The End of Education as We Know It? - A Conversation with Dr Ida Rose Florez

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

When it comes to authentic learning, it is one of the most, if not the most complex process on the planet. And yet we have a complicated approach in education as we know it.

Hi everyone, welcome back to the podcast. My name's Tim Logan and the podcast is produced by Good Impact Labs. It comes up quite a lot on the podcast, but the idea that schools simply deliver objective and neutral knowledge and skills to our young humans is a complete myth. In fact, with the amount of time that we spend in them over the course of our early lives, schools are incredibly good at conditioning us into particular sets of assumptions about the ways the world works. My guest this week, Dr. Ida-Rose Flores, is calling this out in amazing and very grounded ways, and we discuss the impacts of what this does to our ability to be comfortable and competent in working with complexity, which is pretty much the place we all find ourselves in consistently these days. Ida-Rose tells the full story brilliantly in her new book, The End of Education as We Know It: Regenerative Learning for Complex Times, as well as describing the examples of learning communities that are successfully doing education in whole new ways. Over the last decades, Ida Rose has led statewide education initiatives in Arizona and California, and she was a National Science Foundation Advancing Informal Science Learning Principal Investigator and Governing Board Vice President of the National Association of the Education of Young Children. She also served on the board of the Human Systems Dynamics Institute, which we discussed. Ida Rose holds a PhD in educational psychology from the University of Arizona, and she's held faculty positions at many universities, including Penn State and Arizona State University Mary Lou Fulton London Teachers College. You can find more links to the things we discuss, Ida-Rose's book, and the rest of her work in the show notes. Beautiful. Well, thank you, Ida-Rose. I'm so happy to be here with you chatting today. It's been a while coming and we've been Very happily connected through Glenda Ouyang and the amazing work of the Human Systems Dynamics Institute for a while and an amazing community of people. And yeah, just really happy to then kind of be with you on this journey of trying to encourage more regenerative learning out in the world and, and just amazing to see your new book. So thank you so much for joining.

Well, thank you for the invitation and for being here. This is a joy and it's already fun and I'm really looking forward to this conversation.

Ah, great. So, I mean, there's just so much in the book that I would love to talk to you about and, you know, we've only got a certain amount of time, but maybe you're just starting a bit personally, you know, with your own journey around this. There was some really powerful stories that you share in the book about kind of coming to some really important realizations about the work that we need to do for and with young people, with formal education systems and why they're just not serving, to say the least. Most young people or the planet. And really that's what this podcast is largely about. So maybe you could just share a little bit about your, yeah, some of those moments of realization. There was a particularly powerful one on the plane, I think.

Well, let me start a few decades before that plane trip because, so I was trained as a school psychologist very early on in my career, but it was a very unique program at a small state college, Millersville in central Pennsylvania. And we all were required before— those of us that were becoming school psychologists, we had to be trained and go through the paces and go through the practicum and all the feedback and everything to become actually certified family systems therapists. So before I even got my formal education credentials, I was, you know, just steeped in systems thinking and systems thinking in relationship to children and families. And so one of my first, you know, I think this whole journey really started the first week of my full-time internship as a school psychologist. Because here I was so excited to think about, you know, children as complex beings that were nested within these complex, you know, systems. And I remember during all that training that I was thinking, oh, wow. So things have really changed since I was in school. And people have really woken up to the ideas of, you know, I grew up in California. This was Pennsylvania, I was also thinking, okay, things are very different here in Pennsylvania. And then I had my first experience in public schools as a professional educator. And wow, it was— I don't even know how to describe it. I mean, I guess jumping into a pool of ice, this would be a good metaphor for it. It was just really an eye-opener. And I remember talking about widget education and how if we just sliced off the top of every school in the district that I worked for, they looked like egg crates and they all looked exactly the same. This was not a popular way to talk.

I can imagine. Yeah.

Lots of people that just kind of looked at me sideways, like, what are you talking about? And so over the next several decades, as I kept trying to shift my career to figure out where could I be most effective and where would this idea of thinking in systems and thinking in complexity actually do some good and maybe where I would fit.

Yeah.

And it wasn't very successful. And then as I was serving on the, the board of the National Association for the Education of Young Children, as I was coming home, and I tell that story in the first chapter of the book, I had been so rattled by Ilan Norbosh, who is a professor at Carnegie Mellon, and some things that he had said. He was the speaker for our board dinner. We had met in Pittsburgh and I just thought, you know what, I need to take some time and intentionally place myself in places and in circumstances and in situations that's going to disrupt my way of thinking about life, about economics, about politics, but also about education because I was an educator. And so, you know, that story coming home and just thinking, hearing Ilan, literally he stood up, accepted, you know, at the podium, and the first thing out of his mouth was, I use technology to wage peace, not want more. And I just couldn't get that. And that was, that was the first day we were there. We were there 4 or 5 days, I forget. So flying home, not being able to get this out of my head, you know, and then him challenging us to create technology or help children to use technology in a way that they are creators, not just consumers. And at the time, you know, I was the executive director of the Elementary Institute of Science in San Diego, and I thought, I'm not doing that. We're not doing that. I don't know how to do that. Is that really my responsibility to do that? And the whole way home, I'm like, yes, it actually is my responsibility to do that. Yeah. So I was really rattled on that plane ride, but it sent me into— and I'm sure from some of your other— that we're going to talk about disruption. And I was disrupted. I was definitely disrupted on that plane ride all the way home.

Yeah. And now, interesting. And now, as I understand it, correct me if I'm wrong, but perhaps also very resonant coming from a military family yourself and having those connections as well, this idea of waging peace, not war. I mean, that's a— how do you understand that now? I mean, after a while reflecting on that, that idea of waging peace?

Well, one of the deepest things that I have come to— I don't know if accept is the right word, belief is a little bit too— carries too much baggage. But, you know, this idea that I talk about a lot in the book of the difference between complication and complexity, I have really come to believe that the tilting of our society for the past 100, 150, maybe up to 200 years in the direction of machine-based thinking and industrialization, that, that has really gotten us to the place where competition is, you know, we accept competition as good and competition as the way things are supposed to be, whereas reciprocity, and as Robin Wall Kimmerer calls it, especially in her new book, The Serviceberry, the gift economy, that's not even in our thinking. And so it's not that there weren't wars, obviously, before industrialization. It's just we've kind of perfected the competition and we've kind of perfected violence and power over. And so by really understanding and committing ourselves to living in reciprocity, living in ways where we are committed to mutual thriving, and that we actually revere one another, we revere the Earth and plants and animals, that takes us in a completely different direction. And to me, I have a lot of friends that are involved in peace education, and I've really appreciated that, you know, from non-sectarian to, you know, also faith-based approaches. Nothing has ever really captured me as this whole idea of if I really commit myself to reciprocity and mutual thriving. You can't get there unless you really understand complexity. But that for me is the heart and soul of promoting peace and waging peace.

Beautiful. Yeah, I mean, that's such an interesting thing, isn't it? Because what I wanted to— I'd love to ask you next is a perfect connection there, I think, because what What I'm hearing you saying is it's almost like the peace education, it's not a doing, it's not something you just kind of learn how to do differently. It goes down to the level of some really fundamental paradigmatic assumptions about relationship with the natural world or with each other or with, you know, with ourselves in context. And that's, I mean, that was one of the things I just, I loved about the book was the way you draw out so simply and so beautifully this idea of schools embedding these paradigmatic assumptions into daily life. I mean, you, you talk about that in such powerful ways and it's when you highlight it, it's kind of obvious how it happens. And there are some certain aspects of that that are more commonly talked about than others, but I just, I found that a really powerful aspect of the work that you do is for me actually on the podcast, that's part of what I hope I can contribute to is the level of the work at the at this level of challenging, questioning, disrupting, as you said earlier, some of those commonly held or deeply held paradigmatic assumptions about just the way the world is. Maybe it's not, maybe actually we've been sold a bit of a lie in these modern industrial economies, right? So could you say a bit about that whole piece around how you find schools just so good at embedding these sneaky little assumptions into the way that they work.

Well, in all fairness, it's not just schools. Of course, schools are particularly good at a few of them, you know. So, so in the book, I talk about, you know, my background is in educational psychology, and I was also a school psychologist. There's actually a difference between the two, and I'm both. But two ideas about how we as human beings learn about our world and learn about our environment are these cognitive ideas of scripts and scenes. And so, and again, this is theoretical, you know, it's like there isn't— you can't put your finger on a script, so there nobody prints it out and hands it to anybody, but it's still going on all the time. And so the script is kind of the sequence of events, what happens first, second, third, fourth. And then the, the other, the scene, is what is the context, what is the, the physical context, the emotional context, what, what is happening. And you, if you just think about if you're watching, you know, a live play, you know, there be the, the scripts that people are following, and not just what comes out of their mouth, but also how they're supposed to behave in a particular setting. And what we find in schools— and I have been a professional educator in California, in Pennsylvania, in Hawaii, and in Arizona— and what is remarkable to me is those are 4 very, very, very different places, and you see exactly the same thing showing up in the schools in all of those four. And what we see is we see separating, sorting, and sequencing. And then those ways of being in the world— I'm not really sure exactly how to describe it other than that. Like, for example, we'll just start with separating. The idea that young children should be separated from their parents and their families and their extended families and the push is younger and younger. I've worked in early childhood education for a couple of decades now. I've worked at the national level and at state level. I've led large statewide programs. And there is this real push that in order for kids to be ready, that's a whole other thing.

Yeah, really, eh?

I did a webinar once called The Myth of School Readiness.

Good, good. It's a terrible word. Ready for what?

Yeah, exactly. And what does it mean to be ready? And like, anyway, but you know, in, in order for children to be ready to succeed oftentimes in school, which is cast as the workforce pipeline, therefore they have to have all this pre-readiness. And so it becomes younger and younger and younger that we're separating kids from their families, from their community, from each other. So siblings And I mentioned in the book, my oldest kids are twins. And except for one choir class in a middle school, and it was a huge middle school, but for some reason there was only one 7th grade choir class. And so they had to be in the class together. And I remember the guidance counselor almost being apologetic to me that, you know, they were, oh goodness, going to be in a class together. It's fine.

Yeah, it's fine.

I homeschooled them for a few years and they were always together. So you know, it was okay. But that is just an assumption about how things are supposed to work, and we actually have no evidence whatsoever that separating kids— either, you know, then we— there's these ways that we separate them by sorting them, and, and then, and then we— so we, we separate— so we separate knowledge into reading and writing and arithmetic and the social studies. And, and then, you know, in the upper grades, it's, you know, social studies is divided, and there's history and there's political science and We pretend as if these are all really separate ideas, and we, we are really teaching kids to think in that way, to think in these separate ways rather than seeing the world as a whole, seeing themselves as a whole. Yes. And I mean, and it's in these scenes that are embedded in everyday life in schools all the way from preschool and even toddlerhood all the way through, you know, at least high school and to some degree in college or university.

Yeah. And it's, I particularly like the scripts and the scenes idea because I wasn't, that wasn't language I was familiar with. The words like sorting and sifting, you know, often are used around industrial education in my background in sociology of education, for example, that, you know, you'd use that all the time as a criticism of the system. But it's not only the structural description, it's also the effect that those things then have on the psyches of these young people, right? As you would say, how it embeds these just these really deep assumptions about how the world is because they're being normed in this, you know, they're swimming in this sea constantly of separation and sequencing and all of these things, which they don't have to be like that. They're based on choices that have been made about, you know, by humans who have designed that system in all sorts of ways. And it, it really does affect the assumptions that those young people make about the way the world works. As though it's like a complicated machine. And that, I think maybe that's a good moment to make that link. Just for those, I've had different speakers on the podcast around systems and complexity. So some people may have heard it before, but people who may not have done, that difference between complicated and complex, could you perhaps just break that down? Because I think this idea of just separating everything into those parts that then work together like a machine, that complicated idea. Really is what we're talking about, that the schooling system kind of inculcates in our young people. And so what's, if it's not that, then what, what might it be? How might we have been taught that the world actually is?

So this difference between complexity and complication, and of course those two words are used synonymously all the time and it can be confusing. And yet I, I believe with all my heart that the distinction between the two is really important for human beings to understand. A simple way of thinking about this is that complicated and complex, complication and complexity are different systems of patterns. If we just think about it in terms of patterns, you know, so in a complicated or machine-based system, I use those terms synonymously, the patterns are usually very easy to detect cause and effect. Cause and effect usually happen in close proximity in time and space. And so, you know, if you're in your car and you step on the accelerator, you expect it to go more quickly. And if it doesn't, there's something wrong. And that something wrong, you know, needs to be fixed. But when you start to really think about how machines emerged during the Industrial Revolution, you start to really realize that the natural world doesn't work like that at all. So for example, you could, and I love this, when you go to like an art gallery and somebody, one of the artists there, their thing to do, there's one in Prescott, Arizona that is just phenomenal. This artist takes apart, you know, junkyard stuff and he puts it back together, you know, as like a horse or a motorcycle and it was never a motorcycle. So you can take all these different parts and you can put it together. And of course the horse is not alive and the motorcycle probably doesn't run. But we get this idea from the machine-based way of thinking that you can pull the, the parts apart, you can examine them, you can diagnose problems. We think in the, at the component level. None of that happens in the complex world. One of the other things that I should mention is that the way complicated systems and, and the patterns in them, the way that they come about is that somebody thinks them up. And then it's designed, built, and then it's kind of implemented. That is not the way that natural systems come about. The way that natural systems come about is the conditions are right and they start to self-organize, and then they emerge. And then there are patterns that emerge from those complex systems that, you know, I mean, think about a hurricane. Nobody designs a hurricane. Nobody designed the COVID virus. Nobody designs a tomato plant. You can set conditions so that certain kinds of characteristics in a tomato might emerge, but you don't design one and then build it.

No, absolutely. And then, and then the, the next step in perhaps the educational conversation is that we, I think we treat learning as though it was a complicated problem. You know, you need to know these certain things. This is what the learning sciences tells you how you learn. And we just have to, we perform the algorithm of this cognitivist idea of how learning happens. But one of the phrases I've heard you say, which I love, is that authentic learning is one of the most complex phenomenon on the planet. So, I mean, there's the word authentic there, which I'm intrigued by, but that learning is inherently complex, not complicated, right? So if that's the case, and that is what we work with as this amazing process and fuel and magic as educators, how might that shift the way we think if, if authentic learning is the most complex phenomenon on the planet?

I, I love this discussion. So let's go back to complicated for just a moment, because if we think about what most complicated or machine-based systems are for. They are for controlling or being able to act within complexity. Just think about, you know, turnstiles at a subway station. You know, they're designed to actually get people to go in a certain place and in a certain way. And so it kind of removes, or at least dampens, the complexity that's involved in people, you know, getting through a subway station and getting Right. And so when it comes to authentic learning, it is one of the most, if not the most complex process on the planet. And yet we have a complicated approach in education as we know it, right? Well, what is the purpose of the complicated approaches? The complicated approaches are designed to try to dampen, try to control, kind of keep in line. You know, I have said many, many times over the course of my career that most of what goes on, especially in elementary schools, but also, well, I should say, especially middle schools, is crowd control. That absent having all, you know, having a huge school or having all these kids in one place, there are practices that you just don't need because with a large group you're trying to control the complexity. The more individuals and the more relationships, the more complexity there is. And so thinking about learning as one of the most complex phenomena on the planet means that we actually have to trust and not control. And that is very hard to find within traditional educational settings, you know, because we have this mindset that here's a formula, here's a recipe, and I'm supposed to do this recipe, and then there's supposed to be this certain outcome, which is very complicated thinking. And yet we're dealing with a phenomenon that is extraordinarily complex. And so, you know, I mean, I was a school psychologist for a few decades, and so every kid that was having problems landed on my, my desk. And a big part of it was just kids checking out, kids not wanting to be there. And, you know, you asked earlier about where did I— you know, there was several decades of me thinking, we are stripping these kids from their humanity. No wonder they're depressed. No wonder they're angry. No wonder they don't want to be here.

Mm-hmm.

Because they're not getting to be the complex beings that they actually are.

Yeah. And I had a, a really powerful discussion on the podcast recent, in a recent episode with Naomi Fisher, who's a clinical psychologist. And, and in that conversation, in a way, we were saying similar things that the young people themselves are treated as mechanistic parts of a complicated system. But so we just take the part out, fix the part, and then put it back in again. But not question that perhaps there's some feedback dynamics happening, that their concerns or issues or lack of wellbeing is feedback on the system, the complex system, that something needs to shift. And so it's, yeah, it, it's, yeah, very resonant with that. I think it's, it really reminded me of the Gregory Bateson quote about, you know, many of the problems come from the difference between the way nature works and the way people think. And I've slightly adapted that quote to include the idea that it's the way people are taught to think. There's something important in there about, I think, a really deep question about, given that this is the case, or let's assume we are certainly agreeing that this is the case, can we learn to think in new ways? And I've heard you use the phrase whole new ways as in a play on holes. Because as you said, this is the way that nature works. It works in complex wholes and emergence. In a way, this gets to the idea of the regenerative learning in, in the title of your book. And, you know, the core of the book is, do you feel that that is possible for us to, to learn to think in these whole new ways? Can we, and how can we, I guess is the question.

Uh, you're not alone. As I've done interviews and book signing events, this question comes up a lot. And one of the things I think that is so important for us to think about, and that's why I, I devote two chapters there, one in the beginning, one at the end, and then I weave it all the way through, is to understand how disruption actually works. Because all new learning emerges from disruption. We don't learn anything new unless what is already in place gets shaken loose at least a little bit. And unfortunately, this whole notion of disruption has been sidetracked. We were going back to our discussion about peace and war. A lot of people think that disruption and destruction are synonymous. And so destruction actually is a very crude and unsophisticated form of disruption. And so, you know, if a kid is sitting in a classroom and drawing, a lot of kids listen better when they draw. But if a teacher thinks that that's a distraction and comes over and rips that up and takes it away, that's destruction. And we see it happening right now in the United States. There's a lot of destruction going on in our government, including the U.S. Department of Education. And so in addition to understanding and differentiating, being able to see the difference between complication and complexity. So we can see complexity and know how to respond to it and understand what it is. This whole idea of disruption, and I like to call it disruptive curiosity, is incredibly important to answer your question because destruction makes us scared. Destruction makes us turn inward. It makes us start to resource hoard. I mean, I am stocked up on beans right now. But what we really need in order to learn is curiosity. And curiosity only happens within the context of safety. So there's this really, you know, how do we do this? And to me, this is actually at the guts of what it means to be a truly talented teacher. Where you can set the conditions for disruption while maintaining the context of safety so that people can have a huh. And they're okay with having a I don't get that. Like, I want schools everywhere or everywhere that children are learning or adults are learning for everybody to feel safe just interrupting the whole thing. You know, I'm lost. I don't get this. I'm having a major huh. I don't get it because that is beautiful. That is a beautiful place to be because you feel safe and you're curious and you wanna know more. That's what we need to be shooting for in order for the thinking to change into a whole new way. Hmm.

Yeah, that's interesting. Could you say a little bit more about, I mean, that's really intriguing to me in terms of, is it something about the nature of taking a stance of inquiry or being curious that allows for the wholeness that we're talking about, you know, just the inviting in the complexity or honoring the complexity or whatever the language might be. Because maybe it's helpful if I, so some of my doubts around it are there are, there's kind of one school of thought that even just the act of thinking is the thing that separates. I was listening to Krishnamurti, don't know if you know, Jiddu Krishnamurti over the weekend, but he's got these amazing conversations with between him and David Bohm and just the idea of, he would argue that just the act of thinking itself is a fragmentation somehow. It, it takes you into a, you're trying to delineate particular things and you're, you know, so there's, there's kind of that somewhere buzzing around in my mind. And then the other perspective is more like people like Dave Snowden, who I've heard him talk about the fact that We are actually incapable of somehow perceiving wholes because we only have a very— I think if I'm not misquoting him, because we only have a very particular individual unique perspective on it. We're looking from a particular vantage point at a particular moment. We're in a particular context and we only see a very tiny slice and portion of, which is like clearly why you need many perspectives on a complex issue. Et cetera. But what he says is that it's actually impossible for people to perceive wholes. So I'm not taking a particular stand there. I guess I'm just laying out a few different perspectives on this idea. And, and then coming back to your point about curiosity, is there something in the flow of questioning and inquiring and doubting and being curious that is important to staying open to the complexity? Somehow. I don't know if any of that makes any sense, but it does.

And I'm, I just, I love this. So you're not asking me yes, no questions because I very definitely not.

Yeah.

Okay. So let's start with thinking about thinking because from a complicated influenced way of thinking about cognition. Okay. Or thinking. If all we focus on is what happens— I always talk about between our ears, but it's really a little bit north of there. It's, you know, in our brains, right? It's really cerebral. But yet we know that there are thinking neurons actually in our guts and dispersed throughout our whole body. But the way that we have been educated, it's all about— it's what we memorize, right? I mean, think about— we really, we test kids on what they memorize. Well, you know, there is memory that lives, you know, in our muscle memories and in our stomach. You can encounter something that you've encountered a long time ago, or even if you, if you tense up and you— why? I'm not afraid of lizards, you know, why all of a sudden I saw lizard and I all tense? Well, because there was probably some time in the past my mother was— it still is— horrifically afraid of lizards. And so my body remembers that, you know, I mirrored her clenching and then I clenched and then I'm like, I don't get this. It's because my body is responding, not just my brain, which of course my brain is part of my body. But where I'm going with this is I have no idea if humans can actually think in and perceive complex wholes all at once, all the time. Maybe that's a future step in our evolution.

Yeah. Interesting.

But I do know this, that people perceived and acted upon effectively the complexities of life on our planet much more effectively 300 years ago, 3,000 years ago, than what we do now. And so, you know, I would also say, yeah, we need one another. And when there is that openness, when we accept— I, I remember when I was in my, my doctoral studies, I was taking, you know, an advanced statistics class from a very well-known professor of statistics who was very, very, very difficult. In fact, this second semester, there were only 3 of us in the class because everybody kind of gave up. He was all over the place in how he would teach. But I remember raising my hand and saying, but Dr. Levin, what if what we're really interested in, what if what really matters is living in the error? And I'll never forget the look on his face. The look on his face was You know, kind of like a cross between, that's the stupidest question I've ever heard, and I should be able to answer this, and I'm not sure that I can.

Brilliant.

And he just, he's like, well, we don't care about the error. And I'm like, yeah, I know. That's why I'm asking this question. What if the outliers, what if those data points that we can't explain actually are what we should be perceiving? Yeah. And that's, you know, maybe that doesn't directly answer your question about thinking in wholes, but just think about that from a statistical point of view. That we, you know, base all of our randomized controlled trials on and all of our does this vaccine work, it are based on the statistics that actually piecemeal and say there's going to be a certain amount of data, there's going to be a certain amount of error that we have no explanation for. So we're just going to ignore it. It's an intentional ignoring of the whole. And so we are literally taught all the way up through even the highest levels of graduate education that we should slice and dice this experience that we have rather than finding ways to move forward in uncertainty, move forward where I can't control and accepting that as this is the beautiful way that the world works.

I love that. I, you know, I really appreciate that because it's, I've not thought about it in those terms, but I love all those connections. But also the, the other connection it makes for me is that I've done a previous podcast on active inference and just more and more this idea that the cognitive neuroscience and general cognitive science is showing this idea of the predictive brain. And actually, to your point about error, like those are the things that are really salient to us. We really notice when what we sense and experience doesn't match the predictive structured models that we've kind of generated of what we are expecting to. So There's something I think really important there about, yeah, living in the era. I love that.

Well, and let me take it back to the question that you're asking about curiosity because you said in your last comments here about how, oh, we noticed that. If you drive past a sign in front of a store and something is misspelled, you're going to look, you're going to see it. Sometimes it will actually misspell things on purpose, right? So that people will pay attention to it. Well, that delta, if you will, that difference between my expectation and what I actually experience is one of the most common ways that activates our curiosity, where we just go, huh, what? That doesn't add up, or this isn't— and it's a motivation. That curiosity motivates us to want to learn more. So we seek out more information. Well, how often in a traditional school setting where someone has already figured out X, Y, and Z, and it's in a textbook, and then the teacher repeats the textbook during the lecture, and then you're supposed to regurgitate it on a test, and you're basically told this is how it is— there's nothing for a human being to be curious about in that scenario.

Yeah, and it feels very, it feels rigid and stationary. It feels like everything's just kind of stuck and static, like here's the stuff, you need to learn it, just, you know, get to the destination and then you'll be tested on whether you've arrived. Whereas the curiosity, the living in the era feels like it's moving and alive, right? In a very different way. Which feels much more resonant with the things you've been saying about complexity and the way nature works, et cetera. And maybe that's also the connecting point to adaptive action because, you know, you use that in the book in really powerful ways. 'Cause I think sometimes there's a lot of interesting talk and somewhat theoretical talk around these ideas of complexity and thinking in wholes, et cetera. But actually, sometimes people need some guiding principles or simple rules to work with. And that's what Glenda and the human systems dynamics stuff where we met does really powerfully. And you bring adaptive action into the book. And I've had Glenda on the podcast talking about that, but maybe you could just, yeah, if make that link as to why did you bring in adaptive action into the book?

So as I started about, I don't know, maybe 7 or 8 years ago to really with very, a lot of intentionality, study about complexity. I looked across a lot of different models. I took a lot of different trainings. And what I saw in Adaptive Action and what I've said to Linda Enrois on numerous occasions is for me, the beauty of the Adaptive Action model, there are several things I love about it. One is we could use it right now. You know, my husband and I can use it about our household. You know, you can use it in community. You could use it at Boeing, you know, you could use it in the White House or in other, you know, at the highest levels of governance. So I love its adaptability to all these different places. But I also love that it is simple and it helps people deal with complexity in a very practical way. And so often we get stuck. I tell the story about me going in, I was so frustrated at one point in time when I was working for the state of Arizona, and I had just been in meeting after meeting after meeting after meeting where we were going nowhere. And so I remember walking into the chief program officer, and I had grabbed a Highlights magazine from— because it was early childhood state agency— from our waiting room, and I brought it in, and I opened up to a maze, and I said, Karen, do you know what kids do when they're doing this maze and they hit a dead end? She's like, yeah, I think so. They lift their pencil and they find another way. And I said, yes, but what we do is we just circle, we just circle, circle, circle, you know, pick up and try to find a different way in. And so it's very easy to feel stuck when we're dealing with complexity. Primarily, I would posit that we have not from an early age had complexity pointed out to us, and, and we haven't really experienced it. In fact, we've been in these institutional settings that have tried to control and dampen and keep complexity, you know, under control. But that's not the way that the world works. And so then we're in these, you know, whether in our career or in our families or just, you know, out in nature, and we don't really understand, like, we don't necessarily understand how an exponential growth curve works. We don't understand how an S-curve works or collapse. We don't understand these patterns, patterns of emergence, because we haven't been exposed to them. And in fact, there's been some intentionality around, you don't need to think that way. So with adaptive action, there is this very practical— I just love that, you know, here's the what and here's the so what, and then here's the now what. Well, what if I don't know what? I don't know what now, what to do. I'm feeling stuck. Great. Go back to what?

Yeah, right.

Actually have something you can do that can actually get you out of the stuckness, which I think is, it's not only brilliant, but it is a gift to humanity to be able to have that way forward through the Adaptive Action Model.

No, I love it. And I'd really encourage people to go back and listen to, after this, to the episode with Glenda because she talks through the model in a bit more detail, but it is so unbelievable. I mean, she tells a really powerful story about young children using it. And so, as you say, I mean, it can be used in so many places, but to the point about this kind of the curiosity and the movement, it keeps you moving, you know, because once you get to now what, then there's a new what will emerge, of course, because that is what happens. And then you go through the cycle again. Yeah, I know this. I think it's an incredibly powerful framework, and it felt very connected to what you talk about. Again, I find just really usefully around an approach to thinking about and/or working with complexity about those three ideas of simple rules, self-organizing, and emergence. Maybe you could just talk a little bit about those three ideas, because in the way you write about them and you speak about them, they come together almost, you know, you can't separate them, you know, in the spirit of the conversation, They're not fragments and parts of a mechanistic system, but I, I find as three conceptual frames, they're incredibly useful to then think into the idea of complexity because sometimes it's just, it is a little bit off-putting for people to go there. It's got these connotations of being messy and difficult, right? And, and actually you make it really not that, and in really powerful ways.

So let me make a connection between the Adaptive Action Model, not just the what, so what, and now what, but also the CDE, or Containers, Differences, and Exchanges. Because those 3 conceptual frameworks, they, they help us get to the different perspectives in, in holes, right? So thinking about what container are we in, is this container helpful, should there be other, what other containers are there, how do we interact The containers, the differences. And of course, Gregory Bateson and how he talks about differences and what differences are is really also very helpful. And then the exchanges, like we're having these exchanges now. And even as I'm talking with you and listening to you, I'm thinking, that's such a great idea. I need to go down that rabbit hole, right? So you're expanding my understanding of wholeness. And the reason why I bring up in a conversation about about Simple Rules and self-organizing and, and emergence, you know, like, is that one of the most important things as human beings that is so important for us to learn in dealing with complexity is that we don't control it. We can't control it, right? But that we can set conditions. So where do we even start? Well, we can start with thinking about the containers, the differences, and the exchanges as ways that we can think about setting conditions to nudge a complex system in a particular direction. We can't control it, we can't lasso it, we can't threaten it with an F or detention after school, right? Which is how we should be thinking about—

Exactly.

—kids, right? You literally can't force a kid to learn or force them to be thinking differently, but you can set conditions. And you can set conditions. And again, when you're talking about complexity, so simple rules can be a condition, but simple rules can also emerge. They can be emergent. And one of the things I, when I talk about simple rules, I usually start with what we know, which are complicated rules. So if you think about all the complicated rules, just, just think about, you know, the tax code. Think about, you know, poor teachers. My goodness. A lot of them, especially here in the US and in other countries as well, You know, there's this curriculum and there's rules about how they're supposed to teach the curriculum. But what ends up happening with these complicated rules is that because they're trying to control complexity, there's always an exception. And so that exception turns into a sub-rule, and that's where we get these layers and layers and layers of rules that hardly anybody can— it becomes suffocating. It kind of chokes the life out of things. Whereas simple rules not only are they simple, and they're simple enough that, you know, water droplets in a hurricane can follow them, or locusts, and there's lots of, you know, conversations about how locusts self-organize. They're not only that simple, but there's usually very few of them. And when individuals, and this is absolutely key to understanding the differences between a complicated and a complex system and key to understanding what we're doing when it comes to learning and in schools is that complex systems change happens at the individual level. So it happens when you set conditions that kind of nudge in a particular— it's, I think of it as an invitation. You know, I'm also a grower and I live at 6,500-foot elevation. And so we're just now getting to— I was looking, checking out the weather and I'm like, No freezing overnight. Oh, well, yeah, but still, we have a very short growing season. But I can't make— in fact, I'm a little bit frustrated because I have these one kind of tomatoes and I really wanted to be up at 90, 95% germination and I'm more like 80%. I'm like, I paid a lot of money for those seeds, you know, but I can't make them grow. I cannot make them germinate. All I can do is set the conditions for them to start following the little simple rules that are embedded in that tiny little tomato seed. Yeah. And then when that happens, that plant starts to self-organize into a tomato plant. It never becomes a cucumber. It never becomes a child. It becomes a tomato 100% of the time. But it emerges. It emerges out of the ground, which, by the way, is disruptive. It disrupts the ground. And so Adaptive Action Model gives us so many different ways to think practically about how we can set conditions that influence complex systems, which is what needs to be brought into our learning environments.

Yeah. No, I just, I think that's a really powerful way of thinking about it just because it makes it manageable. I think sometimes we even, I was thinking about the, the idea of simple rules and I think sometimes we just, we want to stay in the rules, particularly in educational context. We wanna stay with the rules and then we wanna double down on the rules when they're not being followed and to, you know, to some of of your earlier stories. And the, there's a really important move between the simple rules and the allowing for the self-organizing, which I think is incredibly important. You know, yes, we're setting the conditions, but we're not, again, it's maybe that it's that stance of curiosity to just stay open to the ways things might self-organize. Because if you, if you're staying in this stance of control, you know, I'm gonna set the rules and then people are going to follow the rules and everything is going to work the way I have planned, you know, you're going to be sorely disappointed, right?

Yes. And yet we keep doing that over and over.

Yes, we do.

And then, you know, and principals come in and they observe, you know, or head of school, headmasters come in, they observe teachers in classrooms and are they looking for, you know, what are they looking for? Is the teacher following the rules? Is the teacher making the kid follow the rules? When really one of the most beautiful things I ever observed in a classroom was when I was working on my doctorate at University of Arizona. And there's this beautiful early childhood, a preschool very close to campus called Second Street School. And I went there to observe and I was, I was developing an observation instrument as part of my studies. And it was a, you know, a morning, Tuesday, Wednesday morning, whatever. And the particular teacher with a particular group of kids was reading a nonfiction book about, I believe it was caterpillars. Might have been worms, but she got maybe 3 pages in and one of the kids said, "I saw one just like that. I know where there is one outside." And she immediately put down the book and said, "Everybody grab your, you know, magnifying glasses," and out they went. And of course I was thinking, wow, I've never seen this. I've never seen where a kid said, "I know where there is one of those," and the whole class went outside and, you know, and it was Arizona, southern Arizona in the summertime. And I'm thinking they didn't stop to put on their sunblock, you know, and I'm thinking about all the rules that, and I was, I mean, they were outside maybe 3 minutes. They saw what was there. They had a conversation about it and then they came back inside and there was this robust, amazing conversation as the kids interacted with the content that was in the book.

Yeah. Amazing. No, that's brilliant. It's yeah, no, it's amazing. And I, it's really interesting. Just noting there's a really key concept in the book that we haven't really talked about. And in a way, I don't mind because I feel, I hear it in the stories you're telling. And I think sometimes the word itself is currently often getting captured in a bit of jargon, but that the word of regenerative. So you talk, you know, regenerative learning and regenerative schools. It's a huge part of what you are offering with the book. But I think in a way, perhaps we can think about that as an emergent property of some of these conditions that we're talking about. Because I think even with that concept, there's an over-engineering in the way people sometimes now are talking about it. It's like we figure out what regenerative is and then we deliver those conditions rather than living the thing that we say we want somehow. So there's an interesting thing there, but I just, maybe just to wrap up, I, you've got this amazing foreword by Peter Gray, the very wonderful progressive educator, and he talks about the mice and the dinosaurs, the old schools being the dinosaurs and the, and these mice that are actually, you know, scurrying around doing their thing and actually gonna just stick around when the dinosaurs are long gone. And he's obviously using that as a metaphor for these new, maybe not so new actually, contexts and schools where they are doing some of this kind of work. They're working with wholes and complex systems. They're working with regenerative approaches in the very simple ways that you have been beautifully describing. Perhaps you just to finish off, maybe just if you could give a couple of kind of examples or where, where are you seeing some of those things happening? Because I'm also conscious it's great to talk about, but it's also one of the most inspiring things for people is to see actually where these things are already taking root and being done in beautiful beautiful ways.

It's been really fun over the last few years as I've been writing the book and also talking with people about the book, seeing how it has attracted— and people have contacted me or invited me, or it just so happens that these kinds of regenerative schools have popped up in my life. One of them that I really enjoyed visiting is not too far away It's here in Northern Arizona. It's called Verde Valley School, which was started after World War II as an answer. It's— it was started as an international school with the idea being that if children were exposed— well, young adults were exposed to the complexities of different cultures and, you know, international thinking from, you know, different cultures in different places, that that would actually wage peace, you know, as an answer to what happened, you know, with the world wars. And it's very, it's just delightful to visit and the, the autonomy and the agency that the students have and the relationships that they have, you know, with, with their teachers. Another one that I haven't visited yet, but I have received an invitation is the Grauer School, which is in North Coastal San Diego County in Encinitas. And one of the things that I really love as, as the founder has contacted me and we've been in conversation is this idea of small schools. And I don't think that it's lost on Peter Gray that the— he juxtaposed the dinosaur with the mouse, right? Exactly. Yeah, because small, you know, if you just think about it, small is agile. The other thing that is really important, and you know, is to think about being decentralized and not having somebody remote. Satish Kumar talks about this, about how our current educational system, someone who is completely remote from the local situation is making decisions about what should happen. So when children and teachers and parents, the humans that are involved, actually have agency and it's small enough that you can respond to feedback, you can respond to what's going on in the world much more easily. So the small— I would look to the small school movement. And then another one that is actually very controversial, and I actually spent a lot of time talking about and feeding back because it's been so politicized are homeschools and unschools, right? Especially the collectives, the collaborations that emerge around homeschoolers. And, you know, I know that a lot of people just have this one kind of stereotypical idea of what homeschooling is and who homeschools, but the truth is it is a vast community with all different kinds of ideological or political positions. But one thing that happens quite frequently is that people come together in these very informal ways. They share resources and they regenerate the way that school used to be 200, 250 years ago, where people helping out one another. We weren't necessarily thinking that there had to be a professional. I don't want anybody to hear that as I don't think that there should be professional teachers. I'm not saying that, but what is their role? You know, their role should not be just classroom management, should not just be crowd control. And so seeing those pockets here, there, and everywhere begin to emerge gives me great hope that we're going to see a lot more of that in the future.

No, me too. And I, you know, that's one of the best things about doing this job is you get to speak to and hear about these, and they are usually very local, quite small communities coming together around these questions. And I think it's so— I was talking to someone yesterday in Southwest France, same thing, just, you know, communities of people and just hearing you talk about the homeschooling networks, it reminded me of what you said at the beginning about the separation, you know, that there's somehow often a resistance to even at that stage of separation from the community to go into this kind of industrial school, the separation that most of us, I do, I have done, just accepted that that's just normal. That's what needs to happen as my kids go to school. Some people even at that level will say, no, maybe actually we don't want to norm the idea of that separation because there are learn— we can create a learning community based around the whole of the family or the community or the network. And yeah, absolutely. I mean, I can see there's so much possibility there for doing the things that you are talking about and yeah, no, I, if we can encourage more of it, that would be just the best thing, I think.

A few months ago, I had the pleasure of doing an interview with the NPR station in Phoenix, and the reporter that was doing the interview, it was not a softball interview. And he said, I think it was his first question, he said, I have kids, and what you're suggesting scares me. You know, I don't want to send my kids off to this big experiment where we don't know how it works and we don't know You know, and I just thought, okay, all right, we're not playing softball here. Okay. I said, well, I hate to tell you this, but every day that you send your kids to school, you're sending them into an experiment that's only about 150 to 200 years old, where what I'm talking about has actually been around for millennia. And so shifting our thinking about and recognizing that this really has been an experiment in how we raise young humans and it's really at the end of its life cycle and it really was never humane, maybe sufficient, but it was never even intended to be humane. The intentionality was to fuel industrialized capitalism. Big fat period. That's the entire intention of the vast majority of the way most of us have been educated.

Yeah. Isn't that so interesting though? Because it's been so successful at norming those things that Yes. People are now interpreting the things we are talking about as some new experiment, and it's been so incredibly successful of, as we said, embedding these paradigmatic assumptions that this is how the world works. It works like a machine, it works like a complicated machine, and oh no, what you are suggesting seems a bit scary cuz it doesn't. It's incredible how successful actually it's been.

And that's actually one reason why I like the term regenerative. We're not going back, you know, we're not going back to one-room schoolhouses or back to, you know, thinking that women don't need an education or girls don't need an education. That's not the idea. The idea is to regenerate or to breathe life into for going into the future. Because if we recognize what, you know, industrialization has done to the planet, it's really important for us to have some practical ways, but also the overarching paradigmatic idea of, well, how do we get to a vibrant future where we have clean air, where we value the planet, where, you know, we've got good food to eat that, you know, isn't full of microplastics, all of those kinds of things. It's not just going to happen magically. And it certainly isn't going to happen with the current way that the vast majority of education is done in the industrialized societies.

Absolutely. Well, a perfect place to stop. And I apologize, we've gone over some, but I'm It's just such a lovely conversation. Thank you so much, Heidi Rose. It's such a pleasure to chat to you.

Same. This has been absolutely lovely, and thank you so much for, for having me.

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