so important and as you say, orienting or calming or, you know, whatever about those moments that just feel increasingly to me like really important that we take time to do that.

Yeah, definitely. I mean, and also our language struggles to allow us to talk of time in a way that doesn't treat it as a resource. So we take time or we spend time or, So, but this to me, understanding that we can play with time, right? It doesn't exist. It only exists as we socially construct it. We all have the experience of expanding it, of slowing it down. I mean, the challenges that we have are around coordinating with other people, but time per se doesn't exist. So this is why any sorts of practices or rituals like that, and that's why like some of the old religions are super useful here. Is they help us kind of acknowledge that and recognize it. And they also help us see how we can do this in our lives on an ongoing basis rather than having to make a special thing. We don't necessarily need a workshop on this, you know, it's like, let's get over workshops and let's start thinking about embodied ongoing practices in our lives that allow us to relate with each other and be with each other differently. And to me, that's so critical, particularly in education, because education is governed by time as a language of threat. So I've worked in schools and we talk about how do you use time? And they talk about, you know, well, we threaten children that they won't succeed if they haven't done something by a certain time. We talk about them being behind. We give them detentions, we take time away, you know. So if we're bringing our kids up through an education that treats time, which is the thing we live in, as a source of threat, I mean, that's a level of dysfunction. That we can't even see and notice. And so I think it's just helpful to notice that and then say, actually, you don't need to change the entire education system. You can actually change the relationships on an ongoing basis in the school by simply interrogating the way in which we're using time.

Yeah, absolutely. And just to notice, it's what's so interesting is even then going into this part of the conversation, it takes, maybe listeners might feel a sense of kind of, oh, that's kind of an abstract topic, right? To be talking about time existing or not existing. And it's so interesting how separated from that we have become that it's like the only way we can talk about it is in some kind of strange, you know, end of the night philosophical discussion. But actually, as you say, we use it, we are in it and we're talking about it implicitly all of the time, but really not often aware of how we're orienting or how we're talking about it. So the idea of helping, you talk about helping young people think about the shape of time, even like just even that question, what's, I heard you talking about asking people to draw the shape of time and it's like, that's interesting cuz you then start surfacing some interesting preconceptions or whatever.

Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, so a couple of things that we do, I mean, one of them is to simply ask a question like, what clock should we use to make a decision about how long we do this for? Right? So, are we gonna use this weird thing on the wall? Are we gonna use how our body's feeling? Are we gonna use how fun this conversation is? You know, are we gonna use the fact that you gotta go and have lunch with your son? I mean, yeah. So, that's a simple way in to show that we're always making a decision about what sort of time which is like a measure of change, a measure of duration. That's one of the ways in. But yeah, I mean, I love asking people to draw the shape of time, not least because everybody kind of assumes that their way of drawing time is the obvious one. And so the most interesting thing is doing that in dialogue with other people, because once you've realized that you've drawn maybe, you know, a set of squiggles and somebody else has drawn a circle and somebody else has drawn a line, then you've got the basis for a conversation. Why do you see it that way? Gosh, that's interesting. And then critically, and this ties to both education and climate change, is if you see it that way, how does that frame the problem? You know, how does that structure the world as you perceive it? So if you see time as something that's ongoing and cyclical and coming round and round and round, then certain ways of being and acting in the world are going to make sense to you. I mean, and talking about tech bros, I mean, if you've got a philosophy of long-termism, which is one of the most interesting and potentially dangerous conceptions of time knocking around at the moment, which is thinking on the duration of millennia, then the humans that exist at the moment are not very important, right? So within that temporal frame, their logic and their values make a load of sense. The issue is what temporal frame do we want to be working with? So it's, that's always a question. Which temporal frame do we want to choose? Yeah. So the easy way into that is start drawing a shape. What shape is time? Compare it with somebody else and then think about why does this one work and that one not work?

Yeah. Oh, interesting. Yeah. Try it at home or try it with your class. Absolutely. But then there's also an interesting thing about kind of discounting the future. So, you know, the Long Now Foundation or Seven Generation Thinking, or there's different ways of actually trying to encourage people to think more about a longer-term future. Yeah. I hear what you're saying about the millennial thinking and it's then how it manifests, but then also there's a kind a present orientation that actually we then do this externalizing of all this cost that we're, you know, all this pollution that we're creating by all this. Oh, it doesn't matter because it's not something I can see in my future or even my children's future. It's way off and it's too far and distant, so therefore it doesn't factor into my thinking. So some interesting, definitely interesting questions there.

I mean, this is always to have the discussion about which timeframe, for example, are we going to use, or which rhythm are we going to prioritize, or which tempo do we think is important? So what I'm trying to get people out of— there's a bit of a knee-jerk reaction at the moment, which is linear thinking is bad, cyclical thinking is good, short-termism is bad, long-termism is good. And actually, no, it's to do with the fitness for purpose and how those construct lenses for us to pay attention to something and the fact that we're always going to need to negotiate it, right? So I don't want to replace a kind of totalitarian linear modernist short-termism long-term frame with a totalitarian cyclical long-term frame. All right. That does not improve the world as far as I'm concerned, cuz again, you're gonna have inequalities that emerge as a result of that. You're gonna have certain privileges. So the issue is to become, for me, more fluent in understanding the way in which these different temporal frames are constructing our definition of problems and also creating conflict between us. Like, are we operating with these frames but not understanding that we're doing that. So the issue is to become more agile with temporal frames, not to get locked into the idea that there's one right time, because one right time is an authoritarian move.

Yeah, absolutely. And I heard you say on a separate webinar that schooling is almost by definition a practice of temporal control and management. Or temporal and bodily control and management. And so that totalitarianism kind of is there in schools, right?

Yeah. I mean, schools have been designed to discipline the body within space and within time. That's schooling, I think. So I actually think schools as places are quite interesting things. They're quite fascinating social and cultural practices. And, you know, kids are operating with different temporal frames all the time. I mean, you know, schools are places where all sorts of stuff emerges that is informal, that is disruptive, I mean, they're in many places, they're our last public service that exists that potentially brings communities together. So I have quite an— I always want to distinguish between schooling and schools and industrialized schooling is precisely about disciplining into certain behaviors in the bodies. But schools themselves as social institutions are super interesting. And I think we need to remember them because they are sites of collective relationship. Which we lose at our peril, and people are happy to push us into kind of personalized, individualized, online AI learning. We're gonna lose something big if we do that. So I would want to distinguish schools and schooling.

So, ah, I love that. Yeah. It's so interesting. I hadn't, I didn't take your, you saying that before in that way. And that's so interesting cuz it does open up again, I mean, in a way, some of the similar things of like schools have people in them with bodies who are existing in time. And actually we're quite uncompliant when it comes to like these strange squishy things that we are, and we don't really want to be controlled by this abstract totalitarian concept of schooling, right? So the reality of being in a place altogether in relationship, as you say, of course it, there exists there a set of discourses around what schooling is and why are we here that orient people. But there is also a kind of a level of like disruption or non-compliance from, for a lot of people in that, teachers and young people included, because there's another thing going on here, which is all of us being together in relationship in a community.

Yeah. And also actually there's something about naming the fact that these disciplining practices aren't just abstract, they're embodied in timetables and the timetables have a particular technology and that technology has embodied within it particular ideas about human relationships and time. And you know, I'm a socio-materialist, you know, I think discourse matters, social matters, but the material really matters, right? So these technologies can be redesigned. So one of my challenges to anybody listening to this who works in this area is to say like, what would happen if we sat down with a timetabler and said, let's operate on different temporal frames? Like what would it mean if we designed a school timetable around fascination? What would it mean if we designed a school timetable around the duration of bodily energy? What would it mean if we did that? And these are things that we can redesign. So it's not just an abstract concept of time that causes difficulty. It's actually very practically timetablers. And anyone who works in schools and universities knows exactly how much power they have.

The tyranny of the timetable. Yeah, the way it manifests. No, it makes me think of Kieran Beosetti, who I had on the podcast, who talked about the timetable being an artifact of conscience.

Yeah.

And so that it shows up in the timetable. Absolutely. No, no, 100%. And then it also makes me think of, as you say, around if we oriented around fascination or wonder or curiosity, Then, and I've had this conversation with many educators, then you bring in the question of time wasting because there is this kind of productivity language, efficiency language that is also present in those spaces of like, I remember a friend, Paul Magnussen, talking about it with his young people in an Agile Learning Center. It's like, you know, if they're sitting and contemplating, thinking, or just not doing very much, not visibly doing anything, they're wasting their time is the perception of of some people. So there is an interesting presence again of that idea of, oh, we're here to, we're here in this space to be productive and to produce some stuff and to create outcomes and outputs, right?

Which is a, you know, which is the sort of toxic nature of a future orientation. That's like futures.

Right. Yeah. Interesting. We've got to do it by 2030. Quit.

Exactly. Exactly. So there is something about resisting. This is what I mean. Like futures are sometimes useful and sometimes toxic. And in that situation, what that's doing is shutting off our attention to what's going on in the moment. Other times what's going on in the moment can get locked in and we need to think about the future. So this is what I mean about that agility, the constant moving between which timeframe do we think we want to prioritize. But the idea of time is something to be wasted, time is a resource. I mean, this also has a history. You know, we've, we've learned this. It can be unlearned. You know, and so we have to start playing with things and figuring out what different language do we want to use instead. You know, that's why I'm working in the area that I'm working right now.

Yeah. And I mean, that's in a way a perfect segue into maybe the moves that you talk about, the three moves. Because I think that again, there is a listener response, which is, oh, this is all very nice abstract conversation about time and what time is. But then it gets very practical if you're an educator and some things you might be able to do differently to disrupt or to become a bit more flexible about these things that you talk about: interruption, attunement, and dialogue. So yeah, is it worth opening up those three?

Yeah, I mean, I'll also point to the work of Kevin Birth and Michel Bastien, who are both time scholars who've done a lot of work in this area. Particularly Michel talks about, you know, just designing clocks. Really practical stuff. If you were going to design a clock, what would it measure? First question that you can ask, right? I mean, that's actually the issue of judgment, you know, that's what it means. So to recap, so interruption, attunement, and judgment or dialogue. I mean, that comes from a couple of inspirations. Gert Biester's work on public pedagogy works with those three frames that I found very useful. And Miriam Jensen, who's a brilliant social activist working with water, she talks about the concept of temporal attunement and temporal empathy so that it has to kind of feel our way into other people's. So for me, what they are is interrupting, so questioning our assumptions about time. And that's really what we've just been talking about in this whole podcast so far is just becoming aware that my assumptions about how time works and what time matters is different from yours. At a basic level, we know this, you know, we know what it's like to encounter somebody whose idea of being on time is being 3 hours early. That was my dad. You know, if he was ever less than 3 hours early, you know, he was late. So, and other people who will have a difference. So it's actually not that complicated to do it. It's just bring it into the conversation. The attunement really is about, you know, one of the things that we are doing is inviting people just to sit with a particular situation or an instance and think about what are the rhythms at play in this moment? What are the different rhythms that we're seeing and that we're noticing? And we're doing a lot of work with rivers and with the Environment Agency. And so we simply like list all the different actors and then we say, okay, so what are their rhythms? You know, and you might start, are they fast? Are they slow? Are they cyclical? Do they change every year? Do they, are they different at different seasons? How long is their story? You know, might be a question. In fact, that's a great question to ask.

That's a great question.

When did this story start? Okay, when did this story start? Because as one of my colleagues, Naomi Claire Lazar, who's a brilliant political theorist, she says, you know, If you can agree where the story starts, you have a sense of where the story will finish. And that's where so many conflicts are. So that could be a different question. And then the judgment question is, you know, Kevin Birth asks his students whether they want to submit their term essays on the basis of the kind of Gregorian calendar or on the basis of Chinese calendar or, you know, so it's simply the question of surfacing that there are many different tools and techniques. And when I work with an international student group, I ask them to bring in an object from their family or their tradition or their culture that is about in some way marking time. And, you know, the classroom is just full of difference at that point. And what all we're doing then is we're just making time strange. That's the job. It's like instead of treating it as this thing that exists, that is unquestioned, that governs us, it's like we need to recognize it's this really weird, batshit crazy, strange thing. And so maybe we can play with it a bit more and maybe we could organize it differently.

Yeah. And it's so interesting because that in so many different ways or with so many different concepts feels so important now, just surfacing the assumptions that it could have been different. Or I mean, like my discipline is anthropology, so like for me it's like, yeah, this is the way that humans navigate their world together and create artifacts or create whatever. It's just so interesting and so diverse. And one particular story has become, talking about power and privilege as you were earlier, has become highly, highly dominant in all sorts of violent and awful ways and loads of amazing ways, you know, that it has given rise to many other things. Not to simplify, but you understand what I'm saying. There is a kind of a particular story that has particularly from my interest through the way that educate— formal education, formal schooling has evolved and been disseminated around the world. You know, that is a particular story of what it means to be a functional, successful individual, human person navigating, orienting in the world. It's not obvious that it could have been very, very different. So there's something about a lot of work surfacing different kinds of assumptions around around all of this work of what it means to bring and help young people navigate where we are in this kind of crazy, messy present.

I completely agree. And I think that kind of story of schooling as an institutional endeavor to kind of funnel kids into particular ways of being in the world is dominant. I also insist on the ongoing moments of magic, transformation, wonder, care, relationships that exist in any school at any point at any time. So it's yes and for me there. So the challenge for me is how do we open up those spaces and expand them so that they create more, you know, so there's more room for them.

Absolutely. But I think what's interesting, because I mean, obviously people will choose their own positions. And as you said about the activist kind of approach of some people, there's apocalyptic, like burn it all down and start again. I Personally, absolutely not. And I don't think it's even possible even if we wanted to anyway. But more, more my point around it is, I mean, it's that lovely quote about recognizing where the story has come from is becoming reflexively aware and critically aware of where this story has come from can help us orient where we are now in the schools that we're in. And it might help, I hope, and I hope this podcast is also a contribution to that, is helping educators recognize that time or, you know, space or disembodiment or all these different things that show up, there's a way to be critically reflexive about those things that might actually give rise to some different kinds of moves, some different kinds of decisions like Ben is doing at Black Mountain College, or, you know, other people are doing to stay in place in relationship in a community or in an institution in inverted commas, but make some decisions that allow it to be, to kind of open up more possibilities.

Yeah, definitely. And I mean, I suppose the other thing I'd say is there are this question of where the story starts also goes to education. So, and the fact that there will be multiple stories about where it comes from and what happened and how it ended up the way we are now, because there's always multiple stories at any one time. So there's always many rhythms at any one moment. So that we can figure out which threads of those we wanna pull on and which ones we wanna nurture and which ones we wanna go, okay, let's let that go now. That's enough. So yeah.

No, absolutely.

Interesting times.

No. Yeah, yeah. No, absolutely. Well, I'm just so, yeah, so appreciative of being able to talk to you about it. And also hopefully I can, you know, share your book when it comes out maybe later on this year or early next year.

It's a, we're taking it gently and slowly, but yes, there will be a field guide to time and possibility. That's what we're working on.

So beautiful. It sounds amazing. But yeah, no, thank you so much. I so appreciate it.

Thanks, Tim. It's lovely to talk to you.

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