Reductionism - the breaking down of complex phenomena into as many parts as possible to make them fully understandable - is everywhere. To some extent the whole enterprise of modern formal schooling is based on the promise of reductionism, as we break life down into subjects, concepts, facts, etc to be digestible by our young people. It has also enabled unbelievable scientific and technological progress. So who could possibly argue with this? And yet, reductionism has become like the hammer that sees everything as a nail. One of its problems is that is renders everything into a mechanistic functioning of parts and nothing more. Our inability to perceive, understand and value complex and systemic patterns and relationships is maybe something that we need to engage with in our education systems.

Dr. Roland Kupers is an advisor on Complexity, Resilience and Energy Transition, Professor of Practice at Arizona State University, as well as an Associate Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Amsterdam. He is a global advisor on mitigating methane emissions from fossil fuels for UNEP’s International Methane Emissions Observatory.

A theoretical physicist by training, Roland spent a decade each at AT&T and at Shell in various senior executive functions, including Group head for Sustainable Development and Vice President Global LNG. He has a long running interest in complexity theory and its impacts.

He has published widely, including in HBR, on Project Syndicate, A Climate Policy Revolution: What the Science of Complexity Reveals about Saving the Planet (Harvard UP 2020) and co-authored Complexity and the Art of Public Policy: Solving Society’s Problems from the Bottom Up (Princeton 2014), The Essence of scenarios (Amsterdam 2014), and Turbulence: A corporate framing of resilience (Amsterdam 2014).

In 2010 Roland was a co-author of a report commissioned by the German Government on a New Growth Path for Europe, applying a complexity lens to climate economics. He has been an advisor to the Environmental Defense Fund, the World Resources Institute and the Rockefeller Foundation.

Roland is a Dutch national; his travels have made him fluent in five languages.

Useful Links:

https://www.rolandkupers.com/

Complexity Module for the IB Diploma: https://www.rolandkupers.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/An-IB-complexity-module-for-the-Diploma-Programme-24.10.17.pdf

UNEP’s International Methane Emissions Observatory, 2022 Report: https://www.rolandkupers.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/IMEO2022.pdf

Everyone involved in education from young people to tecahers to leaders to policy-makers are being asked some really tough questions in these current times. Do the systems and institutions that we are working and learning in still serve us? Did they ever? And what are we being called on to do differently? This week, it was such an amazing pleasure to chat with Zineb Mouhyi who is the co-founder of YouthXYouth, a global organisation that she set up with Valentina Raman, to convene action around transforming education systems but in a way that didn't excluding the core of these systems, the primary constituents that they were seeking to engage and serve: young people.

YouthXYouth invited young people around the world to see the COVID-19 pandemic crisis as an opportunity to radically reimagine learning for themselves and their communities. In January 2021, they hosted their first online Learning Festival, which gathered nearly 1000 young people and adult allies from over 80 countries around a central question: What if young people designed the future of education?

YouthXYouth has engaged over 2000 youth activists from 80 countries across 6 continents, buliding their capacity and confidence to reclaim their learning and create life-affirming futures within their communities. They are led by and serve youth who are between the ages of 15 to 26—75% of whom live in the Global South, and about 50% live in Africa.

Zineb is also one of the co-founders of the Weaving Lab (https://weavinglab.org/), an international NGO and a community of weavers learning together how to interconnect people, projects and places to form thriving systems. Prior to that, she was the Policy & Partnership Development Officer at WISE (World Innovation Summit for Education), at the Qatar Foundation in Doha, where she mainly worked on education development policy research and on bringing different education stakeholders together to bring forth collaborations in education.

Useful Links

 YxY Weavership Messaging Toolkit an opportunity for young people or youth organisations who might consider hosting a Weaver-in-Residence.

YxY website: https://www.youthxyouth.com/

Weavership Application: https://airtable.com/appYm9UwzGZxELiYA/shrHR2MmpZfVclJP5

Authors mentioned during the conversation:

Guy Debord - The Society of the Spectacle 

Loretta Ross - Calling In: How to Start Making Change with Those You'd Rather Cancel

LinkedIn: @zinebmouhyi - https://www.linkedin.com/in/zinebmouhyi/

Instagram: @yxyactivists - https://www.instagram.com/yxyactivists/

In episode 181 with Robert Barnett, Rob and I were discussing the real constraints and difficult conditions teachers find themselves in as they try to prioritise the meaningful learning and growth of their young people. This week, we are taking a broader look at the kinds of institutional structures that might actually help rather than hinder these more generative ways of living and learning - the kinds of institutions suited to the transformative adaptations and systems change that we desperately need. So in this episode I'm really happy to be speaking with Thea Snow and Toby Lowe about taking a Human Learning Systems approach to management and governance of organisations. Thea and Toby in their work at Centre for Public Impact focus primarily on public sector management. However, these principles certainly apply more broadly to institutions in the private and third sectors. This is very exciting work as it feels much more authentically connected to the beautiful and complex realities that we know we live, learn and work in and that we want to prepare our young people to embrace. But we also know that the way we are held accountable for outcomes in our work often feels simplistic and naive and entirely dissociated from these complex realities.
Thea is the Regional Director for Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand at Centre for Public Impact. Thea’s experiences span the public, private and not-for-profit sectors. She has worked as a commercial lawyer, a public servant, and, prior to joining CPI, at the UK’s innovation foundation, Nesta
Toby Lowe is Professor of Public Management at Manchester Metropolitan University and action researcher at Centre for Public Impact. He has also done policy work addressing poverty in neighbourhoods for the Social Exclusion Unit, worked as a public management action researcher developing the Human Learning Systems approach and held the position as Chief Executive of a participatory arts charity in North East England.
You can find links in the show notes to a lot of the documents and sources we talk about in the conversation, especially if you'd like to find out more about implementing a Human Learning Systems approach in your organisation.
Some of Thea’s work includes:
“The (il)logic of legibility – Why governments should stop simplifying complex systems”
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2021/02/12/the-illogic-of-legibility-why-governments-should-stop-simplifying-complex-systems/
“Once upon a bureaucrat: exploring the role of stories in government“
https://thepolicymaker.jmi.org.au/once-upon-a-bureaucrat-exploring-the-role-of-stories-in-government/
“Why evidence should be the servant, not the master, of good policy”
https://apolitical.co/solution-articles/en/Why-evidence-should-be-the-servant-not-the-master-of-good-policy
“Public servants are tired of change-washing — not change”
https://apolitical.co/solution-articles/en/public-servants-are-tired-of-change-washing-not-change
Some of Toby’s work includes:
Human Learning Systems: Public Service for the Real World: https://centreforpublicimpact.org/resource-hub/human-learning-systems-public-service-for-the-real-world/
Harnessing Complexity for Better Outcomes in Public and Non-profit Services: https://policy.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/harnessing-complexity-for-better-outcomes-in-public-and-non-profit-services
Human Learning Systems: A practical guide for the curious: https://www.centreforpublicimpact.org/assets/pdfs/hls-practical-guide.pdf
Various links from our discussion:
https://www.humanlearning.systems/hls-insights-findings-from-our-research-2024/
https://centreforpublicimpact.org/resource-hub/storytelling-for-systems-change/
https://medium.com/centre-for-public-impact/embracing-ensembles-8e049c40b87f
https://www.woodleigh.vic.edu.au/events-public-calendar/reimagined-conference

As educators, a great deal of our understandings of what learning is has been dominated by behaviourist (check out previous episode with Carol Sanford) and cognitivist ideas, but what if our decisions about how we design learning environments, and think about pedagogy and curriculum had taken in ecological insights of Eleanor Gibson and James Gibson and the branch of psychology known as ecological psychology. So few educators know that such a sub-discipline even exists!

Rather than individual students's brains neatly arranged in rows in intentionally informationally impoverished learning environments to compute information and construct meaning in a meaningless world out there, we might have young people as object-environment systems moving around and exploring informationally rich environments to fine-tune their action-perception through multi-sensory relating to the ecologies that they participate in! Sounds like a pretty different world!

This episode welcomes Miguel Segundo-Ortín and Vicente Raja, post-doctoral researchers at the MINT Lab, and research fellows at University of Murcia, Spain. Together, they are the authors of the book Ecological Psychology (Cambridge Elements, 2024) -https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/ecological-psychology/9E79001702D4D8029E19D11CD330149FMiguel Segundo-Ortin is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Philosophy and member of the Minimal Intelligence Laboratory at the University of Murcia (Spain). His research is in the philosophy of the cognitive sciences, particularly embodied cognition, comparative cognition, and human agency.https://miguelsegundoortinphd.com/

Vicente Raja a post-doctoral researcher at the MINT Lab, a research fellow at University of Murcia (Spain) and external affiliate faculty of the Rotman Institute of Philosophy at Western University (Canada). His research lies at the intersection of philosophy, cognitive science, neuroscience, and the history of the sciences of the mind, and has appeared in venues including Synthese, Minds and Machines, Physics of Life Reviews, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Scientific Reports, Frontiers in Neuroscience, Philosophical Psychology, Adaptive Behavior, Cognitive Systems Research, and Theory and Psychology, among others. He has also edited/is editing a book for Routledge and special issues for the Journal of Consciousness Studies and Topics in Cognitive Science. https://www.um.es/mintlab/index.php/about/people/vicente-raja/

This is a talk given by Vicente In Memoriam: Eleanor Gibson - https://youtu.be/QmV4Iz1jJs8?si=HAScaBYB2RcNKjTa

James J. Gibson: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_J._Gibson

Systems change is a big phrase, which can mean a lot of different things to different people. Quite possibly the system doesn't actually change "up there" in the realms of national and trans-national policy-making. Perhaps it changes in individual classrooms with teachers choosing to do something different. I was so happy to sit down with Robert Barnett, co-founder of the Modern Classrooms Project to talk about this and find out how he, and his co-founder Kareem Farah, have made some very specific and not particularly easy choices about which leverage points they were going to work. MCP has developed an instructional model to respond to every student’s needs - no matter what or where you teach.

You can find out more about Modern Classrooms Project here: https://www.modernclassrooms.org/

Robert's book Meet Every Learner's Needs: Redesigning Instruction so all students can suceed is out on February 5th 2025, and you can find out more about it here: https://www.meeteverylearnersneeds.org/

Here's a way for you to win a free copy of the book! https://meln-form.paperform.co/?podcast=fld

Social Links

LinkedIn: @robert-s-barnett - https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-s-barnett/

Robert's personal site: https://www.rsbarnett.com/

As Manda Scott's BRILLIANT podcast suggests, "another world is possible… we have the power of gods to destroy our home, but we also have the chance to become something we cannot yet imagine." This week's special episode is a joint podcast with Manda on her Accidental Gods podcast (https://accidentalgods.life/).

In all of her shamanic work, bestselling novel-writing, podcasting and convening, Manda Scott is gathering people around the vital question, how we can create a future that we would be proud to leave to the generations to come?

Manda's new novel 'Any Human Power' is out on May 30th: https://linktr.ee/anyhumanpower

And you can find more of Manda's extensive and amazing work on her website here: https://mandascott.co.uk/

Other things we talk about in this conversation:

Nick Mulvey's performance at COP26: https://youtu.be/x-GBl6DeA50?si=8RgDivREYKZTa9I1&t=1273 Beautiful!

The Substack Manda reads from:  ⁠https://theconcernedbird.substack.com/p/elon-musks-and-xs-role-in-2024-election

Systems Transformation Pathway at UWC Atlantic College: https://www.uwcatlantic.org/learning/academic/systems-transformation-pathway

https://sites.google.com/uwcatlantic.org/transformingsystems/centre?authuser=0

Green School Bali:  https://www.greenschool.org/

School of Humanity: https://sofhumanity.com/

Festival of Hope: https://ibo.org/festival-of-hope/

LinkedIn: @mandascottauthor - https://www.linkedin.com/in/mandascottauthor/

BlueSky - https://bsky.app/profile/mandascott.bsky.socialandMastodon - https://mastodon.scot/@Eceni

This week it was a huge pleasure to be able to welcome Carl Mika, Professor of Māori and Indigenous Philosophies from Aotearoa, the country now known as New Zealand. As you can probably guess from the title of this episode, this conversation with Carl went pretty deep pretty quickly! That's because underlying the most apparently basic concepts like learning or logic that people use all the time are some pretty fundamental assumptions about the way the world is. And they're certainly not universal to all humans. So what does educating our young people in how to read their worlds mean in this case?
Carl Mika is from the Tuhourangi iwi and is Professor of Māori and Indigenous Philosophies, and Head of School of Aotahi: School of Māori and Indigenous Studies, University of Canterbury. His published work includes Indigenous Education and the Metaphysics of Presence was published in 2017, Routledge), along with many articles and chapters, on the issues of colonisation and reductionism; Māori concepts of nothingness and darkness in response to an Enlightenment focus on clarity; mātauranga Māori and science. Carl teaches and researches in educational philosophy and mātauranga Māori, the law, and global studies, as well as aspects of Western philosophy.
In 2024, Carl was awarded the University of Canterbury Research Medal. Also In 2024, he was recipient of the University of Canterbury Faculty of Arts Kairangahau Māori Award for research in Māori philosophies (both traditional and contemporary) and Māori methodologies. He is also a Fellow of the Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia (PESA).

This episode is a fantastic conversation with 2 brilliant women who have been whipping up a storm this week with the release of their amazing new book The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better! Dr Rebecca Winthrop and Jenny Anderson chat with me about the disengagement crisis facing our young people and what we, as parents and educators, can do about it.
Jenny Anderson is an author and an award-winning journalist who spent over a decade at The New York Times before pioneering coverage on the science of learning at Quartz. She contributes to TIME, The New York Times and The Atlantic, among other publications.
Rebecca Winthrop is a leading global authority on education. She is the director of the Center for Universal Education at Brookings, where she conducts studies on how to better support children’s learning, and is an adjunct professor at Georgetown University.

Social Links

https://www.thedisengagedteen.com/

Instagram: @jennyandersonwrites - https://www.instagram.com/jennyandersonwrites/ ; @drrebeccawinthrop - https://www.instagram.com/drrebeccawinthrop/

LinkedIn: @jennyandersonnyt - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennyandersonnyt/ ; @rebecca-winthrop - https://www.linkedin.com/in/rebecca-winthrop-b36b0617/

It's a strange thing that the concept of school has become almost universal over the last few hundred years. If you ask anyone almost anywhere in the world, they will be able to describe something that looks roughly like a shared concept of school. But maybe it didn't have to be this way. Maybe it could have been different. This week the amazing professor of anthropology Susan Blum Joins me to talk about 'schoolishness' which is her latest fantastic book, based on decades of research into the cultural development of the dominant ideas around formal institutional education.

Susan D. Blum is a cultural, linguistic, and psychological anthropologist specializing in the study of China and the United States. She received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and also has two MAs—in Anthropology and in Chinese Language and Literature (both from Michigan)--and a BA in Human Language from Stanford University.

Professor Blum is the author and editor of 10 books and dozens of articles, as well as public-facing writing. Her latest book, Schoolishness: Alienated Education and the Quest for Authentic, Joyful Learning (Cornell, 2024), is the third in a trilogy about higher education. The other two books are "I Love Learning; I Hate School": An Anthropology of College (Cornell, 2016) and My Word! Plagiarism and College Culture (Cornell, 2009). She also edited a widely read book calling into question the centrality and necessity of grading, Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead) (West Virginia, 2020).

She has taught at Oklahoma State University, The University of Colorado Denver, The University of Denver, The University of Pennsylvania, and The University of Notre Dame, where she is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology. At Notre Dame, she has served as Director of the Center for Asian Studies and Chair of the Department of Anthropology. She is a Fellow of the Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies, a Fellow in the Institute for Educational Initiatives, a Fellow of the Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies, a Fellow of the Eck Institute for Global Health, and a Fellow of the Shaw Center for Children and Families.

She received a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for her book, Lies That Bind: Chinese Truth, Other Truths (2007), and has received the Delta Kappa Gamma Educator's Award, 2010, for her book My Word! Plagiarism and College Culture (2009), which was translated into Chinese in 2011. Blum has also received an Excellence in Teaching award from The University of Colorado Denver (2000) and the Reverend Edmund P. Joyce, CSC, Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching from The University of Notre Dame (2010).

Social Links

LinkedIn: @susan-blum - https://www.linkedin.com/in/susan-blum-aba01212/

Instagram: @susandblum - https://www.instagram.com/susandblum/

Threads: @susandblum - https://www.threads.net/@susandblum

We're ending this final epsiode of 2024 in a beautiful place with Karima Kadaoui sharing in some co-reflections with me about the trustful and humanising society that she is seeing emerge in Morocco and beyond. It became really clear to me during this conversation with Karima, that the way that we talk about the work we are doing is a really important choice. This is because it sets up frames and expectations that really affect how we do the work. So for that reason, I'm not going to say much about the incredible work that is happening across communities, schools and government ministries across Morocco through the Tamkeen process as Karima describes it much more beautifully than I ever could.

Karima co-founded Tamkeen Community Foundation for Human Development in Morocco in 2009 and holds the responsibility of its executive presidency. She refers to her organisation as a facilitating-dissolving structure living, with all its partners-in-flourishing, the answer to the question "how can our schools, communities, organisations, societal systems and societies be the expression and manifestation of our humanity; the shared essence that defines us and connects us to each other, to our natural world and the whole beyond our conscious grasp?

Karima's Tamkeen process weaved and was woven with the threads of her 25 years experience working in private, public and social sectors. She worked with top tier companies in a big 5 management consultancy and as the associate senior consultant of a territorial development consultancy she co-founded.  In the Moroccan government, she worked on public policy and governance in quality of the advisor to the Minister of Employment, Vocational Training and Housing.  Her experiences in NPOs working with women suffering infra-human conditions in industries and with a community in a major shanty town have profoundly marked her.

Karima is a full member of the Club of Rome. She is also a board member and advisor to Imal Initiative for Climate and Development the first independent non-profit North African climate think tank, as well to Africa Voices Dialogue "a space where the voices of Africa’s educators and learners are seen, heard and loved".

As we discuss in the conversation, the paper written by Karima and Louis Klein is entitled ‘Realising metamorphic transformation in the mirror of Tamkeen: Growing a shared understanding from co‐reflected lived experiences’. It can be found in the journal, Systems Research and Behavioral Science 41(5):738-749, August 2024 and is linked here.

Karima also mentions the poem, Sept saisis par l’hiver’, by René Char:

Extract: ‘Ma Feuille Vineuse: Les mots qui vont surgir savent de nous ce que nous ignorons d’eux. Un moment nous serons l’équipage de cette flotte composée d’unités rétives, et le temps d’un grain, son amiral. Puis le large la reprendra, nous laissant à nos torrents limoneux et à nos barbelés givrés.’ From Chants de la Balandrane, Gallimard, 1977, p. 16. - https://www.gallimard.fr/catalogue/chants-de-la-balandrane/9782070298303

Website: https://tamkeencommunity.org/

LinkedIn: @karima-kadaoui - https://www.linkedin.com/in/karima-kadaoui/