The Future of Smart - A Conversation with Ulcca Joshi Hansen

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

How can we possibly take on the human endeavor of education if we're not willing to have conversations about what it means to take care of children's psychic, emotional, spiritual, physical, you know, academic needs altogether? And I think what we're seeing in the world right now is this lack of attention to ourselves as spiritual beings.

Hi, thanks for joining me again and welcome back to another episode of the Future Learning Design Podcast with me, Tim Logan. This week's conversation is with the amazing Ulke Joschi Hansen, who is an author, educational thought leader, and social change advocate with a 20-year career dedicated to shifting the foundational values and approaches that underpin our education systems. She currently serves as the Chief Program Officer for Grantmakers for Education, a partner organization for education philanthropists as they adapt to the changes impacting our world. Ulka began her career as an elementary school teacher in Newark Public Schools, and over the last 20 years has gained experience across the nonprofit, public, and philanthropic sectors in the US and abroad. In her most recent roles as Chief Strategy Officer at Boundless and Vice President at Education Reimagined, Ulka built partnerships between schools, districts, nonprofits, and higher education institutions committed to expanding the access to relationship-based, relevant, and real-world learning experiences in the K-12 and post-secondary spaces. Ulka's recently released book, 'The Future of Smart: How Our Education System Needs to Change to Help All Young People Thrive' traces the roots of our dominant approach to education, illuminates why so many reform and innovation efforts over the last 3 decades have fallen short, and proposes a plan forward.

Hi, Okra.

Hi, how are you?

Hey, very good. Well, thank you for joining me. It's just a real pleasure having read your book, 'The Future of Smart,' and I think there's such interesting insights in the book. Genuinely, I think it's— I wanted to start by asking you about the way we've kind of framed the problem that we are addressing in education. But I think that's one of the things that really struck me about the book is the way that you have dug deeply into the real DNA of the, some of the issues and challenges around education rather than the superficial kind of structures, if you like, but what's underneath it all, some of the beliefs and the ideologies and the, and the deep historical patterns, I suppose.

Yeah.

So yeah, if we could perhaps start there, what's, because you use the, the Einstein quote about really fully understanding the problem for a long, long time rather than jumping to solution. So just quite an open question to start with, where do you think we haven't quite understood the real problem and the real challenge of the educational thing that we're trying to build now?

Yeah. Well, first of all, thanks for having me. I really appreciate the invitation to be here. So in many ways, my superpower, and it took me until I was probably in my mid-30s to recognize this, but I'm sort of a polymath and I've always really enjoyed reading across subjects and disciplines and historically and today and kind of thinking, what is it that feels familiar? And so for education, which which has been my kind of interest area for 25 years, it always seemed to me that there were things that we were talking about inside of education that were, as you said, the structural pieces, the way things were organized, as opposed to the driving values that we weren't really questioning, whether it was around what's the purpose, what does it mean to be an educated person, what does it mean to be a human being? And I'm a philosopher by training, right? So a lot of those conversations are very, very deep and rich. And so I think it was through philosophy that I went back in time a little bit to say, I say, you know, there were ways in which the Greeks and the Hindus and, you know, China, you had very, very similar worldviews that we now think of as their kind of spiritual roots. And that took me back to Europe and sort of what happened in Europe about 500 years ago and seeing how this kind of shift from a worldview that was what I call holistic indigenous, which was us understanding ourselves as human beings as part of this bigger mystery connected to everything and everyone. Embodied beings in this world, but the world itself was subject to the kind of whims and means of the gods and the goddesses and spirits and the energies, right? The shifting from that in Europe about 500 years ago to this view of the world as a machine, that we could take it apart, we could understand it, and then we could put it back together again, but it wasn't living, it wasn't organic. And that shift to me represented this kind of flood of changes in the ways that we thought about ourselves as human beings, our relationships with each other, the kinds of systems that we built to support our institutions and societies. And so in the book, I really do try to say, let's zoom out a little bit here and get away from, at least in the US, some of the, the debates we're having about is this governance model better, or is this curriculum better, or is whole language or phonics better? Let's zoom out and actually say, what are the foundational values of the factory model? And in what ways are they themselves really problematic? And what is the alternative?

Yeah, no, amazing. And, and I think what you said there about purpose, I mean, you do hear people talking about the purpose of education, which in itself is a zoom out to some extent.

Mm-hmm.

But I think what you've done, and I think what I agree, what is necessary is to zoom out even further, as you said about what does it really mean to be not only an educated person, but actually a human being, particularly in the current moment and the current context with all the different overlaying crises that we're facing as a species that we know about existential crises, right?

You know, if I can I would add one more thing, though. It's not— it's the questions, but it's also then how we engage in the answers. So one of the hallmarks of a more Cartesian-Newtonian worldview is this either/or, this binary, right, as opposed to it can be both/and. And, you know, part of the book, and we may get here, is that in many ways, the dominant culture of the world through colonization and other forces has become very much this Cartesian-Newtonian way of seeing the world. And so even this question of purpose, right, because we're not having in a both/and sort of way, we end up having these what feels like really silly discussions about like, well, is it about academics or is it about children's well-being and being healthy people? It's like, it's not either/or. The question is what's in the foreground and what's kind of a little bit more of the kind of background of it or what is in service of what, right? And so the shift in the how we have these conversations and how we think about it is super important because I think it opens up new possibilities for solutions.

I completely agree. And I think, I mean, that what you've said there connects to so many of the other things I'd love to talk to you about, but it's that idea that, yeah, it's not just talking about these things in an analytical and reflecting that kind of mechanistic Cartesian, Newtonian idea, but actually dwelling in the problems a bit and actually having dialogue and the different processes, different ways of understanding, ways of knowing as a response to those challenges, rather than just saying, Right, quick, let's jump to a solution cuz we know the answer. We figured it out. So maybe just to take a step back, one of the things I thought was really interesting, the way that you talked about the graphics in the book was the way that you, you veered away from presenting the holistic indigenous view and the Newtonian Cartesian as a kind of an either/or table, right or left. And actually with the help of your, the people doing the graphics, you actually presented it in a in a more integrated and less either/or kind of way. And I think, and that connects with Iain McGilchrist as well, who I'd love to talk with you about, cuz he's a big part of the book. But it's that idea of, uh, see if I can get this right. It's not either/or or both/and, it's both/and and either/or in this kind of integrated, you know what it like, it's, yeah, it ends up being a crazy sentence, but it, it's about nesting those two things inside each other.

But they are distinct. I try to— I think the either/or helps. The word that I have found helpful is they're distinct, but they're also related. And so, and we often don't get that, right? That we feel like once we've distinguished it, we feel like they can't come back together again, as opposed to they're distinct, but they're related. And for, you know, listeners who may not have seen the image, and I'm happy to send it so that you can put it with the podcast, but yeah, I listed out, right, the characteristics of a Cartesian-Newtonian versus a holistic Indigenous worldview and the kinds of systems they birth or the ways that you think about education. And I used to present those as tables. And what's interesting about who helped me with the graphics is I used a student graphic design firm. So it was a young person. I'd been presenting this as a table for years, and I knew that I didn't like it. And I always said I didn't like it, but I didn't know what to do. And she said, well, why don't you untable the table? I said, I have no idea what you mean, but you send me what you send me. And she sent me this graphic, which is essentially a circle inside side of a circle, and the smaller circle had the Cartesian Newtonian elements and ideas, and then the larger circle had the holistic indigenous. And what I often say to people, because it was one of the critiques I got early on from some readers, was, you know, but are you saying that everything that came out of the Cartesian Newtonian way of seeing the world is wrong? You know, because we have vaccines because of it in science. And I said, absolutely not, right? There are really important things that we've been able to do, including this, doing this call, including, you know, getting a vaccine into a global pandemic in a way that we never could have. And, right, it is more limited. So the example I always find helpful to use, 'cause it's a little bit less emotional, is physics. So Newtonian physics is absolutely correct in the embodied kind of physical world that we live inside of. And we had to learn that quantum physics actually exists and that Newtonian physics can exist inside of this quantum world, but it's limited. And I think that's true of many things that have come out of the Cartesian Newtonian way of seeing the world. They can be accurate, not all are, but they are also limited. And so we have to see them in, inside of a bigger picture.

Brilliant. Yeah, absolutely. And even that response from the reader, are you saying it's this or that? We get pulled back so often into that framing, right? Well, there must be a correct answer. So is, are you saying it's this or is that? And I mean, again, if we move to Iain McGilchrist, that's also what he's talking about in relation to the master and his emissary, right? They are two separate approaches or ways of attending to the world, but we've put one in service to the other. We've, we've put this Cartesian Newtonian approach in, in charge, if you like, as the master and, and this holistic indigenous more approach as the, the servant, if you like, even, or sometimes completely disregarded actually. But act— what we need to do is flip it. We don't, we're not getting rid of the, this, this scientific mechanistic approach cuz it has absolute uses. But if it's not in service to something larger, if it's not supporting the larger, more holistic understanding, then we are just trapped in that, that kind of solution-focused Hall of Mirrors, which he talks about.

Yeah.

But, but so sorry to, to go back to that then you use his work as a, as a big part of understanding not only the brain and the way that the brain works, but these bigger philosophical questions about how we attend to the world. So what was it? I mean, I guess firstly, for those that haven't read his work, how did that fit in with the kind of left brain, right brain approach?

Yeah, so I had been, I had done a lot of this work as part of my doctoral work back in 2001. And so these ideas had been in my mind, but I didn't come across The Master and His Emissary. I knew of Iain's work, work a little bit while I was in the UK, but I didn't read The Master and His Emissary until probably 2011, 2012. And something clicked for me. So for those who don't know, Iain McGilchrist is a psychiatrist and works in neuroscience out of the UK. And his theory has, has always been that we have failed to understand the nature of the human brain and something really foundational about it. And so he talks about the left and the right hemispheres. And this is not the sort of popularized version of, oh, I'm I'm right-brained, so I'm good at the arts, or I'm left-brained, so I'm good at maths, right? Everything requires both hemispheres of our brain to operate. But what he does say is that the human brain is unique in that it has two hemispheres, which in many ways, you're like, why did you do that? It doesn't seem really efficient. And you have the corpus callosum, which kind of connects them, but also inhibits them. So it allows them to both communicate and not communicate at times. And his interest was in why that happens. And to boil down his kind of thesis, it's that the two 2 hemispheres of the brain pay attention to the world in 2 different ways. And they're important because human beings need to be able to do both. So we live as embodied beings, and we take in hundreds and thousands of sensations and data points every minute. And that allows us to experience kind of embodied sensation, implicit meaning. It allows us to make sense of the features, you know, the facial expressions you're making right now, or to see patterns. And so you take all of that data And the work of the left hemisphere is to make it usable, because we have to be able to have, for lack of a better word, shortcuts, right, to be able to navigate the world. So the left hemisphere takes this vast amount of data and it reduces it. It's very sequential and linear in its processing. It abstracts things and makes them usable. And then when the brain is functioning well, all of that would go back to the right hemisphere to be seen and understood in the context of the whole, right? Some people might call that wisdom. And Iain's argument is that We have unintentionally, um, and there are a lot of other sociocultural historians like Leonard Schlein who wrote The Alphabet and His Goddess who've talked about this, but over the last 300, 400 years, at a time that actually coincides with the rise of the printing press in Europe, is, is where a lot of people landed. We have allowed left-hemispheric tendencies to dominate, and the reason is that the way the left hemisphere operates is that it's kind of this hall of mirrors. You only know what you know, and so all the new information comes in and gets filtered through what we already have as abstractions. So if it doesn't fit, you throw it out. And so, in a sense, you need the human brain to be healthy in a way that allows the right hemisphere to be stronger than the left so that it can mediate the left. And Ian argues both kind of physically but also culturally, we have become left-hemispheric dominant in many ways to our detriment.

Yeah. Yeah. So, so therefore, if we bring that back into an educational context, what does that mean? What, what, how are those two approaches different? And so that comes, brings us back to your holistic indigenous learning.

Yes. I should have said that. Right. So in the book, what I say is that the Cartesian Newtonian worldview and way of being is very aligned with left hemisphere tendencies and the holistic indigenous worldview is very aligned with right hemispheric. And so I sort of use the metaphor throughout the book to just kind of remind us like which system, which sets Which ways of being have we been privileging in the dominant view of education? And it is really hard, right? They— what's the question? Like, does a fish know it's in water? And of course it doesn't, because that's the only thing it knows. And the reality is that all of us live in this dominant culture. And I don't like the term in the US, this idea of West— white supremacy culture has become very ubiquitous. People are using it. And I actually think of it as a modern Western supremacy culture that has come to dominate us. And has become the dominant culture throughout the world, I think.

Yeah. And it is, I just feel so much resonance in what you are talking about there in the things that we obsess ourselves with in the education space. I mean, you know, we are, we are just constantly obsessed with certainty and measuring and ensuring predicted outcomes. And all of these things are about grasping. It's so, it is so left, left hemispheric, right? And the things that are about something else, and they are, I think they do, they are fringe, but they are, they do exist. Things like, you know, people increasingly using mindfulness practices in schools, and many people might see the value in them, but it's not core to what we do. What the core to what we do is about propositional knowing, and it's about measuring, and it's increasingly about competencies, but we still want to measure them. We still want to plan them and predict them. And then, you know, have the outcomes that allay our fears as parents and as educators so that we can be sure that everything's gonna be fine in the future.

Yeah. Yeah, mindfulness, I think, is such an excellent example, right? Because this is what the left hemispheric tendency does, right? You take mindfulness, which is supposed to be about just being and about letting go and about sitting and not doing, and you, you basically pencil it into your schedule to do it, right? It's a thing. You just kind of like— as opposed to what it's meant to be, which is the more right hemispheric way of actually just existing in the world for a period. And so this is part of the problem with language too, right, is that we will take these things that sound really good or that are really good, and then we pull them into a left-hemispheric context or a dominant context. And Michelle Fine, who's a professor at CUNY, she talked about this notion of scaling, and she said as soon as you want to scale something, you kind of rip out the living part of it in order to be able to scale it, because you need to replicate it and you need to kind of— and, and I think that's exactly it. You sort of rip out the living, breathing part of it and then kind of put it in as a thing, right, as an intervention.

That's so interesting because also you, you use the word Indigenous quite intentionally in your framing, Holistic Indigenous Learning. And one of the provocations you give in the book to people is to think about what that term means to them and how that might evolve as they read the book. I think that's a great provocation to people because it is, it is a challenging term. It, we don't quite know what to do with it. People have many different, I suppose, understandings or value judgments associated with the term, but just in relation to what you've just said, said, there is something— I mean, the root of the term is about place and locality, isn't it? Like connection with place. And as you say, if we try and scale something from the place in which it has developed, we almost inevitably have to extract it from place and standardize it somehow. Or so it just struck me, that's an interesting connection because I think, yeah, why did you choose that term? Maybe as a way in.

I went back and forth all the way. I mean, almost through the editing process as well, because the other term I use I use holistic, ecological, and indigenous to kind of describe and point at the set of things. But I landed on indigenous, and there's now— I realized after I published the book that neo-indigeneity is actually an idea as well, right? And neo-indigeneity is trying to sort of like honor how indigenous is used, I think, in the context of a world where colonization has really disrupted the lives of those who have been indigenous to place and are a people against whom genocide was perpetrated, right, all around the world, whether, you know, New Zealand or Australia or the US or South America. So I think, you know, we want to honor that and not somehow minimize and sort of co-opt it. On the other hand, right, to me, what those communities represent and what they are doing a powerful job of sort of uplifting and trying to remind people of is exactly what you said, which is those who are original to a place and how you live when you are connected to place and to the timeline of the people and beings that were in that place. And all human beings had that, right? We were all at one point indigenous to a place. And neo-indigeneity now is being used to kind of say, at least in the US, how I've heard it used, is many of us who grow up not in particular European cultures will sort of say, actually, I really recognize something about a lot of the other people who are Black and brown, or in some cases maybe Irish or Italian, who are deeply rooted in the culture of a place. We feel a sense of familiarity when we encounter that, whether it's about how we think about time, how we think about family, you know, everyone's your aunt, right, or how we think about who we are in the world. And so I purposefully used it, and I did put that provocation to invite people to almost go through the process I had gone through, which is really grappling with, is it okay to still try and honor the essence of what I think we are pointing at when we use the term Indigenous, which is who we are, and who we can be before we let all of these external pressures of a dominant society kind of take that away from us or pull us away from it.

Yeah, it's, it's such an interesting and I think a deeply complex thing there that you've just said. I mean, there's so much power interwoven into all of that, those discourses, and as you said, the history and, and the domination and the, the genocide of certain cultures, but there's also this current challenge of how do we respond now? I think, which is interesting. I've not heard that term, but neo-indigeneity, that, that idea that there is a huge integrative piece that we need to be able to do now. As you say, you've got the one nested inside the other. How do we integrate this Cartesian Newtonian approach? Because clearly it has significant value, even though it's done significant significant wrong to many people, but it has significant value. But how do we nest it within what, for many people, they've become very, very detached from those ways of— it's almost like a remembering somehow. It's like, you know, it's not regressive in looking backwards, but it's somehow remembering a different way of being. I don't know.

And that's why I talk about— right. No, it is. It is a going back to, and it's funny cuz I just did an interview with two indigenous leaders in the US and Josie talked about this a lot. She talked about, yeah, going back to, but, right, I'll say a couple of things. One, I think the basics of it, and part of why I tried to frame the book in the way I did, is that now we have layered over a lot of other political and racial pieces on it. So even this idea of like whiteness, right, and white supremacy, and why does that term hit people in such a hard way. I think the Cartesian Newtonian way of being, the left hemispheric way of being, when it becomes dominant, harms all of us, right? It traumatizes all of us because in many ways it is ripping us away from the very things that make us human, right? So I always say Descartes is sort of the quintessential Cartesian-Newtonian. I think, therefore I am. Not I dance, therefore I am. Not I love, therefore I am. Not I laugh, therefore I am, right? All these things that make us human, it's I think, therefore I am. And, and so I think there's a way in which we need to have this conversation that is reminding all of us, right, that there is something that we lose when we lose this part of ourselves that is kind kind of the part that allows us to connect with other human beings and to empathize with them, even though we may not have met them, or that they come from different backgrounds, or even have different ideas and beliefs and values about the world, but that we are connected because we're human. And so to me, framing it as our humanity and sort of rebuilding some of those muscles is an important piece of this. But the other thing I will say is everyone loves brain science until they don't, or until it points to something that you don't want to look at. And, you know, in this and I think this is where— and we can go into the specifics of these— but folks like Montessori and Steiner and Krishnamurti, who are the educators that I kind of look at in the second part of the book, you know, they basically said, look, children— and this is true— children are born with brains that are not yet formed, and they are formed by place and by experience. And so we need to give them certain kinds of experiences. And I would argue we need to give them certain kinds of experiences so that their brains develop in certain ways. And if you think about the left and right hemisphere, and you think about how children naturally grow before we put all of the kind of stuff of school and culture and expectations on them, they are embodied. They're walking around. They're using their hands. They're using their mouths. They're running. They're bumping. They're making sense of things. They are living entirely in a right hemispheric— predominantly in that, even as their left hemisphere, right, these conceptions, these abstractions are being formed, and that they need to live in that. Place. And at least in the US and in the West, Western alphabetic literacy is very left-hemispheric dominant. It is linear, it is sequential, right? It is about all these left-hemispheric pieces. I do not think it is a coincidence that the rise of the press in Europe is part of when we started to see these sociocultural pieces, because it actually strengthens the left hemisphere. And as we have progressed in education and pushed literacy, right? Oh, at 3, you need to know your letters, you need to decode, you need to— whatever. We're in inadvertently pulling away from this very natural way of growing, where young children are very embodied, kind of not really thinking analytically. And it's in middle and high school that we begin to really sort of push those, because you've now set up the brain to do both. And, and to me, we are not talking about it, we are not thinking about it. And one of the implications of Ian's work, and what I hope I was able to at least kind of present in the book, is that we really have to be having that conversation. Conversation. We are doing this to ourselves. And technology, I think, is also very left hemispheric in some ways.

Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. In some ways. I think in other ways it's— can be immersive and re— but also I would say there was a significant convergence with religion as well in terms of this individualistic, the Protestant individualism that came with it as well. So I think that also kind of de-racinated us. It pulled us up from our roots in terms of our collective imaginary or our, you know, our ways of relating to others. So I think is, but maybe that connects with one of the things I really wanted to ask you about, 'cause you highlight the example of China as a way that they actually managed through the Scientific Revolution to somehow integrate the two much more successfully. And I just wondered what happened there socioculturally to not allow the Cartesian-Newtonian to just come and wipe out the previous way of knowing.

If you like.

This is interesting because it runs into this field of philosophy called axiology, which is the study of how place and culture shape values. And one of the things we have to remember about Europe as the Scientific Revolution was birthed and kind of moving forward was Europe was actually this like very fractured, very traumatized place, right? You had, because of religion and monarchs and political wars and banking, you know, houses that were undermined and a plague, right? You had a lot of people who were displaced. You had small groups of people using violence, right? We all look at the knights and the duels and stuff. Those were actually public attempts at violence to try and control large groups of people, right? So there was a lot of trauma and displacement that had happened in Europe during this kind of period. Whereas in China at the period, you did have kind of strong— I don't know if it's a monarch or kind of reigns, but you also had folks who were still very deeply connected to place in a very different way. And I think part of that is the religion. And the religious wars that were happening in Europe. And so when the principles of the Scientific Revolution moved and sort of went into China, the research in this area that I cite in the book is that people were able to take these ideas and this kind of Cartesian, Newtonian way of doing things and overlay it over ways of understanding science and mathematics that already existed, because the Chinese had very advanced understandings of all of these areas. And so regionally, these folks kind of took it and they made it their own, but they overlaid and they sort of brought the two together. But what was foundational there, right, and you could think of this again in the sort of right-left idea, like they were very right hemispheric in the sense that they had this whole on top of which this kind of Cartesian-Newtonian piece came in and it was sort of integrated in, as opposed to in Europe where you had sort of broken apart this understanding of the world and the cultures and the people and the places and traditions. And now the Cartesian-Newtonian worldview kind of dominated and I do want to just say, right, like we're talking here about that context in that period in China. So there's a lot that's changed about China since then.

Of course. No, no, absolutely reasonable caveat. But it is, I think that's an interesting example, partly also not to be so Euro-North American-centric in our history even, but there are things that happened in those moments where there was a different outcome to some extent at that point. And that more of that, and perhaps it was a Taoist influence there, but there's, you know, that more integrative success somehow for, of those different worldviews. So it doesn't, you know, alternative outcomes are possible, I suppose, is one of the things we can take from it.

Yeah.

And I mean, one of the things that happened in Europe too, right? They called it the Dark Ages for a reason, which was in a sense they had let go. They had sort of pointed at what the Romans and the Greeks, I mean, cuz when you think of Plato and Aristotle, and I did this, I went to India and sort of studied Vedic philosophy. And then you study the ancient and medieval philosophers, a great deal of similarity there, right, in terms of how we think about the world and wholeness and all that. And then people basically, they let the wisdom of antiquity, they pointed out and they said, well, this doesn't comport with this new way of understanding the world. So it's not, you know, it's not worth anything. So they didn't integrate.

So I suppose, I mean, you mentioned the three of them already. But I think that, as you said, in the second half of the book, you really go into some practical specifics about the way that we put these educational ideas into practice in this, particularly this holistic indigenous learning or ecological approach. But the three examples you cite in Montessori, Rudolf Steiner, and, and Krishnamurti, and, and I think there's fascinating things between all three of them, some commonalities, some differences. But firstly, what, how did you alight on those particular because obviously there's been other progressive attempts in education. What was it about those three that stuck out?

So as long as there was the kind of factory model, right, that was emerging in Europe in the 1700s, there had always been people who'd sort of pointed. So you think of the Romantics, you think of Rousseau and Pestalozzi, right? They were all sort of pointing at something. The reason I honed in on Montessori, Steiner, and Krishnamurti is in many ways, if I can use the right-left analogy, they had gone from this conceptual abstracted idea of what we're supposed to do in education and they had actually built something. So in a sense, they sort of made something in the world that was embodied. And so they had, all three of them, in different ways created something that was embodied enough that it still survives today. And I thought there was something very important and interesting about that. And they all, you know, had left a vast amount of both writing, ideas that gave a sense of the philosophical roots of where they were coming from and why, and then their process and their justifications for creating things in the way that they did that I think gives us a really interesting way to now look at what they did in the context of the science we now know around human development and how learning happens.

Yeah. Interesting. I think Maria Montessori is particularly interesting because, I mean, well, all three of them are fascinating in their own way, but Maria Montessori, you know, she called it scientific pedagogy. She was trained as a medic. She was very steeped in the Cartesian Newtonian worldview, but what made her many people perhaps don't know about her, she also had this mystical and Catholic aspect to her as well, which I think doesn't get talked about as much. But there is, I, I think that's interesting because she managed to do this integrative work. She somehow managed to pull quite a planned scientific intentional approach to education, but also allow ideas of flow and, you know, these other, you know, ways of being, ways of of knowing into an educational framework.

Yeah. And I think she does such a brilliant job, I think, of recognizing— I love progressive pedagogies. There are, as you said, many of them. And when you go into many progressive models or places, when they go wrong, they go wrong badly. And I think it's partly because many of the adults who gravitate towards them are sort of the like, we don't need structures. And I think what Montessori recognized is that you can have agency and freedom and the sort of ability to give children more room inside of the prepared environment. And so the ways in which she thought, well, what is the preparation you have to do both in terms of the child, in terms of the materials at a developmentally appropriate way that give them the kind of structures inside of which they learn all these skills, which I think is, it's an important part of the progressive pedagogy conversation that I feel like we miss out on sometimes. But no, I think the, And I, again, mystical, it was a word that I got feedback on with some of my early readers. They're like, well, do you think people are going to like feel like you're going off the deep end? And I said, well, you know, mystical, again, words have meaning in context. And I think people think, oh, it's a little woo woo. You know, it's like the tarot cards and this and that. But I think what mystical points at is this notion that there is something bigger than we are and that we have direct access to it that does not need to be mediated through formal institutions. Not to say that there isn't value to formal institutions that mediate it, not when they become too patriarchal and controlling. But mediation can be helpful, right, or to do it in community. But mystical very explicitly is about that. And I think we have lost— we are so afraid about this intersection of what we now know and think of as religion, which tends to be quite oppressive and quite rigid and in many ways patriarchal and not fair to many groups. We see so much wrong in that that I think we've thrown the baby out with the bathwater in terms of we hardly we ever talk about the spirit of our children. And yet, for any of us who are parents, right, we know, like, they're born and they are a person. Like, there is something about them that makes them a human being that is unique and distinct from me, and it isn't just genes and biology and their physical being. And so I think, you know, that is a provocation that I give to the field, is how can we possibly take on the human endeavor of education if we're not willing to have conversations about what it means to take care of children's psychic, emotional, spiritual, physical, you know, academic needs altogether. And I think what we're seeing in the world right now, right, just in terms of depression and violence and disconnection and alienation, is this lack of attention to ourselves as spiritual beings. And I know positive psychology now is trying to fill in the space, but even that to me sometimes is like, it's a little bit too like brain-bound. And you're like, no, it's something else. It's something that connects us to something bigger and to each other.

Yeah, yeah, I completely agree. And I, I think it is a— it's a real tightrope to walk, isn't it? Because, you know, as you said, the word mystical is challenging. Even talking about Catholicism with Montessori and then Rudolf Steiner and J.P. Krishnamurti, they are all associated quite strongly in relation to a particular spiritual or religious— and that's not what's happening. And I'm, I'm sure that's not what you're proposing. It's not the education and spirituality or spiritualism or religion should come closer together. But as you said, it's a, there's a holism there about attending to the integrated aspects of what it means to be human, where we started, right? What does it mean to be human? It's not just about propositional knowing in your prefrontal cortex or, you know, your, your working memory. It's about an embodied, but, but, but I think this is the other part that I think I find really exciting and interesting is that unfortunately Unfortunately, we do seem to require a scientific basis for the approaches we use, right? Because of the dominance of, of the Cartesian Newtonian paradigm, we need that. And what we're actually getting now, I think in third generation cognitive science is exactly that justification.

Yeah.

There is a convergence of philosophical traditions as well as scientific traditions, what was it, 2000, Varela's book, Embodied, The Embodied Mind. I mean, it's two decades old now, but it's still very new. The idea that ways of knowing are embodied, they are based in place, they are enacted, they are, you know, our cognition is distributed across multiple people. You can't just isolate it to one individual knowing some propositions and then test those in an exam. And there we go. We've done our job as educators. That's not good enough. And the science is telling us that it's not good enough anymore. And I think there is that convergence that makes this stuff very necessary to talk about, as you say, but also very exciting.

Right. No, I think there's a convergence, although it's an interesting question, right? I used to teach kind of sexuality and sexual health education. And one of the big things there was knowledge does not change behavior. And the reality is that for people who are skeptical of this, you know, we can give them all the scientific kind of pieces that we want and it'll never happen. I mean, the reality is that there is an element of— and I, I use faith again in an agnostic way— which is, if we are all right in what the science is showing us and what Einstein and others have told us, is that we cannot possibly know everything ever. And so at a certain point, there's going to have to be a sense of kind of faith that, like, yes, actually there is a reason for this, and I'm going to jump into it. But I think the important thing there too is that we're not telling human beings what to think. Think. But I do think even asking the question, and I do think children are amazing. And I think they have a lot— they're like the most natural philosophers in the world. And they do have a sense of who they are, before we teach them to ignore it. So I do think asking the question, who are you? What gives you purpose? What makes you happy? How do you feel about this? What does that tell you about how you want to be in the world? Right? Those questions. So it's not about telling them what to think and what to feel. It is giving room in space and community containers inside of which to have those explorations of self, but then also explorations of self in an understanding that you're in relationship, right? This— that is one thing in the book that, that it's interesting to me. Some people pick up on it and some people don't, but this notion of self and other as a dialectic process, right? That I can still be an individual being, and I am an individual being, and I don't exist separate from others, and therefore I become me in relationship to them, and I define my community and others by being me. And so it's this very intricate kind of interesting dance. And that's what I don't think we make a lot of room for in our current kind of push for, you know, knowledge and, you know, memorization and all that kind of stuff.

I do. I completely agree. But I also think, again, the science is catching up with that to show dyna— you know, dynamical systems and understanding component processing. All of these things are coming together to say, yeah, we need to have to take that flow seriously, that kind of movement and that exchange between tensions that we have to take that seriously in the way that people learn and grow fundamentally, right? It's the way that they inhabit their, their bodies, but in their environment and how those things speak to each other. So just, I'm just conscious of time just before we finish. I, it can be very easy to stay up in the clouds and I, I love being there and I love being there with you. It's great to have these conversations, but at the same time, we also need to hear about the implications for practice. What do these things mean or look like in practice? And I think that's one of the things you do really interestingly in the book is compare 3 examples of the way in which these types of learning communities develop. And one is not very successfully, and the, the other 2 are more, more successfully because they're established. But I suppose that's my question is what were the things that you particularly, like headlines that you would summarize about the— that because it's challenging work to do building this kind of community around these ideas, where do the— where do those go wrong? Where do they fall apart in the process of trying to establish them?

Yeah, so, you know, for those who haven't read the book, my three case studies were a more established Krishnamurti school, a more established Waldorf school, and then a school in the state sector in England where the head and many of the teachers were committed to creating this more human-centered kind of approach to education and got to spend 2 years at the school and really have a great deal of respect. But one of the lessons from the case study of the state school was that there were a lot of ideas, there were a lot of good intentions, but they weren't put together in a coherent whole that allowed human beings who who were brilliant and hardworking to kind of make sense of and embody something complex. And so that's where I sort of came up with the framework of what I call an instructional model, which is making visible, right, and being able to articulate the why. What is the purpose of what we're up to? How do we think about the developmental needs of the young people we're serving in the age band we're serving? How do we think about learning, how learning learning happens, meaningful, purposeful learning. In light of that, what do we choose to focus on in terms of curriculum content experiences? How do we then build the capacities in adults and the systems to kind of support it? And when you think about the factory model, you can actually build an instructional model. It's just a pretty simple one. And there's a diagram in the book where I kind of talk about it, right? But when you look at these human-centered models, it's complex work where you're weaving a lot of things together. And so what I think Krishnamurti, Steiner, Montessori, and now there are new models like in the US, Native American Community Academies, you've got, you know, Big Picture Learning, there are a bunch of them that are coming out. They have been able to articulate and put down ideas, practices, kind of template models, so that adults can go in, young people can Students can go in, families can go in, and the phrase I used in my dissertation— I can't remember if it made it into the book— was singing off the same song sheet. You all sort of know what it is that you're trying to do. You understand you have a different relationship to it at different times. You know it's dynamic, you know you're gonna have to make sense of it, but you're not trying to build it all from scratch. And I use the example of what it means to go from novice to mastery, and I use the example of manual driving, right? If you've ever learned and you haven't learned when you first start, if you went from automatic to a manual car, it's really hard because you're trying to do 6 things at once and you have to think about each of them and whatever. It's very confusing. You end up integrating those things and then it becomes easy. And what instructional models, when sort of created well, do is create a scaffold for you to move from novice to more experienced more quickly and, and with less sort of cognitive load than you would otherwise. And so what it does is it allows educators to go in and say, okay, now I can actually pay attention to the young person in front of me and see what it means to apply this and to do it. And so from a practical sense, right, and I think all of those of you who are listening who run schools, like in many ways, that's probably what you try to do in your shared professional learning and your work with, you know, colleagues in different spaces. But there is a value, I think, to being more intentional about our codification and then really building opportunities to kind of build out our knowledge and ways of being inside that work.

Yeah, brilliant. Yeah, I like the idea of scaffolding because it disappears after a while. You don't need it anymore because you built the building, right? Yeah, I think there are people— that's the cognitive dissonance as well though, I think, for school leaders now who are trying to do this kind of work but within the factory model system, as you call it.

Yep.

That's a really cognitively dissonant process because you're trying to do this more holistic work inside a very left brain kind of, yeah, you know, prescriptive model. And that's, that's not easy. But there are people who are, are beginning it. And I think it's important that we, we continue to try and understand what that might look like. Cuz we can't just dismantle the whole system obviously. But yeah, at the same time we've also gotta learn from these examples that you highlight in the book. So—

The one last thing I want to say, because I know we're ending, but is that the pandemic, one of the things that it disrupted, and maybe less so in the rest of the world where people were able to be in school more regularly, but many of these environments, right, they rely on a sustained and community-held culture. And because of the interruptions of 2 years, where in many cases you have 2 to 3 years of students who haven't been inside of this culture, the culture doesn't exist. And I think we have to be particularly attentive now to kind of taking the time and having the patience to actually rebuild the relationships and the cultures and the norms of what it means to be agentic inside of community so that we can do this work. And I think that's just something that I like to name for people who are trying to do this work and have been doing it well and now are struggling, that part of it is you have to rebuild the scaffold a little bit to allow people to understand what it means to be inside of it, and then you can take it away. And that's why it feels like a really great moment to start being a little bit more intentional about like, what was it that was happening that maybe we didn't know or name?

Yeah.

And to make that visible for folks.

Yeah. And, and what did we, what did we miss when it all went away? What do we actually value when you strip away all of the, the, yeah, the noise and you know, what's the signal? But thank you. We're, we're out of time. I know you've got another meeting, but thank you so much. Really, really lovely conversation. And I think there's so many powerful ideas in there that I think we do need to spend a bit of time in. They can sound quite abstract sometimes, but I think we do need to spend some time in that space and really understanding the problem. And that's where we started. Like, we really do need to understand that this problem is not just what's our curriculum and how we can we design a new curriculum or design a new, even a master schedule. It needs to be something deeper than that. And, and I think your work is a great place for people to go to, to get a really wonderful overview of some of that thinking. So thank you.

No, thank you. I really appreciate the invitation and I will look forward to staying connected.

Brilliant.

Thank you.

Well, I could talk to you again. Hopefully I will. Have a great evening with your family.

All the best. Take care. You too.

Bye.

Bye. We hope you've enjoyed this episode. Please feel free to continue the dialogues with us on social media with the hashtag #futurelearningdesign and on the Intrepid Ed News website, intrepidednews.com.