The Future of Smart

What can we learn about design principles from schools and districts that pivoted more successfully during the COVID pandemic? In what ways do these design principles help us better respond to the holistic needs of young people, educators and communities? Hear insights Andy Calkins and Nicole Allard from the "What Made Them So Prepared Project," a collaborative project among 9 organizations leading in the education transformation space. Stewart Hudson from the Leon Lownstein Foundation will join us to discuss the unique funding approach taken to support the work and the grantmaking insights that emerged. 

Relevant Links

What Made Them So Prepared? - Research Project 

Bravely network and our announcement of it and Transformation Design, the research base driving its design

Next Generation Learning website where listeners can find everything that we’ve produced

5 Lessons Learned from NGLC’s on-going efforts to become an anti-racist organization, helping to make next gen learning a social justice seeking movement

If you are new to this podcast, we suggest listening to episodes 2-4 to build a foundation for the concepts and principles we'll keep returning to on the Future of Smart.

E.2 - From Brain Bound to Our Extended Minds

E.3 - A Return Journey to Wisdom

E.4 - Using Science to Imagine a New Purpose and Design for Education with Dr. Pamela Cantor

Ulcca is joined by Google's former Chief Education Evangelist, Jaime Casap. Jaime discusses his vision for how technology will continue to impact education and how funders can help students prepare for their future working alongside technology.

If you are new to this podcast, we suggest listening to episodes 2-4 to build a foundation for the concepts and principles we'll keep returning to on the Future of Smart.

E.2 - From Brain Bound to Our Extended Minds

E.3 - A Return Journey to Wisdom

E.4 - Using Science to Imagine a New Purpose and Design for Education with Dr. Pamela Cantor

In today’s episode, Ulcca speaks with Deanna James, president of the St. Croix Foundation for Community Development, about the foundation's approach to transforming local ecosystems through radical partnership and grantmaking on the island of St. Croix.

Relevant Links

Philanthropy and Race in the U.S. Virgin Islands, Deanna James, 2020

Cracking the Code: Making the Case for a Comprehensive Policy Analysis of the Virgin Islands Public Education System to Achieve Whole-System Reform, St. Croix Foundation, 2017

Collective Work and Impact: the article below is a wonderful review of the research on how system change occurs; and the Nonprofit Consortium 5-Year Retrospective demonstrates our working model of system building via collective impact that is rooted in relationships!

The Relational Work of Systems Change, Stanford Social Innovation Review, 2022

Nonprofit Consortium 5-Year Retrospective, St. Croix Foundation, 2021

If you are new to this podcast, we suggest listening to episodes 2-4 to build a foundation for the concepts and principles we'll keep returning to on the Future of Smart.

E.2 - From Brain Bound to Our Extended Minds

E.3 - A Return Journey to Wisdom

E.4 - Using Science to Imagine a New Purpose and Design for Education with Dr. Pamela Cantor

EdFunder’s Chief Program Officer Dr. Ulcca Joshi Hansen speaks with Dr. Michelle Fine, CUNY graduate professor. They explore the topic of democratizing data and evidence. What does it look like when we step outside our typical worldview to design and engage in the process of research differently?

Relevant Links:

The Public Science Project at the Graduate Center

The Essentials of Critical Participatory Action Research. Michelle Fine & María Elena Torré (2021) Washington D.C.: American Psychological Association Publishers.

From Evidence to Policy: Longitudinal statistical analysis of college access, equity and performance assessments

From Evidence to Policy and Organizing: Participatory study by/for educators and students in alternative/transfer schools in NYC at risk of school closing

From Evidence to policy: Changing Minds: The impact of college in prison: a participatory study of college in prison - impact on the women in prison, their children, the prison environment, recidivism and public safety (a policy report published by seven women in prison and four CUNY faculty/students)

If you are new to this podcast, we suggest listening to episodes 2-4 to build a foundation for the concepts and principles we'll keep returning to on the Future of Smart.

E.2 - From Brain Bound to Our Extended Minds

E.3 - A Return Journey to Wisdom

E.4 - Using Science to Imagine a New Purpose and Design for Education with Dr. Pamela Cantor

EdFunders' Dr. Ulcca Joshi Hansen will speak with Dr. Pamela Cantor, founder and senior science advisor for Turnaround for Children, about new research into youth and adolescent development and what that means for creating learning contexts that truly support and nurture the whole child. Funders have a critical role in supporting educators to develop the skills to create such contexts and development of curricular, assessment and accountability systems that align with the long term outcomes we want for young people.

Relevant Links:

• Science of Learning and Development Trilogy: These are three papers prepared for the inauguration of the Science of Learning and Development Alliance in 2016. These papers are a synthesis of many sciences that converge on a set of core scientific principles that should drive the design of 21st century learning. The first two papers were followed by a third, which synthesizes the implications of the science for educational practice. Pam was the lead author on the first paper. David Osher was the lead author on the second paper, and Pam was a co-author. Linda Darling-Hammond was the lead author on the third paper.
• Key Findings and Implications of the Science of Learning and Development: For readers who are short on time, this is a five-page document that summarizes the science findings and their implications.
• Turnaround for Children’s tools and resources: Turnaround for Children, the organization Pam founded in 2002, provides tools, resources, and services that help educators operationalize whole-child design, especially in school settings. Turnaround’s tools, resources, and services are grounded in the science of learning and development and aligned to the Design Principles.
  • Turnaround for Children’s Whole-Child Blueprint
  • Turnaround for Children’s Toolbox
  • Turnaround’s Well-Being Index
  • Whole-Child Design Inventory

If you are new to this podcast, we suggest listening to episodes 2-4 to build a foundation for the concepts and principles we'll keep returning to on the Future of Smart.

E.2 - From Brain Bound to Our Extended Minds

E.3 - A Return Journey to Wisdom

E.4 - Using Science to Imagine a New Purpose and Design for Education with Dr. Pamela Cantor

Today’s episode is an invitation to consider how mainstream western definitions of learning and education are really just relics. When we use these terms, and when we design – or redesign - schools and curricula, we’re often using templates that were invented back in the 1500s in Europe. Before this period most societies viewed the world as a living system; humans thought of themselves as part of that whole–immersed in it, subject to it, and in awe of it. This is the basis of what we can call a holistic-indigenous worldview. The Future of Smart podcast promotes an approach to education that is grounded in holistic-indigenous views of what it means to be a person, what it means to exist in community, what counts as knowledge, what it means to learn and succeed. Today’s guests are working to further such approaches in American education today and we’ll hear from them about the joys and challenges of bringing it alive in our dominant culture.

Resources

Note to Educators: Hope Required When Growing Roses in Concrete
Jeffrey Duncan-Andrade

Cultivating Sacred Spaces: A racial affinity group approach to support critical educators of color
Farima Pour-Khorshid

If you are new to this podcast, we suggest listening to episodes 2-4 to build a foundation for the concepts and principles we'll keep returning to on the Future of Smart.

E.2 - From Brain Bound to Our Extended Minds

E.3 - A Return Journey to Wisdom

E.4 - Using Science to Imagine a New Purpose and Design for Education with Dr. Pamela Cantor

Today’s episode invites us to explore the conceptions of our brains that dominate so much of our thinking about learning and education. In her research, Annie has found that western culture is extremely brain bound, which means that we overvalue the role of thinking in our own experience. We think of the brain as a computer, a tool. As we’ll learn in later episodes of this podcast, this bias has deep historical roots in western culture. It helps explain how we ended up with our current ideas about what school is, what learning is, and what it means to be smart. But to understand all this, we first need to know how our brains work in the world, which is where Annie comes in.

RELEVANT LINKS

There’s not one single way of being smart - Annie Murphy Paul's notes from "The Extended Mind"

Annie's Book

RSA Animate: The Divided Brain - Explore more of Iain McGilchrist's work on our brain hemispheres and how they attend to the world.

If you are new to this podcast, we suggest listening to episodes 2-4 to build a foundation for the concepts and principles we'll keep returning to on the Future of Smart.

E.2 - From Brain Bound to Our Extended Minds

E.3 - A Return Journey to Wisdom

E.4 - Using Science to Imagine a New Purpose and Design for Education with Dr. Pamela Cantor

Disruption is difficult, but it is also an opportunity to move forward in new ways. The Future of Smart podcast is an opportunity for us to think in new ways about the challenges that we've been attempting to address in education. To go forward, we need to start by going back. Our education system is the way it is as the result of specific historical conditions that harnessed certain tendencies in our brains. Together these created a worldview that’s very hard to see outside of. And we’ve never really stepped back to ask whether organizing schools according to this worldview serves us well today. Join Richard Tagle and host Ulcca Joshi Hansen for an opening episode that explores why this is the moment for funders and others to focus on transformative systems change in education.

Relevant Links

The Future of Smart Worldview Framework - Slides from Ulcca's presentation on the worldview framework.

RSA Animate: The Divided Brain - Explore more of Iain McGilchrist's work on our brain hemispheres and how they attend to the world.

Preview our next week episode with Annie Murphy Paul - There's not a single way of being smart. Notes from The Extended Mind.

If you are new to this podcast, we suggest listening to episodes 2-4 to build a foundation for the concepts and principles we'll keep returning to on the Future of Smart.

E.2 - From Brain Bound to Our Extended Minds

E.3 - A Return Journey to Wisdom

E.4 - Using Science to Imagine a New Purpose and Design for Education with Dr. Pamela Cantor