There aren't many things that prompt widespread agreement from people on all sides of the various educational debates. But whatever your educational stripes, young people becoming better critical thinkers usually gets unanimous support. And, arguably, it's being recognised as increasingly important in a world full of AI-generated content and chatbots pretending to be your friend! So I was completely fascinated when I discovered the work of my guests this week, who, as professors of Philosophy, are exploring the often overlooked embodied process of what it feels like to engage in critical thinking and how that process gets shaped by our experiences and inspirations. 

The fact that thinking comes from somewhere, is very often forgotten in the encouragement of our students to develop their "analytical", "rational" and "logical" skills in pursuit of objectivity. This applies as much in sciences and maths as it does in other humanities subjects like philosophy. And it has major implications for how we teach critical thinking in sophisticated ways aligned with the latest cognitive science, rather than perpetuating the narrow idea that it is simply a dispassionate logical set of computations (which we're clearly seeing the LLMs are much better at than us squishy humans who care about stuff!).

Donata Schoeller - https://www.donataschoeller.com/ - is Research Professor, Philosophy, at the University of Iceland, Iceland and Associate Professor at the University of Koblenz. She is a Principal Investigator, and Conceptual Director of “Freedom to make sense: Embodied, experiential Inquiry and Research,” and the Academic Director of the European Erasmus programmes Training Embodied Critical Thinking and Understanding. She has researched and published extensively on embodied thinking, while developing international and interdisciplinary research and training cooperations on the topic. Recent publications: “Thinking at the edge in the context of embodied critical thinking: Finding words for the felt dimension of thinking within research,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 2022, Close Talking: Erleben zu Sprache bringen, 2019, Saying What We Mean, with Ed Casey, 2017, Thinking Thinking, with Vera Saller, 2016.

Sigríður (Sigga) Þorgeirsdóttir - https://english.hi.is/staff/sigrthor - is a professor of philosophy at the University of Iceland. She is Principal Investigator of the “Freedom to make sense: Embodied, experiential Inquiry and Research” project, and one of the leaders of the “Training Embodied Critical Thinking and Understanding” training programme. She specialises in the philosophy of the body, the philosophy of the environment, the philosophy of Nietzsche, feminist philosophy, and women in the history of philosophy. She is Chair of the Committee on gender issues of International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP) that sponsors the World Congress of Philosophy.

Useful Links:

Training Embodied Critical Thinking and Understanding (TECTU) 2024-2026: https://www.trainingect.com/

Freedom to Make Sense - Center of embodied, experiential and mindful research and education: https://makesense.hi.is/

Practicing Embodied Thinking in Research and Learning

Edited By Donata Schoeller, Sigridur Thorgeirsdottir, Greg Walkerden: 

https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-edit/10.4324/9781003397939/practicing-embodied-thinking-research-learning-donata-schoeller-sigridur-thorgeirsdottir-greg-walkerden

The following conversation is definitely a wild ride*! It's not an argument often made, but I believe that one of the effects of our industrialised education systems is to create the illusion that the world is full of somewhat fixed and ordered things, that don't move or change much. Of course, we teach our children about orbiting planets, the water cycle or change in historical periods. But, for example, in episode 208, Vanessa Andreotti gave a great example of how we name objects in the world, such as trees, in order to teach about them. In doing so, we draw a boundary around a tree that separates it from all non-trees. This sounds kind of philosophical and abstract, but I think the effects of it are very real. Most young people then learn to read the world as a collection of more or less fixed objects, rather than as patterns of relations. 

My guest this week has been exploring the depths of these questions for a long time through the lens of movement. As you will hear, Professor Thomas Nail started this line of inquiry researching human migration, and went on to develop an entirely new discipline of the philosophy of movement by pulling at the threads of how far our collective obsession with order and stasis goes! And it definitely goes back at least a couple of thousand years!

Thomas Nail is a Distinguished Scholar and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Denver and author of numerous books, including The Figure of the Migrant, Theory of the Border, Marx in Motion, Theory of the Image, Theory of the Object, Theory of the Earth, Lucretius I, II, III, Returning to Revolution, and Being and Motion.

Some useful links:

https://liberalarts.du.edu/about/people/thomas-andrew-nail

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Nail 

The Philosophy of Movement website: https://philosophy-of-movement.com/

'The Birth of Chaos Before Physis': https://youtu.be/c3S4w7C2dGg?si=H-1RlmaK7p3x7C4a 

The Philosophy of Movement: https://www.youtube.com/live/YQUtX64uqNc?si=EeP3mP4Z-6_4-DK1

What is New Materialism paper: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337351875_WHAT_IS_NEW_MATERIALISM

'The Random Walk of the Brain' (article in Salon): https://www.salon.com/2021/08/28/walking-and-spontaneous-fluctuations-brain/ 

*In the conversation, Thomas uses the word 'cosmogony' which in hindsight I wished I had asked him to define. Simply put it is a theory about how the cosmos or universe originated.

It's pretty clear from the statistics that there is a huge youth demographic bulge on the continent of Africa. 40% of its population is aged 15 or younger (as of 2021). The population of young people aged 15-24 in Africa is projected to reach 500 million in 2080. But as Prof. Kingsley Moghalu from the African School of Governance said at Harvard University’s African Development Conference in April last year, there is no guarantee that this will lead to positive outcomes for individual young people, countries or the continent as a whole. In order to enable all these amazing possibilities education is going to be a key factor in these emerging possibilities and scenarios. 

There are few researchers, communicators or advocates of education across Africa more brilliant or well-placed than my guest this week to speak to these questions. 

Dr. Modupe (Mo) Olateju is a fellow with the Center for Universal Education in the Global Economy and Development program at Brookings Institution. She is an international development specialist with expertise in public-private partnership in education with additional research interests in education innovation and foundational learning. She established The Education Partnership (TEP) Centre and led the organization’s pioneering work in applied education research in Nigeria and across Africa for 10 years. She is also Board Chair at the Malala Fund and member of the Executive Board at Fab AI.  

Links to Mo's work: 

https://moolateju.com/ 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/mo-adefeso-olateju/

https://www.brookings.edu/people/modupe-mo-olateju/

https://tepcentre.com/

Ref. Africa By 2040: The Future of Africa’s Youth. Keynote Address by Professor Kingsley Moghalu  President, African School of Governance. Harvard University’s African Development Conference 2025, 12 April 2025. https://asg.ac/africa-by-2040-the-future-of-africas-youth/

In the current context of ubiquitous digital tech and runaway generative AI, you'd think that a book calling out our collective delusions about digital tools in relation to learning wouldn't make much of a splash! But Jared Cooney Horvath's latest book 'The Digital Delusion: How Classroom Technology Harms Our Kids’ Learning -- And How To Help Them Thrive Again' (https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-digital-delusion-jared-horvath/1148995809?ean=9798218880378) is currently #1 on the Amazon bestseller list in Educational Psychology and has been receiving a lot of love, including from actor and educational activist, Hugh Grant, and author of The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt!

Jared is an old friend of the podcast, so I was really happy to invite him back on for a conversation about our shared concerns about the impacts that digital tech is having on our young people, the dubious motivations of Big Tech and the strange and growing alliance that is developing between people of all educational persuasions!

Jared Cooney Horvath (PhD, MEd) is a neuroscientist, educator, and best-selling author who specializes in human learning and brain development. He is the creator of The Learning Blueprint, an international award-winning program helping educators and students understand how learning actually works.

Jared has conducted research and taught at Harvard University, Harvard Medical School, and the University of Melbourne, and has worked with more than 1,000 schools around the world. He is the author of six books, has published over fifty research articles, and his work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Economist, Harvard Business Review, and ABC’s Catalyst.

Jared currently serves as Director of LME Global, an organization dedicated to bringing cutting-edge brain and behavioral science to educators, students, and communities.

Jared's website: lmeglobal.com

Jared's previous books: https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/8069909.Jared_Cooney_Horvath

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jared-cooney-horvath/

Previous episode with Jared on the podcast: https://www.goodimpactlabs.com/podcast/dr-jared-cooney-horvath

In this final episode of 2025, you'll hear about some of the most exciting things happening around the world for pathways through the upper end of high school from the voices of the young people involved in them.

The final years of high school is often the 'business-end' of formal schooling, where we often demand that young people just knuckle down and suffer the "rigours" of high stakes standardised exams and college entrance tests. But these conversations really show you that alternatives to this are not only possible, but happening! 

Too often, we can talk a great game of hyperbole and hubris about our apparently "paradigm-shifting" designs, but the young people actually experiencing them are telling a different story. What better way to get at the truth than by hearing from the young people themselves! So in this mini-series (5 episodes), you'll hear from 19 young people about their experiences of the kinds of competencies they feel they are learning and need to learn, what they find energising and enabling, and how they feel about the adults who are very often giving so much heart and hard work into this work, to support and guide them.

You'll hear about five empowering high school pathways and curriculum innovations:

• the International Big Picture Learning Credential in Australia;
• the Greenstones at Green School Bali in Indonesia;
• the African Leadership Academy programme in South Africa;
• the IB Systems Transformation Pathway pilot programme at UWC South East Asia in Singapore and UWC Atlantic College in Wales;
• and the Global Impact Diploma, being run at a number of schools around the world including American International Schools in Lima, Peru, Budapest, Hungary and Bucharest, Romania.

If you know of other innovations that you'd like to see featured on future mini-series, then please do share them with us at goodimpactlabs.com/contact.

In this first episode in this Innovative Student Pathways mini-series, I had the huge pleasure of chatting with Monty, Eliza and Lydia, three amazing graduates of the International Big Picture Learning Credential. There are few, if any, other new pathways and credentials that have been as successful in obtaining university recognition for such radical alternatives to the standardised exam factory system and credential capital monopolies! The phenomenon that is Viv White, the founder of Big Picture Learning Australia has joined me previously on the podcast so you can find out more about what they're up to across Australia in that episode. 

Previous episode with Viv White AM - https://www.goodimpactlabs.com/podcast/big-picture-learning-australia-a-conversation-with-viv-white

LinkedIn: @viv-white - ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/viv-white-am-297642142/⁠

Instagram: @bigpicture.edu.au - ⁠https://www.instagram.com/bigpicture.edu.au/⁠

@bigpiclearning - ⁠https://www.instagram.com/bigpiclearning/⁠ (US)

Website: https://www.bigpicture.org.au/

In Episode 2 of this Innovative Student Pathways mini-series, I chatted with Olivia, Farrah and Chrissa, current students at Green School Bali about their learning through their Greenstone projects. Greenstone are a capstone project that is a key part of the ‘living’ curriculum at Green School Bali that is educates young people for sustainability through community-integrated, entrepreneurial learning, The And the projects reflect young people's passion for important causes and desire to make a difference in the world. 

Greenstone enables students to have authentic, real-world learning experiences, taking ownership of their own learning journeys, and lights in them a fire for being continuous, life-long learners. 

You can also find a link to the Regen26 Youth conference that Olivia mentions in the shownotes here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScl5iKb64QBmcgS-igtzYHYuj4DJWImL58KCq9HIY3tsJiOpw/viewform

https://bali.greenschool.org/regeneration26/

Greenstone presentations from 2025: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLo3UtBdmnunAvG5Yb5cXtQgAk4TcWK3w&si=mWkYAraCkssRkYbh

Website: https://bali.greenschool.org/high-school/ 

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/greenschoolbali_what-is-greenstone-activity-6876068533479055360-tQ61?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAACJvZTMBEdMREU-F2oP3G7TXlcHKmR1Kvnk

Contact: Benjamin Freud - https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjaminfreud/

In Episode 3 of this Innovative Student Pathways mini-series, you'll find a fantastic overview of all of the amazing work happening at African Leadership Academy in Johannesburg, South Africa to build the next generation of young African leaders, innovators, laureates and artists. I had the pleasure of meeting with Ayira, Katleho, Mohamed, Fatima and Maimouna Régina to hear all about the core programme and the broader approach to nurturing passionate Africanist auto-didacts!

Website: https://www.africanleadershipacademy.org/ 

Previous episode with ALA's CEO, Hatim Eltayeb - https://www.goodimpactlabs.com/podcast/hatim-eltayeb

In this fourth episode on exciting global innovations in student pathways, I chatted to Sara, Anisa and Entong from UWC South East Asia and Gabi and Satya, alumni of UWC Atlantic College about their experiences on the new IB Systems Transformation Pathway (STP). This is a really exciting pilot of the IB's 16+ review, pioneered with United World Colleges to enable transformative change, systems leadership and making the world a fairer place for the future. Young people undertake project-based interdisciplinary engagements and systems interventions and are assessed through innovative and collaborative approaches.

IB STP website: https://www.ibo.org/programmes/collaborative-review-of-the-dp-and-cp/alternative-assessment-pathway/

UWC Atlantic College STP site: https://www.uwcatlantic.org/learning/academic/systems-transformation-pathway

UWCSEA STP site: https://www.uwcsea.edu.sg/ib-systems-transformation

Contacts: IB - Jenny Gillett (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifer-gillett-87a19b22/); UWCAC - Marija Uzunova Dang (https://www.linkedin.com/in/marijauzunovadang/); Eivind Lodemel (https://www.linkedin.com/in/eivindlodemel/)

In the last of these 5 mini-series episodes on innovative and emerging student pathways, I chatted with Malna, Nikk and Belen from American International School of Budapest, American International School of Bucharest and American School of Lima respectively. These are 3 of the more than 100 international schools who were represented in the cohort of passionate educators and leaders who co-create the Global Impact Diploma, which is a two-year sequence of courses designed to prepare students to change the world.

GID Overview: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1vKbk0F8zLPhNdT7Dx7zY2dOyTA7MUjZY63NEJkepQbg/edit?slide=id.g3009304bdc5_0_5#slide=id.g3009304bdc5_0_5

Pathways Summit: https://youtu.be/-75VaXq5rBo?si=mU9ryiqdhATssjrY 
Contact: Corey Topf - https://www.linkedin.com/in/corey-topf-0a062464/