This week, it's a huge pleasure to welcome Adam Kahane onto the podcast to talk with Tim about the everyday habits and radical engagement that young people as well as educators and leaders, at all levels of our education systems, can learn in order to do the coordinated and constant work of transforming systems.

Adam Kahane is a Director at Reos Partners, a global social impact company dedicated to supporting sustainable and equitable progress on humanity's most crucial

challenges. He is an internationally renowned organizer, designer and facilitator of complex and conflictual multi-stakeholder processes through which business, government, and civil society leaders collaborate to address such challenges.

Adam has worked in more than fifty countries, with executives and politicians, generals and guerrillas, civil servants and trade unionists, community activists and United Nations officials, clergy and artists. He is also a best-selling author of six books about this work, is a Member of the Order of Canada, and in 2022, he was named a Schwab Foundation Social Innovation Thought Leader of the Year at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

Adam is the author of "Power and Love: A Theory and Practice of Social Change," "Transformative Scenario Planning: Working Together to Change the Future," "Collaborating with the Enemy: How to Work with People You Don’t Agree with or Like or Trust," and "Facilitating Breakthrough: How to Remove Obstacles, Bridge Differences, and Move Forward Together." These books are available in more than twenty languages. Nelson Mandela said of Adam's book Solving Tough Problems: An Open Way of Talking, Listening, and Creating New Realities: “This breakthrough book addresses the central challenge of our time: finding a way to work together to solve the problems we have created.”

In April this year, Adam's latest book was published, Everyday Habits for Transforming Systems: The Catalytic Power of Radical Engagement

Links:

https://reospartners.com/our-people/adam-kahane

[email protected]

https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-kahane/

This week we're exploring embodiment science in education with some of the worlds leading embodiment practitioners and cognitive scientists! We believe that this is one of the most important shifts happening in education globally, which is simultaneously so simple, and yet so hard to budge given the depths of the tendencies towards disembodiment, especially in the Western tradition, that we explore. Joining Tim in this fantastic conversation are:

Arawana Hayashi heads the creation of Social Presencing Theater (SPT) for the Presencing Institute. Working with Otto Scharmer and colleagues, she brings her background in the arts, meditation, and social justice to creating “social presencing” that makes visible both current reality and emerging future possibilities for individuals and groups. She is currently on the core faculty of the Presencing Institute.

Links: https://arawanahayashi.com/

https://www.u-school.org/

Book: Social Presencing Theater: The Art of Making a True Move - https://presencing.market/collections/frontpage/products/social-presencing-theater-the-art-of-making-a-true-move

Prof. Guy Claxton is a cognitive scientist, education thought leader and prolific author interested in expanding human intelligence through research, writing and education. He has spent most of his working life based in a variety of UK universities including Oxford, Bristol, King’s College London and Winchester.

Links: https://www.guyclaxton.net/

Recent Deans Lecture Series, University of Melbourne: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGFEswKBnMw

Book: Co-authored with Emily Poel, Bodies of Learning: How Embodiment Science Transforms Education will be released soon from Routledge.

Dr. Akhil Kumar Singh is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Public Policy at MS Ramaiah University of Applied Sciences. Akhil works at the intersection of Philosophy, Psychology and education, emphasizing the creation of educational policies and innovative curricula based on embodied approaches that drive systemic change.

Links: https://akhilksingh.in/

https://www.msruas.ac.in/faculty-staff/akhil-kumar

Book, Education for the Embodied Human: A Contemporary Understanding on Human Nature for Holistic Education - https://brill.com/display/title/71864

Emily Poel has been teaching embodiment in Berlin for over fifteen years. Originally from Michigan and with a degree in contemporary dance performance and history, she's worked internationally as a performer, choreographer and creative advisor. In 2004 she shifted her focus to embodiment training and hasn’t stopped since. Over the last ten years she's developed a large collection of activities using physical awareness tools and movement training to better understand how creativity, learning and thinking actually work. Emily is the co-author with Guy, of the forthcoming book, Bodies of Learning: How Embodiment Science Transforms Education.

Links: https://embodimentatwork.co/

Move4Schools - https://move4schools.com/

Caroline Williams is a UK-based science writer with 20 years’ experience in magazine and radio journalism. She writes regularly for New Scientist magazine. Her work has also appeared in the Guardian, The Times, The Telegraph, BBC Future, BBC Earth and the Boston Globe. ​She is the author of three books: Inner Sense: How the New Science of Interoception Can Transfrom Your Health (2025), Move! The New Science of Body Over Mind (2021) and Override (published as My Plastic Brain in the US, 2018), and the editor of two of New Scientist’s Instant Expert Guides: How Your Brain Works: Inside the most complicated object in the known universe (2017) and Your Conscious Mind: Unravelling the greatest mystery of the human brain (2017).

Links: https://www.carolinewilliams.net/

Caroline's latest book - https://profilebooks.com/work/inner-sense/

Move4Schools - https://move4schools.com/

The idea that schools simply deliver objective and neutral knowledge and skills to our young humans is a complete myth. In fact, with the amount of time that we spend in them over the course of our early lives, schools are incredibly good at conditioning us into particular sets of assumptions about the way the world works. My guest this week, Dr Ida Rose Florez is calling this out in amazing and very grounded ways and we discuss the impacts of what this does to our ability to be comfortable and competent in working with and in complexity (which is pretty much the place we all find ourselves in pretty consistently these days!). Ida Rose tells the full story brilliantly in her new book, The End of Education as We Know It: Regenerative Learning for Complex Times, as well as describing the examples of learning communities that are successfully doing education in whole new ways!

Ida Rose Florez, PhD, is a transformative leader in education, dedicated to reshaping learning for a more sustainable future. As the author of The End of Education as We Know It: Regenerative Learning for Complex Times, she challenges traditional education models and advocates for schools that nurture individual growth and ecological responsibility.

Ida Rose has spoken at a White House panel on Hispanic education, keynoted the Asian Preschool Education Annual Conference, and presented to leaders such as the governor of Shanghai and the California State Legislature.

Over the last decades, Ida Rose has led statewide education initiatives in Arizona and California, was a National Science Foundation Advancing Informal Science Learning Principal Investigator and governing board vice president of the National Association for the Education of Young Children. She served as assessment subject-matter expert with the National Governor’s Association and is a frequent grant reviewer for the National Science Foundation. She has also served on the board of the Human Systems Dynamics Institute.

Ida Rose holds a Ph.D. in educational psychology from the University of Arizona. She has held faculty positions at Penn State University College of Medicine, University of Arizona College of Education, Northern Arizona University College of Education, and Arizona State University Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College. She is a certified Human Systems Dynamics Professional and certified Warm Data Host with the International Bateson Institute. In 2017 she founded a consulting practice serving U.S. and international clients that focuses on regenerative education.

If people are interested, here is a blog post from Dave Snowden that touches on his view that we are unable to understand systems as wholes: https://thecynefin.co/regularities-reduction-2-2/

And here is a video where Jiddu Krishnamurti talks about thinking itself being the cause of the fragmentation and separation: https://youtu.be/CvL4uNA4U-k?si=bLbWpiSaPHJ4K5-Z&t=1073

Ida Rose's website: https://idaroseflorez.com/

The book: https://theendofeducationasweknowit.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/idaroseflorez/

After learning about the amazing work of my guest this week, I had an idea that I wanted to test out. Perhaps our current obsession with Large Language Models is revealing of our historic obsession with a narrow cognitivist view of how human learning happens (and, therefore, how schooling is structured)?!

Memorise the largest possible bank of static data and then output plausible propositions, in response to prompts from a teacher or a standardised exam! Obviously that's a bit of an unfair caricature of the industrial schooling system, but also not a million miles from the truth! As you will have seen from my explorations over the last few years in episodes on ecological psychology, play, movement, active inference and 4E cognitive science, I believe that there is an emerging understanding of how radically embodied and embedded in place and in relationships human learning is actually is. So that's why I was so excited to learn about a vastly different approach to artificial intelligence that is based on a sensorimotor learning framework and Jeff Hawkin's Thousand Brains theory of the neocortex.

Dr Viviane Clay is Executive Director of the Thousand Brains Project and a scientist with years of experience in neuroscience, AI and machine learning. She has a PhD in Cognitive Computing. The Thousand Brains Project grew out of decades of research at Numenta, a leading company in neuroscience-based AI technology, and is developing Monty, a new type of artificial intelligence based on the sensorimotor principles observed in the brain. Numenta's co-founder Jeff Hawkins is Research Advisor and Board Member of the Thousand Brains Project.

You can find links to additional information about Monty and the Thousand Brains Project below:

https://thousandbrains.org/

https://linktr.ee/1000brainsproj

2 page overview: https://thousandbrains.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/TBP_Overview.pdf

https://www.youtube.com/@thousandbrainsproject

This week, we're thinking about how change happens, or more often doesn't happen in formal education! What are the practical approaches that education leaders and policy-makers sometimes miss when they are initiating change management and innovation processes. This week we welcome back Dr James Mannion to the podcast, in light of the recent publication of his book 'Making Change Stick'. He's done a fabulous job of synthesising the change management literature, including techniques and strategies from many disciplines so that you don't have to.

Dr James Mannion is the Director of Rethinking Education, a teacher training organisation dedicated to improving outcomes for children and young people through implementation science, self-regulated learning and practitioner inquiry. He has a Masters in person-centred education from the University of Sussex, and a PhD in self-regulated learning from the University of Cambridge. James is an Associate of Oracy Cambridge: The Hughes Hall Centre for Effective Spoken Communication, through which he provides training and consultancy for schools and other organisations, such as the National Gallery. He is a renowned expert in metacognition, self-regulation and self-regulated learning, and regularly presents on these topics at national and international conferences. James is also the host of the popular Rethinking Education podcast, now in the top 3% globally, which features long-form conversations about how we might reform education to bring about a more harmonious, less hair-raising state of world affairs. With Kate McAllister, James is the co-author of Fear is the Mind Killer: Why Learning to Learn deserves lesson time – and how to make it work for your pupils. He has also more recently published Making Change Stick: A Practical Guide to Implementing School Improvement.

James' website: https://www.drjamesmannion.com/

Book: www.makingchangestick.co

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-mannion/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drjamesmannion/

A huge part of the shifts we want to see in schools and in education more broadly is more agency, choice-making and self direction for young people. There is an increasingly compelling story about why this is important for them, as well as for the kinds of challenges we're facing in local communities and national and global society. But sometimes what isn't highlighted is the impact of not having those things. What toll does it take on youth well-being and mental health? So this week I'm joined by renowned clinical psychologist and educator Dr Naomi Fisher to help me find out.

Naomi is a clinical psychologist, author and EMDR-Europe Accredited trainer. She specialises in trauma, autism and alternative ways to learn. She has a doctorate in clinical psychology from Kings College London (Maudsley), a PhD in developmental cognitive psychology also from Kings College (IoPPN), and a degree in Experimental Psychology from the University of Cambridge. Naomi is also an alumni of UWC Atlantic College, Wales.

Whilst in the NHS, Naomi worked in primary care and specialist trauma services in London, as well as neurodevelopmental services. She has worked for the Metropolitan Police and third sector organisations. She now works in private practice with adults, adolescents and children. She runs self-help webinars for parents on how to help their children with common mental health difficulties.

Naomi is the author of several books on psychology, mental health and alternative education. She is the author of Changing our Minds: How children can take control of their own learning, A Different Way to Learn: Neurodiversity and Self-Directed Education, When The Naughty Step Makes Things Worse, The Teenager’s Guide to Burnout and What Can We Do When School’s Not Working?: An Illustrated Handbook for Professionals (with Abigail Fisher). Most of Naomi's books are beautifully illustrated by Eliza Fricker.

Social Links

Naomi's substack, Think Again: https://naomicfisher.substack.com/

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/naomicfisher/?hl=en

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/naomi-fisher-psychologist/

Naomi's website: https://naomifisher.co.uk/

This week, we are celebrating 5 years and 193 episodes since going live with Episode 1 in April 2020!

You can hear Tim's reflections, as well as clips from previous episodes with Marie Battiste (Ep154), Nora Bateson (Ep116), Roland Kupers (Ep 185), Wakanyi Hoffman (Ep 157), Carl Mika (Ep179), Nolita Mvunelo & Matias Lara (Ep190), Zineb Mouhyi (Ep184) and Zoe Weil (Ep171).

Please share your own thoughts and reflections on the podcast guests, topics and future possibilities here: https://forms.gle/4nNEcw3QEopjf1W98

Thanks so much for being a great supporter of the podcast... and here's to the next 5 years!

Are we educating young people as consumers? Have educational institutions become service providers in the consumer economy of educational products?  Or are we educating young people as citizens - of their local communities, nations and the planet? If so what does that mean for how we engage them in the  processes of living and working together, making meaningful contributions and learning important things as they go.  I'm not sure that that looks much like what we're currently doing in most schools around the world.

Jon Alexander is on a mission to help a new story to emerge about how people all over the world are getting involved in 'citizening' - that is, thinking of citizen as a verb and a local participatory responsibility, rather than citizen as a noun that you claim rights to.

Jon began his career with success in advertising, winning the prestigious Big Creative Idea of the Year before making a dramatic change. Driven by a deep need to understand the impact on society of 3,000 commercial messages a day, he gathered three Masters degrees, exploring consumerism and its alternatives from every angle. In 2014, he co-founded the New Citizenship Project, a strategy and innovation consultancy that aims to shift the dominant story of the individual in society from Consumer to Citizen. NCP’s client list includes The Guardian, the European Central Bank, and the European Journalism Centre. They have partnered with the BBC, Amnesty International, National Trust, the British Film Institute, Tate galleries, the National Union of Students, YouGov, the Centre for Public Impact, the Food Standards Agency and the Food Ethics Council.

Jon is author of Citizens: Why the Key to Fixing Everything is All of Us - a book that seeks to reframe the moment in time we're living in as one of huge civic opportunity, not just crisis and collapse, and in doing so opens up a world of possibility for organisations and leaders across sectors and across the world.

Links to Jon's work:

• Citizens (Book): https://www.jonalexander.net/
• How to Citizen, with Baratunde Thurston: https://stories.howtocitizen.com/form
• New Citizenship Project: https://www.newcitizenproject.com/
• Jon's Four Thought lecture, BBC Radio 4: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04md5b0
• Jon's NCP article on Three Post Covid Futures: https://medium.com/new-citizenship-project/subject-consumer-or-citizen-three-post-covid-futures-8c3cc469a984
• Jon on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jon-alexander-11b66345/
• Baratunde on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/baratunde/

Is it possible to unlearn the conditioning of our minds, that many of us who have had traditional educations have experienced, such that we can think differently about what an education could be? This week's guest has seen both sides of this experience, and is weaving incredible communities and new institutions all over India and the world!

Manish Jain is deeply committed to regenerating our diverse local knowledge systems and cultural imaginations and is one of the strong planetary voices for de-schooling our lives. He has served for the past 20 years as coordinator and co-founder of Shikshantar: The Peoples’ Institute for Rethinking Education and Development based in Udaipur, India, and is co-founder of the Swaraj University, Creativity Adda, Learning Societies Unconference, Walkouts-Walkon network, Udaipur as a Learning City, and Families Learning Together network in India. He recently helped launch the global Ecoversities Network and the global Giftival Network. He is a featured speaker / advisory member of the Economics of Happiness network for localization. He has edited several books on vimukt shiksha (liberating learning) on themes such as learning societies, unlearning, gift culture, community media, and tools for deep dialogue. Prior to this, Manish worked as one of the principal team members of the UNESCO Learning Without Frontiers global initiative. He has also been a consultant to UNICEF, World Bank, and USAID in Africa, South Asia, and the former Soviet Union. Manish also worked as an investment banker with Morgan Stanley. He has been trying to unlearn his master’s degree in education from Harvard University and his BA in economics, international development, and political philosophy from Brown University. He and his wife Vidhi have been unschooling themselves with their 15-year-old daughter, Kanku, in Udaipur, Rajasthan. Manish is passionate about urban organic farming, filmmaking, simulation gaming, bicycling, group facilitation, clowning, intercultural dialogue, and slow food cooking.

Links to Manish's communities of practice:

www.shikshantar.org
www.ecoversities.org
www.swarajuniversity.org
www.udaipurlearningcity.org
https://complexity.university/
www.jailuniversity.org
www.farmversities.org
www.creativityadda.org
www.creativityconsortium.org

As I often say we radically underestimate young people and what they are capable of. They are asking to be involved in the critical conversations about systems change. And not only that they are also building their own capabilities for and with each other about how to engage with it's systemic issues. So it's a huge pleasure this week to be speaking with Nolita Mvunelo, Matías Lara and Vanessa Terschluse who have taken it upon themselves, as The 50 Percent, to gather a collection of insights to enhance young people's understanding of systems and how they move and change. They have published the amazing 'Young Person's Guide to Systems Change'.

Nolita Mvunelo is Co-Director of The 50 Percent and Club of Rome Youth Program Manager: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nolita-thina-mvunelo/

Matías Lara is Director of The 50 Percent: https://www.linkedin.com/in/milara14/

Vanessa Terschluse is Chief Editor of The 50 Percent: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vanessa-terschluse-915a5b171/

Other links:

https://the50percent.org/

The Young Person's Guide to Systems Change: https://the50percent.org/young-persons-guide/

https://youth-talks.org/

https://www.clubofrome.org/