Warm Data in Education - A Conversation with Nora Bateson

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

One of the biggest responsibilities of being an educator is actually paying attention to what is implied and not just leave that as something that is irrelevant because that's the warm data. That's actually the meta messaging. That's where the deep stuff is happening.

Hi everyone, and thanks for joining me for another episode of the podcast. It's a huge pleasure to be able to share this wonderful conversation I had with Nora Bateson. In my opinion, Nora is one of the most important thinkers working today to challenge the dominant paradigm of optimization, separation, and machine-like efficiency that pervades our institutions, including education. She does so in her own beautiful style and in deep continuity with the ideas of her father, Gregory Bateson, and her grandfather, William Bateson, among many others. Nora's work with the International Bateson Institute brings the fields of biology, cognition, art, anthropology, psychology, and information technology together into a study of the patterns in the ecology of living systems. She coined the term warm data, and as you'll hear in the conversation, this was in response to the disproportionate credibility and authority given to information derived by decontextualizing. I've had the privilege of working with Nora and her team to explore what warm data means for the way schooling and education happens. If you'd like to find out more, we're hosting some online sessions in early October and also visiting schools to run warm data labs with young people in partnership with the International Baccalaureate. Nora is the author of Small Arcs of Larger Circles, which was released by Triarchy Press in 2016, and very excitingly, her forthcoming book Combining is being launched at an event in New York on September 30th. In our conversation, you can hear Nora read two excerpts from her latest book.

Mm-hmm.

Well, thank you, Laura. I've been so looking forward to this conversation. We've been doing a bit of work together in some really interesting ways with the IB and with international schools, thinking about how warm data fits and sits with what we're doing in education. And what I would love to do with this conversation, if we can, is just to kind of give a sense to people who are perhaps new to your work and new to warm data and what it is, a sense of what that term means, but also kind of where is it coming from? Because it's coming from generations worth of work, which I'm beginning to really appreciate. And I think, yeah, there's a lot of very important ideas in there. And even yesterday I found myself, I answering this. So what exactly, what is warm data? What is, what's it all about? And then I'm stumbling for words to try and explain something that is so big and, and expansive. And so I'd, yeah, really looking forward to kind of getting into some of that. 'Cause I think there are big implications for what we're doing in education. Mm-hmm. So, um, yeah, too. Brilliant. Thank you. So if we could start, one of the pieces I absolutely love from your first book is Tears at the Bus Stop. When I read it, I was, it really speaks to the conversations we're having around the education system now and in, in general what some of the challenges are. And often it's the children who were crying on their first day at school, but in that piece it was your father crying at the bus stop as he led you onto the bus to take you away to school, because he said, they are, they're going to ruin her mind. And as you defiantly said, but they never did. Perhaps you could, you give just a little bit of a background of Greg, so this was Gregory Bateson, your father, dropping you off at this on the school bus, but obviously coming from his father, William Bateson, and this kind of lineage of work. Perhaps just briefly, just if you could give a little bit of a sense of where all of those ideas have been coming from as we then bring it up to the, the current day.

Yeah. So briefly, my father's father, William Bateson, is probably best known for having been the person that coined the term genetics in 1905. So the study of genetics is a study of how organisms change. And what's important about that is that it is actually, I think, a parallel to what it is people are talking about right now when they are ringing the bell and calling for systems change. Yeah, how do organisms change? What's happening? Because they are changing in context, they're changing in relationship. So all those relationships change, but all the structures also change. All the possibilities for communication are also changing, learning to be in their world in new ways together. So that's a very brief description of where William was studying. He was at Cambridge, and this was exactly at the same moment when the study of eugenics was beginning. People associate eugenics with the Nazis, but it started much earlier than I think a lot of people are aware of. And it, it started as a way to try to control and harness this process by which organisms change, and to do so with a predetermined idea of what would be the better or the best or the most efficient or the the optimum outcome. And this as an idea permeated everything from education systems to health systems to religion, science, technology, law, and, and so on. Psychology. It went everywhere. It was maybe the most pervasive viral idea that we've ever actually seen. And it was so pervasive that it's very difficult to even see where it is. It's lodged so deeply in all of our institutions that it's very difficult to even become sensitized to those places where after, you know, a century or more of really beautiful human effort and intention, there is still this contamination down at the base. My grandfather tried to fight this in every way that he could. And this was the environment that my father grew up into, was this deep affection for life and affection for the inquiry, the curiosity, the beauty, and the way in which life continues to change, to make more life. And that, that happens between human beings. It happens in different ways in different cultures. It happens in different ways between different kinds of organisms or landscapes or different sorts of ecologies. But it's happening.

Yeah.

So this was at the base of the world that I have come into is this affection. Ultimately, it's an affection for life and the recognition that the study of life is an ongoing and deeply rigorous process. And this was William's frustration with the eugenicists. He kept saying, you can't control this. You will make a disaster. This is gonna be a Frankenstein's monster, right? And every time you try to interrupt these processes with your own idea of what's best, you will truncate and interrupt the multiple processes that are involved with multiple other organisms and multiple other contexts that you're not seeing. Yeah. So when I was going to school on those mornings, my father was so sad. Because he knew that I was going into the institution that was going to train me explicitly that math is something different from reading, is something different from history, is something different from art, but implicitly that I was going to be thinking about my own identity fitting into a world in which those were the presuppositions. Okay, so that's maybe the more pernicious part of it. This idea of, you know, our children who, you know, if our children had been born 15,000 years ago, we would be thinking about how to best prepare them to be members of a community, to be members of a group of people that need each other. We would be having to help them sensitize implicitly and explicitly to the interdependency and the membership that they have with each other and the natural world. So what is being sensitized in that classroom is actually what it means to have membership in this economy, this set of cultural ideas of what is success, what's an individual, what is failure, what is health, what is optimal, What does it mean to be better? What's a hierarchy? What's competition, right? These things are, we don't really even have to be explicit about them because they're already bubbling in the down low.

Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, yeah, they are in the environment, the water that all the young people coming into our schools are kind of swimming in. But I would, I mean, I love that word sensitize and that we'll come back to that I think, but I think the impulse is still the same.

Mm-hmm.

And that's where, like you said, all these kind of, all these intentions that, that underlie all of wherever people choose to take it, there is still, you know, that intention to prepare our young people to be in community, to, to understand, to sensitize to the world they're coming into. It's still there. But one of the things I wanted to talk to you about was that, that explicit implicit part of it. And I, I would like to get onto that because I think that's one of the things that we overly focus on is the explicit because, and that requires us to have answers for how things work so that we can talk and tell and teach our young people about them, which involves separation and decontextualization and all the things. But would it be okay just to go back a step to put Gregory in there as well? Because I'm, I'm also interested in this other part that comes in, which is what Gregory then started in an attempt to— with cybernetics and those kinds of things, just to try and help people understand more. Because that, again, that impulse is there. It's like William had it— was, it's not that we just want to let life happen. He was a scientist, right? And he was, he was still seeking to understand, just like Gregory was seeking to understand. And then each time there's an attempt to say, well, Perhaps if we look at it this way, we might frame it differently so people can sensitize more to the life that's happening. And in a way, your warm data idea is a similar attempt to get people again from a slightly different perspective to say, oh, there's all this other stuff happening here that perhaps we should name or highlight or, or focus in on. What, what was it that Gregory did in terms of a contribution to that?

Mm-hmm. Well, it starts again earlier than you will find in the books. My father went to New Guinea to study culture, and when he was there, he met Margaret Mead, and they were young. Okay. It was 1929. My dad was born in 1904, so they were 25 years old. Yeah. And in that moment, the world was getting intoxicated with fascist ideas, okay? And they were coming out of eugenics. Yeah, of what makes a more perfect human being. How do we either eliminate or fix the ones that aren't in that particular threshold of normalcy and optimized possibility? And this was global, okay? It was not just the Nazis, it was global. It was the United States with their There was an immigration law of 1925 that said no Southern Europeans could come into the United States. It was everywhere. Okay. And eugenics was the darling of science at that time. It was what was funded. It was what, what the hype was about. Now we're talking about neuroscience and viruses. And, you know, a couple of decades ago, it was all about the genome. So we've seen these moments where culture gets a crush on particular ideas in science. And those ideas get pushed and they infiltrate everywhere. Okay, so at that moment, this is what was happening. And Gregory and Margaret, they were young, they were upset, they were worried for a world that would look back on this and be horrified at what they had done. That's an interesting take on it. So they were worried for the children of the people who were promoting these eugenics and, and fascist ideas? What would happen to societies that were needing to justify their past? What sort of double binds, what sort of deep pathologies would come in with that process? Okay, so they had an idea that it would be interesting, and they started writing to other young people around the world. It would be interesting to find out what would happen if we had a different kind of science and it was a science not of pulling things apart and identifying them objectively, but the science of how things come together. So the idea was that there was an underpinning observation that if something could be objectified, it could then be exploited.

Yeah.

If you cut something from its nest of relationships and contextual processes and you are no longer able to perceive all of those relational interdependencies, then it becomes much easier to justify exploitation and destruction. So their idea was if we could have a new science, this new way of learning about our world would be a sort of antidote to the kind of thinking that would breed fascism. Yeah. Okay, so that's where the beginnings of what would later become the Macy Conferences and the beginnings of cybernetics, systems theory, complexity theory, that was what it started with, was a few young people who really wanted to stop the future from being bloodied with— yeah, the harm of fascism. Okay, so then though, weird things happened, as they do, as they do. It's a strange world out there. And I mean, for my father, cybernetics was like poetry. It was a way in which we could find connections between things and we could begin to understand how stuff happens in relational process. But the language of the time, the, the way that it was delivered and landed in so many different fields from psychology to education to health to information technology, et cetera, was in a sugarcoating of these ideas of mechanistic metaphors. So as a thought experiment, there was this need to break loose of our own habits of thinking by having a different metaphor. The metaphor they had was a machine. How would a machine contract leukemia? Okay, so the, the point of doing that was not to mechanize the idea. The point of doing that was to get out of our habituated ideas. However, we live in a world that is infatuated with machines, and this metaphor landed in an already mechanized world that was totally gaga for spaceships and modernism and toasters and washing machines and cars and airplanes. And it was the '50s. Yeah, it was, you know, pure modernism at that moment. So what my father was interested in with cybernetics in some ways got lost in the way that it was implemented. So he went on to continue to try to bring this perception of relational process into all of his work, whether he was working in psychology or ecology or information or anthropology or wherever. He was looking for the same thing. How is this system communicating? What are the boundaries and the limitations of that communication? What are the patterns of relationships? And how are things moving not just in the way that would cause immediate effect, but the consequences of the consequences of the consequences.

Yeah.

The way that he went about even doing this work was out of sync with the culture, to put it mildly. And for the most part, I don't think he was very well understood.

Yeah.

His books are difficult to read because he doesn't relent. He doesn't give you a break. He won't come to the point because there isn't a point. The point is life. If you're asking what the point is, you've missed that the point is life.

Exactly. Yeah.

And so there's no wind-up, there's no methodology, there's no 5-step process, there's no indicator of what's the optimum or the goal or the strategy or the manual, which drove people crazy. But it also left something for us to work with now.

Yeah.

Which is an, I think, an entry point into what I would refer to as really ecological thinking.

Mm-hmm.

Right. So we can, we can be concerned about water. All right. And we can abstract water. But then if you actually pay attention to how an artist describes water, What is in the description of water that resonates with us as, ah, there's membership with that water. It's more than an abstract thing to control. Okay. And that's my point.

That's the point. Exactly. Yeah. That's amazing. That's, I didn't know that. I mean, obviously I knew about Margaret Mead, but I hadn't, didn't know that part of the story. And that's fascinating because I think She then obviously went on to write about the intergenerational or the generational divides that come between young and then the previous generation, which I find fascinating and I think is really relevant now, particularly her idea of the prefigurative culture that we're now in. And I think that's why I'm so interested in all of this work is because it feels, well, as we've said previously, it feels very important, very relevant now to what Margaret called the prefigurative culture, meaning we don't really know what we as the, the older generation should be passing on to our children.

Mm-hmm.

Because the contexts have changed so significantly. Obviously the underlying contexts are actually still a lot the same, same patterns happening as we've just heard in that history, but there's this Yeah, the kind of different needs that young people have now with polycrisis, global complex challenges, whatever you wanna call them, deeply interconnected world. We are not quite sure, I think, in education and as parents, what exactly are they gonna need? So we start talking about things like adaptability and agility and, and we just want them to be resilient and all these kind of competencies that we get to because, well, we don't know what's coming, so we don't want to We don't want to teach them about the world anymore. We want to create these competencies in them that help them deal with this rapidly changing world. All of that future-ready, future-proof, all of these kinds of jargony terms that come out because it's like, well, we don't really know, but, but that feeling of not really knowing and being a bit uncertain and scared and how do we help them? It's all coming from a place of we want to sensitize them to the world as it is and as it might be, as you said before. And so that impulse, that feeling is really there for a lot of people. But then we go back into this explicit mechanistic kind of solutioning of, okay, that means we need to teach this set of competencies or that. But in your new book, and this is, I'd love if we can to, um, bring it right up to date now in your new exciting new book just about to come out called Combining. There's a beautiful poem that you've written. Again speaks to what you're saying about Gregory, thinking about science and poetry as this way to kind of understand things, but not necessarily at this propositional explicit level up in your prefrontal cortex, but you know, in your body or, you know, in the other, in understand implicit intuitive, um, things about the world in other ways. And so this poem you've written about that idea, and if you're happy to, it'd be really lovely if you could read it and then perhaps we can talk a bit about what it says, that, that impulse of not quite knowing how to prepare our young people. Sure.

So this is a poem that's called Mama Now, and I wrote this for my kids about what it's like to be a mama now. Your eyes will see the derailing of assumptions. Your hands will hold the crumble of the old matrix. I do not have any authority to lean into. I have empty pockets where parents used to advise their children. I do not have any maps, myths, or mother wisdom for you. I can fix your breakfast, but not the culture. And when you ask about how to be a good person, I cannot lie to you. Everything you touch in a day is in some way bloodied. You have been born into an edgeless violence, but I will not judge or measure you against a bygone metric. I'm here too, ready to learn with you, unsure how to be or who to be. I can only read fragments of your worry as the future is a horizon of confusion. I cannot protect you And yet it is my only job. Aching as I witness from this side of the hourglass, other generations of parents knew the outlines: school, career, family, and retirement. But your life will be another shape entirely, forming in the fractures. When you say you need a goal, I offer you an expired ticket. Superficial memes roll off the tongue right into your bullshit detector. Success in the existing system is not going to do you much good. Your integrity is your rage, and I will nourish it. Your dignity is your curiosity, and I am tiny beside it. Your courage is your pain, and I will sing to it with you. We will riot together. We will notice the nuance of small graces in the day. We will wash the grit of loss for each other. I am your mama, and your future is the story of a storm. I am your cabin. Your boots, your rucksack.

Amazing. Beautiful. Thank you so much.

You're so welcome. And, um, it was interesting because I, I read this poem to my kids and my son said, you just have to put that at the very beginning of the book, Mom, so that all the parents read it. Because, because it's coming from a different place, that switch of I can't fix this, but I can be your cabin.

Yeah.

And so much of the parenting and educational objective has been to create individuals that could individuate, that could be independent that had tough skins, that could do it themselves. And that, that's the success of a parent, is to create a successfully individuated citizen. And that if you don't do that, that somehow you failed.

Yeah.

And then there's this other ruminating meme that says, no, this is the era of community. We have to collaborate. This is about interdependency. We have to think more ecologically. But you have to do that as an individual successfully. And so there's a terrible double bind and a whole lot of contradictions in the seeding of all these messages we give our kids from the time they're tiny. Yeah, right. If you ask a child, what do you want to be when you grow up? Somehow they know, yeah, even when they're little, that there are jobs, that there is a system, that you have to be— you're— when you say, what do you want to be, you aren't asking them if they want to be a flower or an idea. You're asking them what job they're going to have.

Exactly.

Yeah, you're inviting them to envision themselves as successful individuated participants in a totally destructive system. So what happens? Like, what does it mean? How would you raise your kids differently if you knew they were never leaving home? I mean, it would change everything. Yeah, right. So the reason for doing the dishes is not because one day you're going to have an apartment of your own and you don't want to live like a slob because no one will want to come over, right? All these subterranean messages.

Yeah, they're kind of preparations for your future, your individual future, right?

Why do I have to go to school? Because you have to take part, you have to get a job, you have to support yourself. And as parents, there's nothing more terrifying than thinking of the next generation not being able to survive or being excluded from their community or their culture. I mean, this is a deep, bone-level fear of somehow being left out of the group or pushed out because they aren't contributing in the way that other people are contributing. And yet we're also saying everything has to change because all of these clothes that you're wearing are made by people who are living in horrible conditions, and the oil that makes the bus run, and the coffee that you drink, and the— right, every single thing has to change, but somehow you have to find your place in the existing system.

Yeah. And both, I mean, both of those things are true.

Yes.

And you have to be able to hold them together.

Yes.

Because it makes me think of the conversation with Tyson Yunkaporta that I had, and when he's talking about from an Aboriginal perspective, this kind of the shaming and the deference to culture of, of the individual, but at the same time you are still like this absolutely fundamentally unique individual. And so he was talking about that, that same holding those two things together, but, and we come out perhaps in a slightly different balance and in a more kind of Western industrial, certainly in the kind of parenting or education system, we come out much more heavily on the side of, as you said, the individuated individual. And I would say our response now even more so is about, well, we need more agency. We know we need more individual agency. For young people. So we need to create education systems that provide an opportunity for more choice and voice of young people and agency for them to own their education more, to lead their education. You know, all these kinds of, again, as you said, like they just roll off the tongue right into the bullshit detector, right? You know, there's a lot of that kind of language. And again, almost more into the, let's be more individual, more active, responsible, leaderly, individuals. And you do have to just hold those two things in tension, cuz we also, especially with all of the, you know, the potential for the Great Simplification, as Nate calls it, or the, you know, the climate emergency, we, we are going to need each other much more deeply and in ways that we can't fully comprehend yet, I think. And it's, that's why I loved, I, I think I said to you, I love particularly that noticing the nuance of small graces in the day. Because for me, that speaks to the kind of the, just that's where the life happens, right? When the things are just happening and you are going about your day and you're trying to figure out who's gonna do the dishes or, you know, whatever it is, it's, it, you're not trying to explicitly propositionally understand the world and explain it and tell somebody else about it and fix it and prepare someone for it. It's just, you know, while you're doing all that, propositional work, life's just carrying on doing its thing. And that's where a lot of this stuff happens is in those spaces in between that kind of, yeah.

I think that there's almost nothing more profound than to share a smile across a room wordlessly with your kids.

Yeah.

You know, we're sharing our learning and our life together. I, I remember when my kids were born feeling this overwhelming sense of trust that this little being just looks at you and knows that you will be their cabin and their boots and their rucksack. You will do this. And somehow there is all of this advice for parents about how to get out of that role so that your kids can somehow be strong on their own, that there's somehow a disconnect between those two processes. And I think for me, I have always seen that I was a tour guide, right? So I am not here to fill these little beings full of information, but I can share with them the enthusiasm that I have. Yeah. And the affection for life that I have, and I have no idea where that enthusiasm will go. I have no idea where that affection for life will go. But if we start with those things, where they can go as they ripple out into their experiences in all different contexts, from their own, you know, love affairs to their own adventures, to their own heartbreaks and troubles and crises.

Yeah. Yeah. The trust that all of that stuff is happening invisibly all of the time anyway, and they will carry that with them. But there's a trust of that because you can't see it and you don't know. You can't guarantee that, that me doing this now will ensure that they're safe and happy and well in the future. You just can't know. That's the point, right? But it's, it's funny cuz I'm like, I'm sitting here, I'm also thinking, you know, I'm imagining people listening to this podcast, right? And they're like, yeah, but we work in education. So what, what is it? Like, come on, what are you really talking about? There's this impulse to like name the thing that we are talking about, you know, cuz we've been talking about warm data for this entire conversation already, right?

Exactly.

But the way in the kind of the cold light of day of turning up in your school and to do your work in the classroom and you know, there's like, well, I can't do anything with it if I can't name it, if I can't say, well, why am I doing this? What's the outcomes of this, of this thing? So you kind of this pull back into that same kind of, of way of articulate. You have to be able to articulate it in order to do something with it. The same feeling I had yesterday trying to explain Wamday to somebody else. So what's it for? Saying what's it for, saying what the, what the outcomes of this are gonna be is fundamentally missing the point, right? But I, I did, I did wanna ask you, given that we've, you know, obviously William was doing things there and, and naming certain things, and then Gregory was too, and as you said, with him and Margaret's work, that that landed differently than the way that they intended and expected. What was it that propelled you to name warm data? Like, why did you want to give it a name? Was that kind of a pragmatic move on your part?

Well, I think I felt that the only information that was given any credibility or authority was information that had actually been derived by decontextualizing, and that that information was inherently inadequate. Decontextualized information does— it's useful, but it's inadequate. And there is a lot of other information, and that information, we're constantly, as living organisms, we are constantly engaging with it. It's not like it's not real. It's just that it doesn't sit on the page in the same way because it's living, moving, changing, shifts from perspective to perspective, moves in time differently, creates paradoxes. It doesn't agree. It's right, but it's alive. It's real. It's there.

Yeah.

How do you know in an algebra class that, that you're not supposed to, I don't know, jump on the desk and practice tango guitar. Where's the rule that says that? Well, there is no rule that says that. So how do you know? You see, there's a lot of information that we are paying attention to, that we're sensitized to. There's codes everywhere in our gesture, in our inflections of our voice, in what we say, what we don't say, in the, the small pacing of blinks of eyes, of the way your breath moves when you speak or when you Don't speak. Yeah, I mean, silence, right? Silence can be angry. Silence can be peaceful. Silence can be thoughtful. Silence can be— it can be awe. Silence can be sleepy. Silence can be just acceptance. Silence can be fury and rage. But there's nothing on the page that says anything about what that silence was. Yeah, but it absolutely could have been any of those. You can have entire conversations in silence. So did that— is there no information there? So looking at warm data and giving it a name was really about recognizing that there's a lot of information that's not in the spreadsheet and will never fit in the spreadsheet, because even when we try to create multiple descriptions of complex systems and we label all the different things that we're looking at, what about how they're in relationship with each other?

Yeah.

What if I asked you to illustrate a relationship in your life and to not use any lines to attach? Okay, here's Tim. Tim's attached to Tim's parents. Here's Tim's children. If I asked you to illustrate your family and you couldn't use any lines and you had to use other forms of expression, to draw a relationship, what would you draw? Right? What color, what texture, what patterns?

Exactly.

So it's that thing of recognizing there's a lot more happening in a relationship than a simple line.

Yeah. And that's where the art comes back, the creativity, the poetry, the expression, because it allows us different forms of communication to say something that isn't a line, that isn't a set of words strung together. In a line to say that must be true, 'cause that's the thing I've just said. It's like all this other stuff that you can't say propositionally or diagrammatically. Yeah. Where does that sit? And that's—

I think we need both.

Oh, of course. Exactly. And I think that's an important point, right? As well.

I, I love the tension between, yeah. So when you can actually look at something that is defined and measured and in reductionist description and has that kind of rigor, and to look at it in relationship to, okay, not as better or worse or more or less useful, but in relationship to other forms of study that are a practice. Okay, so poetry or art, these are practices that are about perception and the possibility of perceiving in new ways. Now, as far as I can see right now, that's probably the most important realm of possibility right now of how might we actually begin to perceive in new ways, communicate in new ways, behave in new ways, align ourselves and our daily world in new ways. How do we live differently so that we are not living in this edgeless violence?

And at that exact time, we're also kind of particularly in education, moving more towards science, engineering, maths in, in, in that kind of STEM approach to say, well, we actually, the, the arts are not instrumentally relevant. We need these technical subjects that are gonna help us solve these problems that we have. So, you know, we need more, more girls in STEM or, or whatever it is. And absolutely, I think that those kind of ways of perceiving And the other, it's the sensitivity that you mentioned before. I think that's sensitizing, such a good word for it because it's like, what are the means you have to be sensitive to the things going on around you? But again, they going down that line is beset with traps too, because then we very quickly get drawn into a list of the right sensitivities to have to help us solve the next level of problems. You, you know, it's like, well, okay, if it's not STEM and we want something more creative and sensitive to the world, so what are those competencies that we want? And then we are falling into a, a different trap of trying to maintain some certainty. 'Cause we've gotta act, right? We've gotta do something. And then again, we're trying to pin down these things that we think our children need to be certain that they're gonna be safe and happy and well and successful. Yeah, it's again another—

Somehow have control of that. And this is where I say that these ideas that came in at the turn of the century around industrialism that gave way to the whole eugenics, they are the, this underlying presupposition that you can optimize and strategize toward a particular goal. And you can do that with complex living organisms that are creating ecological processes together. And this is a fundamentally non-rigorous idea. It is anti-symbiosis. It's a misunderstanding of contextual and transcontextual process. It may be easier at first to create some sort of methodology, but the consequences and the consequences of the consequences are not going to be easy to undo. Yeah. And I think we're looking at that now, and I don't even know what the latest numbers are. And that's again, why do we want those measurements? Why do we want those measurements? What is it that the measurements are giving us? Yeah, I think that's an important question. It came from the 1600s in the Scientific Revolution. The methodology that was created was you had to have research that could be repeated and get the same result. You had to be able to define and measure. You had to be objective. Okay, these things are, are great. I mean, our world is made of them, and we wouldn't be in this podcast right now without them. Yeah, but you can't use those principles with complex living systems into which all of the aspects are continually changing, responding, and shifting the shapes of each other. Okay, who, who you are when you're with me is really different than who you are when you're with somebody else. But I'm not sitting here thinking I'm gonna shapeshift Tim Logan because I— you're shapeshifting me too. We are, we're doing this thing together because we're living systems.

Yeah.

So this idea that we can somehow control this is a fundamentally anti-ecological idea.

There is also a kind of essentialist thing going on in there as well, because I think perhaps some people might say, well, but there is an, an essence to who Tim is and an essence to who Nora is, and that should be consistent across space and time. It shouldn't be that different when Nora is with Tim as when Tim is with somebody else, because that you are this coherent whole that moves through space and time into, you know, into your future. I do in my I don't know, it sometimes it does feel like there are some really deep kind of disagreements about what we think the world and reality actually is that then lead us to measuring that, right? I can, you know, if that's true, then I can, I can measure that. And that's quite a good thing to do cuz I'm gonna understand, I'm get some certainty around the shape of, and the, the height and the capacity of what Tim is, this essence. And he can then take that self-knowledge with him into the future and You know, that's a very non-fluid take on it. But I wonder if that is what some people think is a better description of the ontology actually behind it, or, you know, the reality behind it. I don't, I mean, we're getting off into some quite abstract territory, but there's something in it.

But not really. Let's bring it right on back because I mean, I've got teenagers in my life. I think you've got some in your life.

I do. Yeah.

They are longing to know who they are and how they fit into the world around them. And the internet is providing them with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of these wild personality tests. What kind of ice cream are you? Which Harry Potter castle do you live in? You know, what sort of— they're all knockoffs on the personality test. And, you know, They might seem like they're innocuous, but there's actually something very sad happening there. For one thing, this idea that there is this world and you have to fit in, so you need to know how you fit in. And this idea of this fitting is a fundamentally industrial idea that— back to the eugenics question— this came with the early personality tests that were, they were absolutely designed with this sort of way to measure who fits in and who doesn't. So if we could define normalcy, you can define abnormalcy, and then you can, you know, act accordingly. So if you're feeling like you can't be in the classroom, let's fix you so you can, medically or psychologically. So this is— I think that this, you know, sort of seemingly existential exploration we're having here is right at the core. Yeah. Of the question of what's happening with schools. How do you actually get out of this rubric? Okay, who made the rubric? What is normal? Why does every single parenting book tell you how to have a well-adjusted child into a world that is completely maladjusted to life?

Yeah.

And at the point that we identify the individuals as being the people who are having these pathologies, One of the things that's taking place there is that there is a, a kind of a Jedi mind trick, you know, these are not the droids you're looking for, around the poly crisis.

Yeah.

Okay, if, if you are the one who can't keep a smile on your face, you can't keep your fitness level up, you can't keep your attitude straight or your anxiety under control, then you are the problem. And not this incredible trans-contextual disaster of economic pressures and cultural paradoxes that we're asking these kids to go through. The institutional obsolescence that's taking place right before our eyes, the technological pressures and the double binds and the very scary authoritarian, you know, algorithmic processes that are taking place.

There.

Yeah, instantly inside those damn personality tests, etc. So, so here we have a whole generation of people who are coming in and they're sort of spoon-fed all this pop psychology about how to essentially get a diagnosis that will offer you some relief. And I'm not saying that they're, that they're not real. They're very real. That that pain is very real.

Yeah.

And working with family therapists around the world that are, are actually trying to help families that are facing this, and the parents are in it too. It's not just the kids.

Yeah.

We're, we're all— well, I guess some people feel like they're healthy and happy and doing just fine, but not very many. And it's, you know, it's not just the people who are in economic challenges. It's also people who are rich. It's not just people on— in this sort of Western world. It's people all over the world are in these double binds that are breaking them. And, and there's not really that sense of being able to point to this polycrisis and saying, yeah, but this is what we're living in. Instead, it gets placed on the individual. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's, I can understand it's just much easier to do that as well because it's these things we're looking at, the polycrisis, whatever we wanna call it, are just so huge. Mm-hmm. And overwhelming in some ways, right? So I mean, we've been having some really interesting experiences taking this idea of these, this relational process or sensitivity to relational process that is warm data into a school context, right? And we're gonna do more of it and it's super exciting. I'm really interested to know, so you put the warm data in a, in quite a cold data rich context, like a school. It has some interesting interactions. If we were to think about school in general, or, you know, maybe not even school, but just kind of this educative process that we have, we, you know, it was in the, in your poem about how do we be that cabin for our children? How do we continue that beyond the parenting, but also into this kind of educational space, however that might look in the future, schools or not, I'm really interested in this idea of what actually is the role of the educator there. It's not the same as a parent, right? You're not, you're not being a parent, but you take on some similarities, I feel, in that role. And I, I would say a lot of what parenting is, is educational in the most kind of generative sense. The word education's been dirtied by the modern formal schooling system. But I think there's this educational urge to show, to show our children the world somehow. You've mentioned being a tour guide, right? And I just wonder, yeah, I'd love to hear, what do you actually, how would you describe the role of being an educator? Because I mean, perhaps you see yourself as an educator in some ways when you're doing trainings. There's, I don't know whether William or Gregory would've seen any connection to the idea of being an educator or Yeah. What, what do you think that is for you? Yeah.

Well, let's, let's start with what it's not for me. Yeah. Okay. It's not essentially that the students of any age, it's not that the students are empty teacups that we should fill up with whatever this knowledge is. Okay. They're, they're not empty vessels that need filling.

Yeah.

But I think so, so that, that changes everything. Mm-hmm. Okay, so at that point you are not there to deliver information. So what are you doing? And for me, this is about— even when it's teaching math, okay, or history or whatever— it's about allowing in the relationship for there to be mutual learning that is produced through creating gaps. So it's exactly the opposite for me, that what I like to do is to provide something that I'm enthusiastic about and then provide bits around it and let whoever I'm with make their own connections, and then learn from them what connections they made. What connections did I make? Yeah. How do we actually perceive this whatever it is, in this way that is— well, it's more of an abductive process, right? Where, you know, I might tell 4 different stories that describe things from a different context or direction and let people make their own connections so that what is happening in that mutual learning is alive. Those are their connections. And recognizing— you were talking earlier about, you know, the essence of Tim Logan Logan Logan or this this really incredible aggregate of experiences that you are or that I am, and that the way that something enters you is different than the way it enters me. What connections do you make? How does it happen for you? Yeah. What is it attaching to and with? And what's the tone or the atmosphere of that? So for me, that question of what is happening when you are the person standing at the front of the room. First of all, I don't like to stand at the front of the room. I'd rather be— yeah, but, but then there's more to this also, because it's not just about ideas or information. It's also about paying attention to each other. And it's a strange thing, you know, I did a lot of teaching of high school kids. And I remember hearing the teachers around me talking about, well, there's 30 kids in the class and this is what we have to do to keep everything under control. And I, I didn't feel that way. Yeah, I never had the sense of them. I always felt that if there were 30 kids in the class, that I was paying attention to them all.

Yeah.

And that even when I'm in a Zoom room with 70 people and I can flip the pages, I'm still paying attention. Are they falling asleep? Are they angry? Are they looking at email? Are their knees twitching? Are they writing notes? Are they— are they— is there— you know, you can see when you're working with a group of kids if there's somebody, yeah, you know, just sort of oozing animosity out of their pores at you.

The silence is angry. Yeah.

Yeah. So, so this, I think for me, this is a big piece of that experience is actually paying attention.

Yeah.

And also there's this pressure that says you have a job to complete this curriculum.

Sure.

I don't know. I mean, for me, I kind of felt some rebelliousness against that.

No, no, I can't believe that.

No. So I tended to, you know, kind of— there was a sort of a wink and a nod and a little bit of solidarity with the students around, well, eh, that thing, we'll do that, but we're not going to just do that because that's not why we're here. Yeah, fragmented thing they've given us. So let's figure out what's all around it.

Yeah.

And I'm thinking about other ways in which you have been taught things that you weren't necessarily officially being taught, but you were being taught. Yeah, right. So, you know, the first time you go into an ice cream shop, you are taught how to do it, right? How do you look in the thing and pick? And then you can— you— oh, you can taste. Okay, I want to taste that. But you can't taste everything. No, there's a limit to how many things You can have. And then eventually you have, what size do you want? Oh, okay. And so you're learning how to do this. When I first moved to Sweden, I couldn't figure out how to go to the grocery store. Now, that may sound silly to you, but I had never actually noticed that I had learned how to go to the grocery store. Yeah, here they do it differently. And it's not like there's any— no one tells you, but suddenly So there's a particular movement, and if you start going the wrong way, you're going to get the vibe that you're doing something wrong. You might not know what it is. Yeah, but you know that something's not right. And so when you check out at the grocery store in Sweden, you take every item one at a time and you find the barcode and you put it where the cashier can see it easily, and then you put the next item, the barcode. Next item with the barcode up. Okay, so the underlying learning here is that the person who's working is the person we're deferring to. Okay, but coming from the US, what I learned was the person who we— you defer to is the customer. So the best thing you can do is pile your groceries up as high as possible so you take as little of the belt up. As you can for somebody so that the next person can put their stuff up.

Funny.

Okay, so, so these are— and honestly, if you go to the States and you turn every item one by one, so the barcode, people are going to think you're completely having an OCD moment.

Sure.

Right. So these are moments where we don't recognize how much we've learned.

Yeah.

And I think that this is really interesting because this is that implicit learning. And so for me, I think one of the biggest responsibilities of being an educator is actually paying attention to what is implied and not just leave that as something that is irrelevant because that's the warm data. That's actually the meta messaging. That's where the deep stuff is happening.

Completely. I, I love that. I love that because it's so interesting listening to you, but there are a few things that you've said there which are really common tropes within progressive education, or, you know, whatever you wanna call it, right? We're not filling up vessels, we're lighting fires and all these kinds of things. And they get, they get thrown around, you know, people are a bit tired of those kinds of, you know, it doesn't really mean anything anymore sometimes in, in education. Yeah, of course we're doing that. But I think again, like it's, it's trying to find ways of, of saying something that make people sit up a little bit in their chairs and, and kind of look at it a bit differently so that we don't just ignore, we don't let it kind of roll off the tongue into the bullshit detector and then we just dismiss it because there is so much implicit learning going on. I completely agree. And, and again, educators will say that it's like, well, I think I'm teaching this, but they're learning something else. They're always learning. But they just may not be learning the thing I want them to be learning. And these kinds of commonly held descriptions of what happens in a classroom. And as you said, you, you, you sometimes just have to work within a system that doesn't fully or doesn't at all allow you to kind of do those things, but those things are always going on. And so again, it comes back for me to that kind of sensitivity, the noticing, the paying attention that you were just describing, like where's the feedback? There's constant feedback coming back at you all the time. Are we supporting young people to be sensitive to that kind of data, if you wanna call it that, warm data feedback, just life, living, moving. And that's what I think there is something really powerful in the idea of warm data because of exactly that. Because we are, as you said, we're kind of naming this thing in order for it to be given a space and not just dismissed as a truism or an assumption, but then we just go back to the, the normal job of here's the curriculum, I'm gonna teach this. But I, I also think that there's a, there's a binary gets set up that you either have something to teach or they're just learning themselves. And I think there's something in between there as well for me that you can still be tour guiding, you can still be saying, from, from your enthusiasm, or as you said, look at these things, this is amazing. I want to show you maths because maths is incredible.

Right.

You can still be doing that. You can still be teaching maths. There's all this implicit learning going on as well, of course, which you have to also take responsibility that you're not trying, you want to give them a critical sense that maths isn't the only lens through which you can look at the world. This isn't, I'm not teaching you truth here, but I'm teaching you a way of looking at patterns in the world that is It's pretty incredible, but it's insufficient. As you said earlier, you might make your own connections. You might not resonate with it at all. You might not like it, but I think it's pretty cool and I'm gonna show you.

Right. And that, that's actually two things happening there. One is I'm gonna show you this interesting math thing or whatever. The other thing is I'm gonna show you something of me.

It's true.

Yeah, right. And how I live in this world and where I find myself being curious and what makes me happy or where. And because the math has that in it, it's no longer flat. So again, with the, you know, the grocery store example, one of the things that happens there is that immediately there's a perception that leads to a curiosity of a whole question of culture and economy and history and, you know, all sorts of things around the presuppositions of, you know, what it is to be in Sweden, where suddenly this strange feeling of being at the grocery store and doing it wrong becomes a transcontextual exploration. Yeah. Wow. So the worker is the one you defer to. Okay, so what's What's that all about? What does that look like in other contexts?

Yeah.

How does that change the way people talk on the phone or the way that you make a hotel reservation or the way that you get on the bus or— right? So, so there's this opening into all sorts of other contextual processes. So I think one thing also is that it's important to recognize that there is an awful lot that our generation simply cannot teach the younger generations because we don't have those sensitivities ourselves.

Yeah.

So it's an interesting predicament of how to create the conditions for next generations, or even each other, to begin to sensitize into something that we don't even know what it is. And I think the moment I really got this one was when I was working with a group of Reggio Emilia teachers, and they had an assignment coming up for working with little littles, you know, 3, 4-year-olds. And it was about food. And so they had these fresh spices on the table, and they, you know, basil and rosemary and mint, and there was all these art supplies. And the exercise for the teachers, for the educators to prep for the week, was to sit down and to draw the smell.

Nice.

Okay, now you better believe that they were like, eh, what? How do you draw a smell?

Yeah.

And the next day in class, the little itty-bitty children came in, cute as can be, and they had the same assignment. And without hesitation, they sat down and drew those smells. That's a really interesting example of ecological education.

Yeah.

Okay. So what's happening there is not that the children are learning which leaf belongs to which category in the Linnaeus, you know, botany description, but they are learning to sensitize into another whole way of perceiving. Yeah, this is important. That's what it looks like to have things happening in the classroom where I'm learning as much as they are. We're all getting new perceptions on things.

Yeah.

And it was so cool because these kids, they did this all week. It was actually about basil. They did— had all these explorations of basil. Nobody used the word basil. They had no idea it was called basil, right? On the last day, they went home with their little plant of basil, and they came home on Monday going, "It's basil!" But they didn't have that name until then. And so when I try to imagine what for them basil is, yeah, right? Because I can't go back.

Yeah.

For me, I have an idea of basil, and then I can add my sort of synesthesia exercises onto it. But their exploration of basil is completely wide open, onto which a name—

interesting—

was given.

Yeah, that's good.

That's interesting, right?

It really is.

That's what I'm talking about.

Yeah. And it also made me think that, and again, this is a kind of a dominant cultural thing that happens, is that, well, Nora's defined warm data. Nora must know what warm data is, and she can tell us what the warm data is, right? But exactly what you're describing there is like, You know, the warm data is just, we're gonna create this space for these other things to happen. And for that, like you said, that kind of mutual learning, intergenerational mutual learning to happen in that space. And calling it warm data is, is not to say we know what the thing is and we'll teach you. It's just creating an opening where we can take those things seriously, that cross-contextual, trans-contextual, whatever you wanna call it, but just that kind of Intuitive implicit learning and all, all of that stuff. It's, yeah, it's really interesting. And, and like you say, so needed now, but still challenging to do this work because when you bring it to a school that isn't Reggio Emilia or, you know, then there's questions like, so how do we harvest the data from this? Where, where is the, what's the outcome? And then, well, let's see.

I mean, you might not know. For 20 years what it is. And, and the way in which there's these, you know, sort of associative and tacit ongoing ideas that become stuck to other ideas that combine as they go. That's— this is why my book is called Combining, because really what we're talking about is things that are combining, and, and there's— they're still in motion. It's still combining. It's not like it's statically combined. It's still combining. So those kids that did that exercise with the drawing the smell may have a completely different way of both smelling and drawing and naming in completely different contexts forevermore. So you just don't really know what's happening at second and nth order.

Yeah.

And, and that's the piece that In the Warm Data course, sometimes I, just to keep myself, you know, kind of honest, because there's a lot of wonderful theory in that course.

Sure.

And it's, I get very excited about it and I love that theory and talk about enthusiasm. Like I love that stuff and it's such an honor to teach it. And, but then there's a moment when I have to recognize that this stuff can become very heady. It can all sound very intellectualized and it can be just sort of like this thing that's happening in the top part of your head. Yeah. And that this is not actually what we're up to here. So for me, one of the questions that I have around my work in teaching complexity perception or systems perception or any of that is, what if I'm not teaching Tim Logan's head? What if I'm here to offer Tim's elbows an understanding? How would Tim's spine come to understand this? How do I actually offer this experience, this information, the tonality, the possibility? Because the way that your elbows learn and the way that your spine learns is not the same. So for me, that makes me have to put it in something beyond that first direct impulse of, of here is the learning, here is the word, here is the definition, here is that. But more, let's make a space where you, capital Y, capital O, capital U, will begin to make that combining. And those learnings are not just You know, kind of from your eyeballs up.

Exactly. Yeah.

Yeah.

And that's when, I mean, again, when I heard you talk about warm data as a practice, that helped me to think about that differently too, because it's something you just, you have to do and be in and experience within Warm Data Lab, for example. Again, just a space where your spine can learn, you know, you can experience the thing happening. And I think, and that's why we've got some things that we want to offer coming up, right, in terms of an online People Need People session, which I've been helping to organize with your team. And then we're going to Wales in October to do some more work with young people and Warm Data Labs. But again, just to create those spaces, because it's like you say, it's not just this propositional set of theories that people can plug in and that's, that's it. They've got it. There's something else happening. That, you know, is a really interesting exploration. But again, that's what makes it challenging when you put it into the formal school context. And I love, I'm just really enjoying those meeting points of those two worlds coming together. And I think we're learning a lot about how that might, you know, how it might proceed. So yeah, it's amazing.

I'm really looking forward to that. I was thinking there's another, piece here that if I can find it, I would read it to you. Okay, there's a piece called Harvest, and ah, here it is. Okay, and I think that it really is something to think about with education, so I'm going to read you this.

I love it.

Harvest. Be careful, a hasty harvest is an unfeeding. It is non-food. Harvests are patient history and quiet roots that start tiny. While compost is necessary for the growing season, do not eat the compost. Wait. The eggshells and onion skins bear little resemblance to the conversation at the table where the meal they fed feeds you. Wait. The industrial craving for instant food ideas and plans distracts from entering ecological time. An apple seed in the ground is not an apple. It requires seasons, years, changes in light, wind, temperature. It must reach up into the spring sun and down into the winter earth. The blossoms need the insects and the song of the baby birds. This is not the time to harvest. This is the time to let these ideas come to find other contexts in the underground, in the wilderness. Notice the un-ecology of the question, what is the point? A meadow never asks such a thing. Life is making life. Nothing less. The harvest is a time of golden brown, reds, and deep orange tones. The harvest is marking the long journey into the squishy death and rot that offers new compost. It's the last moon before the cold comes. Don't race into winter before it's due. Harvest is long in its arrival. Sometimes it comes with an empty basket. Leaving its lost leaves and roots to decompose, feeding the possibility of next year. Likewise, let the ideas and stories of today remain in the undergrowth. Let them find new context, new contacts, and new life. Let the movement of relating follow its own reachings. Let it touch and rename itself as it moves. This is the beginning. This is the middle. Let it form and inform. Do not ask what you will get out of this. This is the making of next year's rain. The point is the meadow of 100 years from now. Ecology is not instant. You cannot run to the shop and buy it. There is no summation, nothing to put in your pocket, only idea seeds in warmth and moist history. Relax. The possibilities are brewing, stewing. Let them wander and shape in ways you may never have considered.

Amazing.

So there's that.

There is that.

There's that.

Yeah. I don't wanna say anything else cuz I, there is a point where actually it feels really important to stop talking because if we feel like we're gonna arrive at Like you said about Gregory and the way that he writes, it's like if we feel like we're gonna keep talking and therefore one day we'll arrive at the answer, it's like, again, we've missed the point.

And so, no, we're just weaving a big basket for the ideas to swim around in.

Yeah.

Love it.

Beautiful. Amazing. Thank you, Nora.

Thank you, Tim Logan.

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