Coconut Thinking: Recent Episodes
Benjamin Freud, Ph.D.
The Coconut Thinking podcast brings together educational provocateurs who are re-thinking school as a concept and a space. It is about advancing the conversation about learning for purpose and for the common good, not just for job-readiness, and certainly not to create docile consumers. Coconut Thinking is a place where we think and act to make positive contributions to the welfare of the bio-collective—all living things that have an interest in the healthfulness of the planet. It is time for revolutionary change in education, to move away from anthropocentric approaches and embrace learning as a social and natural experience that has purpose. It is time to go #BeyondSchool and open up learning and action for, by, and to the (greater) community.
How do we nurture radical human relationships through authentic stories of learning?
In this episode, I speak with Virgel Hammonds. Virgel is a nationally recognized leader in education innovation. He became CEO of the Aurora Institute in 2024, bringing over two decades of experience in learner-centered education. Formerly Chief Learning Officer at KnowledgeWorks, Virgel has partnered with national policymakers and local communities to redesign learning systems. He has also served as superintendent in Maine and high school principal in California, where he implemented personalized, mastery-based learning models. Virgel is an active board member for several educational organizations, continuing his mission to transform education for all learners.
The Aurora Institute is a pioneering organization focused on advancing competency-based education frameworks. It champions personalized, learner-centered approaches, ensuring students progress based on mastery rather than seat time. The institute collaborates with educators, policymakers, and communities to redesign learning systems, promoting equity and deeper learning for all students.
We discuss:
🥥 Shifting from school systems to communities of learning, recognizing learning as a 24/7, anywhere journey;
🥥 Listening to voices from the entire community to bring in local values, while creating connections with wider networks.
🥥 Showing up with authenticity in order to deepen our relationships, with courage and vulnerability.
Check us out www.coconut-thinking.com
You can find the Aurora Institute on https://aurora-institute.org/
How is place an emergent, relational experience, rather than a fixed location?
In this special episode, Charlotte and Benjamin speak alongside the sounds of Paris to create a conversation that includes the city. We discuss:
🥥 How place creates the conditions for agency to emerge;
🥥 How learning experiences might be designed with emergence in mind, that is, with enabling constraints that nurture inquiry and the unexpected, without giving way to "anything goes;"
🥥 Specific examples of learner projects that have contributed to life and led to deeper learning (and yes, outcomes).
Come be part of this conversation that is alive with the city. When we listen to the stories around us, we appreciate that Nature is everywhere because we are Nature.
How might we commit to change in order to create conditions for deeper learning and put students first?
In this episode, I speak with Kyle Wagner. Kyle is an education consultant and founder of Transform Educational Consulting (TEC). He specializes in empowering schools to create socially, emotionally, and globally aware citizens through project-based learning. With over 20 years of experience, Kyle has worked with numerous schools worldwide, helping design more than 500 learning experiences. He previously served as the coordinator for Futures Academy at the International School of Beijing and as a project-based learning leader at High Tech High. Kyle is the author of "The Power of Simple," which provides strategies for school transformation. We discuss:
🥥 How changes in the physical environment can augment or constrain deeper learning;
🥥 How artifacts of learning are touch points in journeys of learning rather than ends in themselves;
🥥 How no matter where you are, or think you are, you can make a shift toward more student-centered learning.
Check us out www.coconut-thinking.com
And look Kyle up on https://transformschool.com/
How might regenerative travel teach us about reciprocity, contributing to a different approach to education?
In this episode I speak with David Leventhal and Ximena Rodrigues of Playa Viva. Playa Viva is a B-Corp certified brand that leverages hospitality to bring capital to work to improve ecosystems, for people and planet, to create vibrant, resilient, healthy and profitable systems for all participants. It takes a "slow money" committed investment and runs entirely off-grid. Playa Viva works extensively with its local community to support health and education. David Leventhal is its Founder. He is a regenerative (social and environmental) impact entrepreneur and investor. Regeneration principles have guided much of his work including the founding of Regenerative Travel and Regenerative Resorts to support similar independent hotel owners around the world. Ximena Rodriguez is the ReSiMar Regenerative Education Coordinator. Sher works closely with the local community to develop citizenship through education, working alongside guests at Playa Viva. We discuss:
🥥 How travel is an exchange of discovery between peoples coming from two different places;
🥥 How we are not the principle characters of the story, but rather participants here and in this moment;
🥥 How travel is not reward for working, it is education for living... which has a parallel to schools.
Check us out www.coconut-thinking.com
And look up Playa Viva: www.playaviva.com
What if we decided to do things differently?
I speak with Clover Hogan. Clover is a 24-year-old climate activist and the founding Executive Director of Force of Nature - the youth non-profit turning climate anxiety into action. She has worked alongside the world’s leading authorities on sustainability, consulted within the boardrooms of Fortune 50 companies, and counseled heads of state. Clover has spoken alongside Jane Goodall and Vandana Shiva, and interviewed the 14th Dalai Lama. Her TED talk, 'What to do when climate change feels unstoppable', has been viewed over 2 million times. At 22 she was recognized on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list, and has featured in countless media outlets. And she is a Green School Bali graduate! We discuss:
🥥 How the real problem isn't that youth is climate anxious, it's that people in power are not;
🥥 How Departments of Defense might consider defending our rivers, mountains, forests, and air—where preserving the peace becomes about climate;
🥥 How social justice and climate justice are the indissociable, and how transforming education has to take this into account.
Check out our website: www.coconut-thinking.com
How might our stories be as unique as the place from which they unfold?
In this episode, I speak with Jenny Andersson. Jenny is the founder of The Really Regenerative Centre. She works as a strategist, facilitator and educator, supporting organizations and communities to create visions for the future they want – together – and to find the energy, will and approaches to sustain long-term change. She also leads the cohort Power of Place, which is collective learning journey in regenerative placemaking. The aim of the course is to provide a living systems and regenerative thinking approach to how we design our places so that they can become places in which humans can fulfill their potential and true roles and all life thrives in harmony – so that the places that are precious to us become Places For Life. We discuss:
🥥 How place provides an entry point into understanding the enormous complexities of systems and the dynamic relationships within them;
🥥 How understanding your bioregion is critical to education because it connects us to place, but also appreciates the uniqueness of every system and our place [within/as] it;
🥥 The nestedness of all things, or rather, the rhizomatic relationships that we have with all aspects of society and life.
Check us out www. coconut-thinking.com
How might we re-think higher education to be about our ability to discern the world and take action, not the diplomas we receive?
I speak with Ronald Barnett. Ron has spent a lifetime in higher education as a scholar, institutional leader and manager, researcher, and writer. He is recognized as having introduced and developed the philosophy of higher education as a field in its own right (and he is the President of the recently established Philosophy and Theory of Higher Education Society, and co-editor of two major book series. Since 1990, he has been on the staff of the Education Faculty of University College London, where he is now an Emeritus Professor. Over the years, Ron has written and edited more than 35 books and over 150 papers has been cited in the literature over 25,000 times. There are about 3 million words of his in the public domain. He continues to act as a consultant to individual universities around the world on higher education matters, and also with his work in examining, reviewing, editing, and mentoring. We discuss:
🥥 Higher education as a process, not an institution;
🥥 The conspiracy that involves all stakeholders in grade inflation and the degradation of standards;
🥥 Ethics as the platform from which the critical thinker seeks to make the world a better place.
Check us out on www.coconut-thinking.com
How might we create the conditions and spaces for learning to be wild? Or maybe we need to un-create them for wildness?
I speak to Jennifer D. Klein and Jill Ackers-Clayton. Jennifer has a broad background in global education and global partnership development, student-centered curricular strategies, diversity and inclusivity work, authentic assessment, and experiential, inquiry-driven learning. She has facilitated workshops in English and Spanish on four continents, providing strategies for high-quality, globally connected project-based learning in all cultural and socioeconomic contexts, with an emphasis on amplifying student voice and shifting school culture to support such practices. Jennifer has worked with organizations such as the Buck Institute for Education, the Center for Global Education at the Asia Society, The Institute for International Education, Fulbright Japan, What School Could Be, the Centre for Global Education, TakingITGlobal, and the World Leadership School, to name a few. Jennifer’s first book, The Global Education Guidebook: Humanizing K–12 Classrooms Worldwide Through Equitable Partnerships, was published in 2017, and her second book, The Landscape Model of Learning: Designing Student-Centered Experiences for Cognitive and Cultural Inclusion, was released in 2022.
Jill is an influential educator with nearly three decades of experience across a broad spectrum of the educational sector. Her journey began as a mathematics teacher, evolving into a technology expert after achieving her CCNA & MCSE certifications in Denver, Colorado. Her skills in managing school networks and teaching K-8 technology led her to significant roles in educational leadership. Her publication, "Developing Natural Curiosity through Project-Based Learning: Five Strategies for the PreK-3 Classroom," highlights her dedication to innovative education. As the Director of Education at VS America, her current role focuses on transforming learning environments, a crucial aspect of impacting student lives daily. This role involves collaborating with architectural firms, interior designers, and furniture vendors globally to create adaptable, flexible, and dynamic learning spaces.
We discuss:
🥥 How learning experiences might be gatherings rather than collaborative efforts, to allow for possibilities and emergence;
🥥 How we might consider physical and non-physical spaces in different ways to promote learning, not simply to hold learning and learners;
🥥 How place-based learning flourishes when communities gather to solve problems.
Check us out: www.coconut-thinking.com
How might we come together around a WHY rather than a HOW? Might the HOW sort itself out if we share purpose?
In this episode, I speak with Kevin Bartlett. Kevin is the Founder of the Common Ground Collaborative. He has held leadership positions in the UK, Tanzania, Namibia, Austria, and Belgium, where he was most recently Director of the International School of Brussels from 2001-2015. Kevin has co-designed accreditation systems for the European Council of International Schools (ECIS), the Council of International Schools (CIS) and the New England Association of Schools and Colleges (NEASC) and is currently engaged with a small team developing ACE, an innovative new accreditation protocol for NEASC. He is a writer and trainer in the field of curriculum design and leadership for learning for the Principals’ Training Center. As a curriculum designer, he was the initiator and early leader of the IB Primary Years Programme. We discuss:
🥥 How we might challenge schools to describe what they're doing as a process, in order to avoid getting stuck in outcomes;
🥥 How conceptual transfer opens up spaces for learning and action, how goes beyond the the here and now to make a difference in now and then.
🥥 How feeling inspires action, not academics; feeling is what connects us, not cognitive understanding (though that can nourish feeling).
Check us out: www.coconut-thinking.com
How might AI create both utopian and dystopian futures all at the same time? What does this mean for education and for learning?
In this episode, I speak with Darren Coxon. Darren is Founder of CoxonAI, a worldwide strategic advisory specialising in K-12 AI implementation. An educator for 25 years, Darren has most recently managed the operation of schools’ groups, notably Brighton College’s international schools, Forfar Education, and Britus Education, Bahrain, where he was COO. Darren has been at the forefront of educational technology for many years, including leading the first 6th form college in the UK to move to an iPad 1:1 model. He is now a major thought leader on AI in education, has delivered training for COBIS and the National College, as well as more recently delivering keynotes and workshops for HMC, GESS Dubai, and the Cottesmore AI Festival. We discuss:
🥥 How generative AI is only the beginning, yet there is nothing new in how we use technology to enhance ourselves, our learning, and our abilities;
🥥 The connections between AI and our response to ecological breakdown... maybe this is also an opportunity to connect non-virtually;
🥥 How we might prepare learners, no matter their age, to be useful, not in an extractive way, but rather one that helps all life thrive, and this is the re-purposing of schools.
Check us out: www.coconut-thinking.com.
How might we free ourselves from the bondage of data to tell different stories of learning?
In this episode, I speak with David Penberg, Ph.D. David is an urban and international educator, teacher and writer with 40 years of experience. His work is place-based and intergenerational. He supports communities seeking to become more vital, joyous and integrated places of learning. He has held leadership and teaching roles in non-profits, community-based organizations, independent, international and charter schools, and in higher education. His love for learning and interest in people are rooted in a belief in agency and democratic practices. We discuss:
🥥 How intentionality can lead to greater well-being and deeper learning;
🥥 How to amplify stories of care, ones that connect and inspire us;
🥥 How schools can find their place within the community, as places of learning for all generations.
Check us out www.coconut-thinking.com
How might learning be flow between structure and emergence? How might we measure impact quantitatively and qualitatively?
In this episode, I speak with Michael Bunce. Michael is an educator, researcher, and interdisciplinary sound artist, with wide-ranging international experience across education and the arts. As an educational researcher, he specialises in interdisciplinary learning design and innovation, working in leadership, teaching, research, and consultancy roles in schools, arts and community organisations, regulatory and advisory bodies, and universities.
You'll want to check out http://www.learningmap.education/ for the visuals.
This isn't a light conversation, yet Michael's work provides valuable insights into pedagogy and the cyclical and dynamic nature of learning, going from structured, to semi-structured, to emergent, to embedded forms of learning. Michael challenges us to reconsider how we might conceptualize learning. We discuss:
🥥 Emergent learning as an unpredictable process that arises when learners have agency and are the source of knowledge creation;
🥥 How content, capacity, and context find different value depending on the learning experience we have and need;
🥥 How we can tell different narratives of learning that include stories of impact.
Check us out on www.coconut-thinking.com
What might flourishing look like as collective and individual experiences entangled in environment?
Eri Mountbatten-O'Malley is a Senior lecturer in education policy at Bath Spa University and is also a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. His research is philosophical in nature and helps us to better understand social problems and social research. Eri’s central pedagogical interest is in nurturing critical thinking and complex concept development in students. Eri’s research interests are at the cross-roads between epistemology and ethics. In particular, he is interested in using philosophical skills to better understand social problems. His interests in concepts such as ‘well-being’ and ‘happiness’ led him to focus his PhD research on a conceptual analysis of ‘human flourishing. He has had the opportunity to share his research and read papers at numerous international conferences on the problems of reductionist accounts of normative concepts such as ‘wonder’ and ‘human flourishing’, and will be reading further papers over the coming year on related topics. We discuss:
🥥 How flourishing happens where the inner and outer worlds inter/intra-act;
🥥 How empiricism requires conceptual understanding that cannot easily be measured;
🥥 The dynamic nature of language as encounter.
Check us out on www. coconut-thinking. com
How might we tell new stories open up our imagination to what is possible?
In this episode, I speak with Cindy Forde. Cindy’s career has been dedicated to transforming how we understand and act as human beings towards Earth. She works globally with leaders across sectors in education, communication and sustainability including University of Cambridge and the UN, and believes the biggest impact we can have in making change is how we, as a global community, shape the mind-set of our children. In 2022, her children’s book “Bright New World” came out.
Cindy is the founder of Planetari, an organization that sets out a new vision for education, to enable all children to understand our planet as a living system and to have the capacity for creativity and innovation to be able to live successfully here. Prior to Planetari, Cindy led the Cambridge Science Centre as CEO and the Blue Marine Foundation as Managing Director. We discuss:
🥥 The importance of storytelling for us to imagine and then create possibilities for new a new worlds;
🥥 How healing ourselves (including the planet) begins by listening to one another with open hearts and minds;
🥥 How ecological breakdown finds its roots in colonialism and our spirit of extraction.
Check out our website: www.coconut-thinking.com. You'll find our articles and resources.
How might we transform our relationality with the world, as the world, especially the non-human world?
In this episode, I speak with Rūta Žemčugovaitė. Rūta is a writer, artist, and researcher, working with mycelium for regenerative futures. With a background in Psychology, she learned to facilitate trauma healing and shadow work in Costa Rica and now works with technology, mycology (and trying to build things out of mycelium), affective computing, spatial sound design, creating art, regenerative practices, and writing. Rūtais a philosopher, flirts with post-humanism, and asks how we can design with the living world in mind. We discuss:
🥥 How humans are embedded in the ecosystems around it, meaning that if we increase the thriving of the non-human, we increase the thriving of the human;
🥥 How de-centering the human opens up spaces to changing our relationality [with/as] the living world, toward more regenerative approaches to life.
🥥 How we can re-draw the boundaries of our identities and idon'thave to stick to "human."
Check out our website: www.coconut-thinking.com
Check out Rūta's consultancy: https://www.sympoiesis.world/
What might happen when the landscape is our place of learning?
In this episode, I speak with Luis Alberto Camargo. Luis was named the 2023 Richard Louv Prize recipient, in recognition of his life’s work, which has impacted 130,000 children and youth across Colombia. Luis is Founder and Executive Director of Organización para la Educación y Protección Ambiental (OpEPA - Colombia & USA), Co-Founder of The Weaving Lab, Core member of Regenerative Communities Network and Founder of Colombia Regenerativa, and Director at Thundra Outdoors. Global Change Leader, Young Global Leader (2008), Ashoka Fellow. Prior, he held a number of roles, including Adviser to the Vice-Minister of Environment of Colombia, Adviser to the Department of National Planning, Researcher at Universidad de los Andes and WWF, Wilderness Medicine Instructor at the Wilderness Medicine Institute of the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) as well as wilderness educator in the US. We discuss:
🥥 Listening to the silence as means of connecting and convening;
🥥 Ways in which schools in urban settings can re-connect with/as Nature within their context;
🥥 How if we want to live as Nature, we must learn as Nature.
Check out our website: www.coconut-thinking.com.
What might it be like if we approached education and business as if we belonged to the living world?
In this conversation, I speak with Gil Friend. Gil, a systems ecologist and business strategist, is widely considered a founder of the sustainable business movement. He is noted for inspiring, challenging, and supporting business, policy, and investment leaders to rethink business in light of the challenges posed by climate change and sustainability. Joel Makower describes him as "one of the most thoughtful and creative thinkers I know in the area of sustainable business, adeptly bridging the scientific and technical aspects of sustainability with the practical realities of the business world and its impact on people and the systems in which they operate." Gil is the founder and CEO of Natural Logic Inc., a strategy boutique advising the world's leading companies on building "massive value" through business-integrated sustainability strategies. He is an inaugural member of the Sustainability Hall of Fame and was named "one of the 10 most influential sustainability voices in America" by The Guardian. He is also recognized as one of the Bay Area's "top 25 movers and shakers" in CleanTech. Our discussion includes:
🥥 How can we reconsider capitalism to be reciprocal, not extractive; caring, not alienating; regenerating, not just generating for the few?
🥥 What would happen if we went to school to learn in order to contribute to all life, rather than simply attending prestigious institutions like Oxbridge?
🥥 Approaching capital (of all kinds, not just financial) in ways that meet the needs of all life, re-evaluating even what those needs are systemically rather than individually.
Check out our website: www.coconut-thinking.com
How might the stories we tell about the future help us bring about the futures we want?
In this episode, I speak with Will Richardson. Will was a guest on the podcast a couple of years ago, and it's fascinating to notice how he his thinking has both shifted and stayed strong. A former public school educator of 22 years, Will has spent the last 18 years developing an international reputation as a leading thinker and writer about the intersection of social online learning networks, education, and systemic change. Most recently, Will is a co-founder of The Big Questions Institute which was created to help educators use "fearless inquiry" to make sense of this complex moment and an uncertain future. We discuss:
🥥 Moving from a culture of teaching to a culture of learning;
🥥 Telling oral futures, stories of how we imagine we will be in a decade or two and working together toward those stories;
🥥 How more and more of us realize we are at a tipping point, opening hope for change toward more education for sustainability (and perhaps regeneration)
Check out our website: www.coconut-thinking.com
How can capital contribute to the (non-monetary) wealth of the entire ecosystem?
In this episode, I speak with Cordell Jacks. Cordell is the Co-founder and CEO of Regenerative Capital Group, a Canadian-based fund and accelerator that trains entrepreneurs in an 'alternative' entrepreneurial career path through ETA (entrepreneurship through acquisition). Instead of launching start-ups as platforms for change and innovation, RCG champions aspiring leaders to acquire small businesses that have already proven market validation and traction, and that are seeking ownership transition from retiring baby boomers (most of whom are without succession plans). RCG acquires these businesses for the entrepreneur (no investment capital required from entrepreneur), where they can earn meaningful equity in the business if they take it on a 'regenerative journey'- looking at all material areas of impact the business has, which can be utilized as levers for net-positive value creation for all stakeholders (human, social, and environmental) across their ecosystems.
We discuss:
🥥 How mono-capitalism can be a source of degeneration, much like mono-agriculture can be, but eco-capitalism might open up different possibilities
🥥 How capital might become regenerative when it is nourishes every part of the ecosystem, human, other-than-human, and more than human
🥥 Approaching every moment as an opportunity to contribute to the ecosystem, to bring about the world we want.
Check out our website: www.coconut-thinking.com
How might we approach life from Nature's paradigm rather than from the dominant paradigm?
In this episode, I speak with Denise DeLuca. Denise is the founder of Wild Hazel. She is an adjunct faculty and the former Director of MCAD’sSustainable Design program. She was co-founder of BCI: Biomimicry Creative for Innovation, a network of creative professional change agents driving ecological thinking for radical transformation. Denise is the author of the book Re-Aligning with Nature: Ecological Thinking for Radical Transformation. She also teaches with the Amani Institute.
Denise’s previous roles include Education Director for the International Living Future Institute, Project Manager for Swedish Biomimetics 3000, and Outreach Director forThe Biomimicry Institute. Denise is a licensed civil engineer (PE) and holds a master’s degree in civil and environmental engineering with a focus on modelling landscape-scale surface and groundwater interactions. In addition, Denise is a Biomimicry Fellowand a member of the Advisory Council of The Biomimicry Institute, Board Member of the International Society of Sustainability Professionals (ISSP), on the editorial board of the Journal of Bionic Engineering, and anExpert with Katerva.
We discuss:
🥥 Emergent abundance as means of cultivating ego-less, curious, and thriving relationships, thinking, and feeling;
🥥 How we can learn as Nature, not always from or about Nature, which is a shift in how we respond to the world (away from problem-solution mindsets)
🥥 How imagining and describing the world we want to create opens up new possibilities for non-linear thinking and ways of becoming.
Check out our website: www.coconut-thinking.com
Check out Wild Hazel: www.wildhazel.net
In this episode, I speak with Stefan Bauschard. Stefan is the Co-founder of educating4ai.com; the Owner of DebateUS.org, the Executive Co-Director of the New York City Urban Debate League and the Debate Coach @ Lakeland Schools. He is also the author of several substance articles that have received a tremendous amount of attention in the way they challenge us to re-think assessment, re-think our ways or learning, and re-think our relationships with evidencing what we can do... all due to AI. We discuss:
🥥 How AI will be able to teach learners certain things better than any human ever could;
🥥 How AI will end the primacy of single artifact assessments, in favor of more creative, individualized ways to demonstrate understanding;
🥥 The notion that educators in the future will be those who care about and enjoy spending time with kids.
Check our our website: www.coconut-thinking.com
You can find Stefan's substance articles here: https://stefanbauschard.substack.com/
In this episode, I speak with Russell John Cailey. Russell is the Managing Director and visionary behind THINK Learning Studio (TLS), which is associated with Thinking Global School, one of the first traveling high schools. He aims to revolutionize the education industry. Honoured as a Top 100 Global Visionary in Education by GFEL in 2021, Russell is dedicated to positioning TLS as a beacon of innovation and inspiration for educators worldwide, challenging traditional norms. Russell is the Co-founder of the Hakuba Forum, ForesightLab.org and EduVue.ai. We discuss:
🥥 The importance of listening to local contexts and not coming in with a pre-made, out of the box solution in education, particularly when it comes to PBL;
🥥 The risks and opportunities that come with challenging traditional education;
🥥 How collective endeavors might be the next horizon for AI, beyond individual productivity.
Check out the Coconut Thinking website: www.coconut-thinking.com
How do we find the courage to move beyond the single story?
In this episode, I speak with Sahana Chattopadhyay. Sahana Chattopadhyay is a Writer, Speaker, Synthesizer, and Transition Catalyst. Through her work, she researches and explores different pathways to civilizational transition towards life-sustaining and decolonial future(s), and counter-hegemonic narratives. She is the Founder and Director of a boutique consulting firm Proteeti, a Sanskrit word meaning "wisdom that transforms." She is also a certified Coach, Facilitator, Learning Designer, and an Organization Development Professional with a focus on Transformational Learning and the Future of Leadership.
Sahana is also the author of a series of thought-shifting articles about Wayfinders, which you can find here: https://medium.com/age-of-emergence.
We discuss:
🥥 How wayfinders are the holding space for organizations that have the courage to listen to voices from the margins and the center, including voices from the more-than-human world, moving so that the centers shift constantly so there is no center;
🥥 How we want to go beyond "human-centered" (anthropocentric), which has led us to where we are today and will not get us out;
🥥 The problem-solution trap, which is also the "God-trick," and inevitably creates more problems;
🥥 Resistance as more than political struggle, as a form of defense and opening up to better futures.
Check out the Coconut Thinking website: www.coconut-thinking.com
In this episode, I speak with Fabienne Vailes. Fabienne is the host of the Flourishing Education podcast. She is the author of two books: The Flourishing Student in its 2nd edition (aimed at tutors) and another one co-authored Dr. Dominique Thompson called How to Grow a Grown up (aimed at parents). As an educational expert with over 20 years’ experience in the sector, Fabienne is on a mission to change the face of education—embedding well-being into the curriculum to create an environment where both students and staff flourish and develop the mental agility and resilience to succeed both academically and in the workplace. We discuss:
🥥 How maybe we can measure community well-being (qualitatively);
🥥 The need to avoid getting stuck with words like "regeneration," which are not silver bullets and represent concepts that go beyond the words;
🥥 How change comes one imperfect perfect conversation at a time.
Check out our website: www.coconut-thinking.com
Check out the Flourishing Education podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/flourishing-education-how-to-become-a-humble/id1519086201?i=1000617730193
In this episode, I speak with Paula DiPerna. Paula is a strategic advisor and consultant, who draws upon a diverse leadership background, having served as the president of the Chicago Climate Exchange International, which pioneered global emissions trading, as well as the president of the Joyce Foundation, a leading US private philanthropy. Prior to these positions, she was vice president of the Cousteau Society for nearly 20 years, and worked with governmental organizations across the globe to establish sustainable business and governmental policies. As a noted public policy analyst, she served as a consultant to the World Bank, LEAD International, The Urban Justice Center, and is currently a Special Advisor to the Carbon Disclosure Project. She is also a widely published author of non-fiction books, a novel and is currently working on a memoir addressed to emerging leaders. We discuss:
🥥 How responding to ecological breakdown will require being able to live with and through ambiguity;
🥥 How we can work within existing financial systems to incentivize the non-exploitation of Nature;
🥥 How we can work with value to understand the interconnectedness of all living things.
Check out our website: www.coconut-thinking.com for articles, resources, and more.
In this episode, I speak with Alexandra Pimor. Alexandra leads on the Nature On The Board project, a pioneering endeavour to expand the scope of Rights of Nature across legal systems, corporate boards, and any decision-making body to foster a global Nature/Earth-based governance praxis. A published scholar with over 20 years’ experience in pedagogical engineering, Ally started her career as a senior law lecturer in the UK. We discuss:
🥥 Nature governance as a way to bring back nature consciousness in our decision-making, our ways of doing things, our lives as a collective;
🥥 How understanding that we are relational, that we are Nature, would lead us to make different decisions and connect in ways that lead to thriving;
🥥 How Nature governance is the cultivation of happiness.
Check out our website: www.coconut-thinking.com. You'll find articles and resources there about Emergent Learning
and Nature on the School Board: www.natureontheschoolboard.com where we propose to put a proxy for Nature on schools' boards or senior leadership teams.
How can neurodiversity (and ADHD in particular) allow us to cultivate and become attuned to the potential for creativity, courage, connection, and compassion—the ecological 4Cs?
In this episode of the Coconut Thinking podcast, I speak with Lennart Hennig. This is part II of our conversation a few weeks ago. Lennart is a founder, teacher, and facilitator. He explores the edges of individual and collective development through the angles of consciousness, embodiment, safety, trauma, metaphysics, philosophy, and deep ecology, using an integral framework of the whole, undivided cosmos. This is a conversation where ADHD is an entry point into understanding our individual and collective selves in different ways. We discuss:
🥥 How neurodiversity contributes to the whole society like biodiversity contributes to the whole ecology;
🥥 How our civilization is showing the signs that are typically associated with ADHD, through its inability to grapple with and respond to ecological issues;
🥥 How cultivating effort is a way to embrace life, to affirm it in all its possibilities.
Check us out on www.coconut-thinking.com
Lennart's website is www.theinstitute.one and his course can be found on www.theinstitute.one/attention
How might we create regenerative learning experiences through healthy soils?
Founder of Fearless Farmers, Amy Milliron creates online and onsite regenerative farming curricula for kids of all ages. Amy advocates for regenerative agriculture as a path to reverse climate change, heal the soil and improve health. She also works to promote regenerative food sources of all kinds, from the rights of breastfeeding mothers to feed in public to teaching people to grow their own foods, to creating curriculum that opens up communities around teh world to different ways of connecting with the earth and each other. We discuss:
🥥 The need to be connected to the land and know where your food comes from;
🥥 Opening up spaces so that we can learn from each other, not impose our views—this is regenerative;
🥥 Creating networks of that work on shared principles, but adapted to their local contexts.
You can find Fearless Farmers here: https://www.fearlessfarmers.org/
Check out our website www.coconut-thinking.com for articles, episodes, resources, and lots of other things.
How might we embrace complexity to open more to life?
In this episode, I speak with Michelle Holliday. Michelle is a consultant, facilitator, author and researcher. Her work centers around “thrivability” — a set of perspectives and practices based on a view of organizations and communities as dynamic, self-organizing living systems. Her research, perspectives and practical experience are brought together in the highly acclaimed book, The Age of Thrivability: Vital Perspectives and Practices for a Better World, as well as in a popular TEDx talk and an online slideshow with close to 65,000 views. We discuss:
🥥 How a life-aligned worldview requires us to be ok to engage with complexity;
🥥 How wherever there is life, it is worthy of our reverence, and we can design with life, as life, opening us up to a differnet consciousness;
🥥 Culivating a learning ecology, where everyone is changed through the process entangling living and non-living things.
Check out our website www.coconut-thinking.com, where you will find articles, resources, links, and more.
What would it take for us to embrace decay as means to creating new life?
In this episode, I speak with Lennart Hennig. Lennart is a founder, teacher and facilitator. He explores the edges of individual and collective development through the angles of consciousness, embodiment, safety, trauma, metaphysics, philosophy and deep ecology, using an integral framework of the whole, undivided cosmos. This is a conversation about regeneration, about appreciating that there can be no white without black, no life without death, no change without composting. We discuss:
🥥 How spaces are opening up in our collective consciousness to bring together forth Western Science and ancient wisdoms;
🥥 How life and death are the same and lead to composting for new living systems to emerge;
🥥 That success might just be obsolescence because that would signify that something/one has reached their purpose and can become something/one else.
Check out our website www.coconut-thinking.com, where you'll find our articles, podcasts, presenations, as well as resources.
What would it take to bring about a world that enmeshes modernity and ancient wisdoms?
In this episode, I speak with Joe Brewer. Joe is the co-founder of the Design School for Regenerating Earth. He has a background in physics, math, philosophy, atmospheric science, complexity research, and cognitive linguistics. Joe was the co-founder and research director of Culture2 Inc., a culture design lab for social good. He is a former fellow of the Rockridge Institute, a think tank founded by George Lakoff. We discuss:
🥥 The indigenous notion of Third World, which brings together the best of Western Science and indigenous knowledge;
🥥 How everything happens somewhere and that somewhere is connected to somewhere else, creating a fabric of time and space and opening up spaces for bringing about the futures we imagine;
🥥 How composting the current dominant system allows for new life and new ways of being to emerge and grow.
Check out our website www.coconut-thinking.com, where you'll find our articles, podcasts, presenations, as well as resources.
What would it take for us to respond to the planetary Crisis with our collective imagination(s)?
This is a special episode: a conversation between three thinker-doers around this question. Their complementary backgrounds augment the importance of the message.
Penny Hay is an artist and educator, Research Fellow in the Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries, Reader in Creative Teaching and Learning, Senior Lecturer in Arts Education at Bath Spa University and Director of Research for House of Imagination, an arts research charity.
Andy Middleton brings over 30 years of experience as Managing Director and Chief Exploration Officer at the TYF Group, which creates experiences that help people connect deeply to nature and purpose to trigger transformative shifts in life and at work. He is also a Partner at NOW Partners and one of the most versatile people I know.
Joanna Choukeir is the Director of Design and Innovation at the RSA. She is a life-centric designer with serveal hats: practitioner, entrepreneur, thought leader, and educator. Previously, Joanna was Health Director at FutureGov and had spent 10 years leading Uscreates – a service design agency for health and wellbeing.
We discuss:
🥥 The connectedness and interdependence of all things, including the crises we face as a civilization and alongside all other life forms—there is but one Crisis;
🥥 The importance of creating safe spaces for imagination if we are to respond to the Crisis as connected to ourselves and all life;
🥥 How values underpin learning rather than curriculum and thus should be cared for ecologically.
Check out the Coconut Thinking website https://coconut-thinking.design, where you'll find our articles, podcasts, conference presentations, resources, and more.
In this episode, I speak with D'Arcy Lunn and Kenny Peavy.
D'Arcy is the Group Head of Sustainability & Global Citizenship at Education in Motion. For the past 20 years, D'Arcy has experienced more than 90 countries, given over 1300 presentations to 120,000+ people, and worked with leading development, environmental, social justice, and global education organizations and people. His self-initiated concept and organization, Teaspoons of Change, focuses on the personal choices, decisions, and actions that have a positive impact on people and the planet.
Kenny holds several roles at Green School Bali. He's been teaching in the region for 20+ years as a science teacher and expedition leader in Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia, and Vietnam. Kenny speaks, writes, and supports teachers to create experiences that take learners outside in order to love nature and feel connected with nature. He's ridden a bamboo bicycle from Thailand to Bali to raise awareness for sustainability and paddled a kayak while circumnavigating Phuket, Thailand to spotlight marine conservation issues in Southeast Asia.
We discuss:
🥥 How can we cultivate our connections with nature by finding opportunities to go outside;
🥥 How the reality is that we are nature and the rest is make-believe;
🥥 Exploring how we are global citizens without getting caught up in the "hairy spider's" web of what that means.
Check out the Coconut Thinking website https://coconut-thinking.design, where you'll find our articles, podcasts, conference presentations, resources, and more.
In this episode, I speak with Michelle Blanchet. Michelle is the founder of the Educators’ Lab, which supports teacher-driven solutions to educational challenges. Michelle is the co-author of The Startup Teacher Playbook, and Preventing Polarization: 50 Strategies for Teaching Kids About Empathy, Politics, and Civic Responsibility. She has worked with organizations like PBS Education, the Center for Transformative Teaching and Learning, the Center for Curriculum Redesign, and Ashoka. We discuss:
🥥 Social entrepreneurship as purpose that changes our understanding of process and outcome;
🥥 The important of students learning the skills they will need, which depend on the students, but also on the coherence with the world we want to bring about;
🥥 How critical it is to engage in civic society in order to shape policy, the most effective means of change on a larger scale.
Check out the Coconut Thinking website https://coconut-thinking.design, where you'll find our articles, podcasts, conference presentations, resources, and more.
In this episode, I speak with Joe Rice. Joe is the Co-founding Director of Philips Indigenous Education Network, specializing in holistic learning for well-being rooted in Nature. The mission of Phillips Indian Educators is to dramatically improve education for Native American students by insuring that all educators of Native American students incorporate indigenous best practices into their teaching, and to continuously work towards a Native consensus of what those best practices are and should be. Joe has over 40 years' experience as an administrator, teacher, and advocate for indigenous education. We discuss:
🥥 How we often see the world through artificial constructs, illusions that prevent us from connecting to the coherence of the world;
🥥 Letting go of control and linearity in education to make space for play and creativity;
🥥 Telling a different story, not one of individualism, but rather one of how we are all related, including to the more than human world.
Check out the Coconut Thinking website https://coconut-thinking.design, where you'll find our articles, podcasts, conference presentations, resources, and more.
In this episode, I speak with Dean Bragonier. Dean is an entrepreneur, public speaker, and advocate for people with dyslexia. He is the founder of NoticeAbility, a non-profit organization that aims to empower students with dyslexia to recognize and use their unique strengths to achieve success in education and life. This is a conversation about what happens when we approach learning—and life!—from abundance, not scarcity. It also speaks to what can happen when we appreciate the unique gifts and points of view that we each bring. We discuss:
🥥 How what we have learned about teaching people with dyslexia can apply to all learners, perhaps re-framing what schools should be;
🥥 Purpose as a powerful energy for learning and growing (we even came up with the word "teleodiversity");
🥥 How responding to the crises we are in requires the unleashing of imagination and diversity.
Check out the Coconut Thinking website https://coconut-thinking.design, where you'll find our articles, podcasts, conference presentations, resources, and more.
In this episode, I speak with Pavel Cenkl, Head of College at Schumacher College, Devon, England. Previously, Pavel was a Professor of Environmental Humanities and Associate Dean at Sterling College, Vermont. With more than 25 years of experience in higher education, Pavel's goal is to continue to interweave a life-long passion and professional dedication to higher education teaching and administration in an organization dedicated to progressive transdisciplinary approaches to contemporary environmental, social, and economic challenges. We discuss:
🥥 What learning programs that integrate the landscape might look like;
🥥 The importance of observation, and noticing our experiences in embodied and social ways;
🥥 What it would take to create networks of networks to augment the work.
Check out the Coconut Thinking website https://coconut-thinking.design, where you'll find our articles, podcasts, conference presentations, resources, and more.
In this episode, I speak with Tom Rippin and Oliver Matikainen. I came across their article Are the SDGs a dangerous distraction? a few of weeks ago. It asks "Are we addicted to quick-fix painkillers – and still failing to address the underlying causes of our ailing economy?" In this conversation, we explore whether the worldview that created the SDGs is born from the same paradigm that created today's major problems. Tom is the CEO of On Purpose, an award-winning social enterprise developing purpose-driven leaders and a Trustee at Global Action Plan. Oliver is an Associate at On Purpose and has a rich background in sustainability development. We discuss:
🥥 How development as a linear, one size-fits-all path doesn't open up to different ways of becoming;
🥥 How the SDGs isolate problems in ways that don't recognize the interconnected whole;
🥥 How there is no unradical future: either we respond radically to create conditions for thriving or we don't and we risk facing radical futures that aren't so pleasant.
Here is the link to Tom and Oliver's Article in Pioneers Post: https://www.pioneerspost.com/news-views/20230105/are-the-sdgs-dangerous-distraction?
Check out the Coconut Thinking website https://coconut-thinking.design, where you'll find our articles, podcasts, conference presentations, resources, and more.
You can also find our articles and many wonderful writers and thinkers on IntrepidEd News: www.intrepidednews.com.
In this episode, I speak with Curtis Ogden. Curtis has served as Senior Associate at the Interaction Institute for Social Change since 2005 and brings to IISC his experience in education, community building, leadership development, and program design, as well as an abiding passion for work at the intersection of racial justice and environmental sustainability. For the past several years he has built a robust practice in support of numerous multi-stakeholder collaborative change networks. We discuss:
🥥 How relational trust building is where genuine equity work begins;
🥥 Fusion organizing of different movements to create a bigger we;
🥥 Regeneration as what it takes to nurture healthful relationships across nested living systems.
Check out the Coconut Thinking website https://coconut-thinking.design, where you'll find our articles, podcasts, conference presentations, resources, and more.
You can also find our articles and many wonderful writers and thinkers on IntrepidEd News: www.intrepidednews.com.
In this episode, I speak with Vlad Glăveanu. Vlad is Full Professor of psychology in the School of Psychology, Dublin City University, and Professor II at the Centre for the Science of Learning and Technology, University of Bergen. He is the founder and president of the Possibility Studies Network (PSN). His work focuses on creativity, imagination, culture, collaboration, wonder, possibility, and societal challenges. He edited the Palgrave Handbook of Creativity and Culture (2016) and the Oxford Creativity Reader (2018), co-edited the Cambridge Handbook of Creativity Across Domains (2017) and the Oxford Handbook of Imagination and Culture (2017), authored The Possible: A Sociocultural Theory (Oxford University Press, 2020. We discuss:
🥥 How the concept of potential is linear and mechanistic, whereas possibilities are open-ended and emergent;
🥥 How affordance is the movable meeting point between person, object, and environment. It is intra-active;
🥥 Distributed creativity as shared creative responsibility, enacting our ethics as a collective, rather than individually.
Check out our website https://coconut-thinking.design, where you'll find our articles, podcasts, conference presentations, resources, and more.
You can also find our articles and many wonderful writers and thinkers on IntrepidEd News: www.intrepidednews.com.
In this episode, I speak with Karen O’Brien. Karen is a Professor in the Department of Sociology and Human Geography at the University of Oslo. Karen’s research emphasizes the social and human dimensions of climate change and implications for human security. Her recent books include You Matter More Than You Think: Quantum Social Change for a Thriving World and Climate and Society: Transforming the Future. Karen has been named by Web of Science as one of the world’s most influential researchers of the past decade. In 2021 she was co-recipient of the BBVA Foundations Frontiers of Knowledge Award for Climate Change. Karen is currently co-chair of the International Science-Policy Platform for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) Transformative Change Assessment. We discuss:
🥥 How it's not just the actions that we take that matter, it's how we engage with the system as a whole in everything we do;
🥥 How thinking in terms of quantum social change means appreciating we are all entangled, connected, and a (bio-)collective;
🥥 How everything has agency and thus we can move beyond linear, problem-solution models of thinking and action.
Check out our website https://coconut-thinking.design, where you'll find our articles, podcasts, conference presentations, resources, and more.
You can also find our articles and many wonderful writers and thinkers on IntrepidEd News: www.intrepidednews.com.
In this episode, I speak with Zachary Stein. Zak has published two books: Social Justice and Educational Measurement, which traces the history of standardized testing and its ethical implications, and Education in a Time Between Worlds, which grapples with the relations between schooling and technology more broadly. Zak is a co-founder of The Consilience Project, which is dedicated to improving public sensemaking and building a movement to radically upgrade digital media landscapes. He is a scholar at the Ronin Institute, where he researches the relations between education, human development, and the evolution of civilizations, and Zak serves as Co-President and Academic Director of the activist think-tank at the Center for Integral Wisdom, where he writes and teaches at the edges of integral meta-theory. We discuss:
🥥 How learning is not a finite journey: the more we learn, the more we are aware of all that we don't know;
🥥 How teachers should model the emotional side of being a good learner;
🥥 The importance of establishing the legitimacy of the vocabularies that are given to us to tell the stories about ourselves.
Check out our website https://coconut-thinking.design, where you'll find our articles, podcasts, conference presentations, resources, and more.
You can also find our articles and many wonderful writers and thinkers on Intrepid Ed News: www.intrepidednews.com.
In this episode, I speak with Conrad Hughes, Campus and Secondary Principal at the International School of Geneva, La Grande Boissire, the oldest international school in the world. Conrad led two major projects with UNESCO to rethink the guiding principles for learning in the 21st Century and preventing violent extremism through education. He has published three books on different aspects of 21st Century learning. Conrad is a member of the advisory board for the University of the People, senior fellow of UNESCO’s International Bureau of Education and research assistant at the University of Geneva’s department of psychology and education. He is a regular contributor to the World Economic Forum’s Agenda blog and speaks in conferences across the globe. We discuss:
🥥 How for us to have an inclusive society, everyone needs to be able to bring their multiple selves and identities to the table;
🥥 How the process of becoming is non-linear, mysterious, and about connections;
🥥 How capturing learning wherever and whenever it happens tells the whole story of flourishing.
Check out our website https://coconut-thinking.design, where you'll find our articles, podcasts, conference presentations, resources, and more.
You can also find our articles and many wonderful writers and thinkers on Intrepid Ed News: www.intrepidednews.com.
In this episode, I speak with Jon Ardern, designer, artist and technologist. As Co-Founder and Director of Superflux he develops long term vision and strategy for the Studio alongside constant, and deliberate, prototyping and material investigation. Over the last 14 years Jon has developed pioneering design, technology and foresight projects, projects, and exhibitions receiving critical acclaim, awards, and press internationally. His work has been exhibited at the MoMA New York and V&A London on numerous occasions, and has won prizes from UNESCO and New York’s Social Design Network. Find Superflux's manifesto here. We discuss:
🥥 How we shouldn't decide the destination before taking the journey of exploration into design and learning;
🥥 How "navigating a predicament" might help us avoid the traps of problem-solution approaches;
🥥 How when we think we're designing experiences for others, we end up transformed ourselves.
Check out our website https://coconut-thinking.design, where you'll find our articles, podcasts, conference presentations, resources, and more.
You can also find our articles and many wonderful writers and thinkers on Intrepid Ed News: www.intrepidednews.com.
In this episode, I speak with Nora Bateson. Nora is an award-winning filmmaker, writer and educator, as well as President of the International Bateson Institute, based in Sweden. Her work asks the question “How we can improve our perception of the complexity we live within, so we may improve our interaction with the world?” Yet Nora opens us up to understanding that we are so much more than any label that binds us. This was a truly inspiring conversation, one that leaves me humbled, hopeful, and aware. We discuss:
🥥 How the gaps in between us are both a blessing and a curse, and these gaps are filled with possibilities;
🥥 How sometimes it comes down to the most simple and complex of questions: How can I be a good person?;
🥥 How even if we zoom in and zoom out at the same time, we get a different understanding of what is going on and yet one that will never be complete.
Check out our website https://coconut-thinking.design, where you'll find our articles, podcasts, conference presentations, resources, and more.
You can also find our articles and many wonderful writers and thinkers on Intrepid Ed News: www.intrepidednews.com.
In this episode, I speak with Rachel Musson is an international speaker, educator, facilitator, and thought-leader on regenerative education and wellbeing in schools. Rachel was recently listed as Natwest WISE100 most influential women in social enterprise. She is the Founding Director of ThoughtBox Education CIC and the pioneer behind their award-winning curriculum and training, currently accessed by 5,000+ educators in 76 countries. Rachel is currently working with global industry leaders and education ministers on education reform policy, hosting student workshops, empowering educators through professional development and delivering keynote speeches on transforming education at international conferences. We discuss:
🥥 The work in education to help learners care for and thrive in the world we are co-creating;
🥥 Whether daydreaming could be part of the "curriculum;" so it's not about doing but about being in the learning space;
🥥 The importance of asking courageous questions and listening to responses with your heart.
Check out our website https://coconut-thinking.design, where you'll find our articles, podcasts, conference presentations, resources, and more.
You can also find our articles and many wonderful writers and thinkers on Intrepid Ed News: www.intrepidednews.com.
In this episode, I speak with Rachel Musson is an international speaker, educator, facilitator, and thought-leader on regenerative education and wellbeing in schools. Rachel was recently listed as Natwest WISE100 most influential women in social enterprise. She is the Founding Director of ThoughtBox Education CIC and the pioneer behind their award-winning curriculum and training, currently accessed by 5,000+ educators in 76 countries. Rachel is currently working with global industry leaders and education ministers on education reform policy, hosting student workshops, empowering educators through professional development and delivering keynote speeches on transforming education at international conferences. We discuss:
🥥 The work in education to help learners care for and thrive in the world we are co-creating;
🥥 Whether daydreaming could be part of the "curriculum;" so it's not about doing but about being in the learning space;
🥥 The importance of asking courageous questions and listening to responses with your heart.
Check out our website https://coconut-thinking.design, where you'll find our articles, podcasts, conference presentations, resources, and more.
You can also find our articles and many wonderful writers and thinkers on Intrepid Ed News: www.intrepidednews.com.
In this episode, I speak with Jack Miller. Jack is Professor of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning at Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at University of Toronto. Jack's work is focused on holistic education, curriculum and spirituality. He is an author of over 20 books including and his most recent book is Taoism, Teaching and Learning: A Nature Based Approach to Education. In 2009, Jack was one of 24 educators invited to Bhutan for the orientation of Bhutan's educational system towards the goal of Gross National Happiness. We discuss: 🥥 How the Tao and nature teach us that if we are quiet, the action(s) that will be helpful will arise, which is particularly necessary in this time of crises; 🥥 How being present for another is a show of love, so teachers can cultivate their mindfulness out of love; 🥥 How a holistic education requires a curriculum of connectedness. Check out our website https://coconut-thinking.design (https://coconut-thinking.design), where you'll find our articles, podcasts, conference presentations, resources, and more. You can also find our articles and many wonderful writers and thinkers on Intrepid Ed News: http://www.intrepidednews.com (www.intrepidednews.com).
In this episode, I speak with Jack Miller. Jack is Professor of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning at Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at University of Toronto. Jack's work is focused on holistic education, curriculum and spirituality. He is an author of over 20 books including and his most recent book is Taoism, Teaching and Learning: A Nature Based Approach to Education. In 2009, Jack was one of 24 educators invited to Bhutan for the orientation of Bhutan's educational system towards the goal of Gross National Happiness. We discuss: 🥥 How the Tao and nature teach us that if we are quiet, the action(s) that will be helpful will arise, which is particularly necessary in this time of crises; 🥥 How being present for another is a show of love, so teachers can cultivate their mindfulness out of love; 🥥 How a holistic education requires a curriculum of connectedness. Check out our website https://coconut-thinking.design (https://coconut-thinking.design), where you'll find our articles, podcasts, conference presentations, resources, and more. You can also find our articles and many wonderful writers and thinkers on Intrepid Ed News: http://www.intrepidednews.com (www.intrepidednews.com).
In this episode, I speak with Helena Norberg-Hodge. Helena is a linguist, author and film maker, and the founder and director of the international non-profit organization, Local Futures, a pioneer of the new economy movement, and the convener of https://www.localfutures.org/world-localization-day/ (World Localization Day). She is the author of several books, including https://www.localfutures.org/publications/ancient-futures-book-helena-norberg-hodge/ (‘Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh’), and, together with a https://www.localfutures.org/publications/ancient-futures-book-helena-norberg-hodge/ (film of the same title), Ancient Futures has been translated into more than 40 languages, and sold half a million copies. Her latest book is https://www.localfutures.org/publications/local-is-our-future-book-helena-norberg-hodge/ (‘Local is Our Future: Steps to an Economics of Happiness’). Other publications include https://www.localfutures.org/store/#!/Bringing-the-Food-Economy-Home-Local-Alternatives-to-Global-Agribusiness/p/16039320/category=12119219 (‘Bringing the Food Economy Home’) and https://www.localfutures.org/store/#!/From-the-Ground-Up-Rethinking-Industrial-Agriculture/p/16039322/category=12119219 (‘From the Ground Up: Rethinking Industrial Agriculture’). We discuss: 🥥 the dangers of imposing a monoculture when everything is always in a state of change; 🥥 living in specific natural ecosystems to create an expanded self that is able to become; 🥥 shifting from I to We to move the narrative in our heads. Check out our website https://coconut-thinking.design (https://coconut-thinking.design), where you'll find our articles, podcasts, conference presentations, resources, and more. You can also find our articles and many wonderful writers and thinkers on Intrepid Ed News: http://www.intrepidednews.com (www.intrepidednews.com).
In this episode, I speak with Helena Norberg-Hodge. Helena is a linguist, author and film maker, and the founder and director of the international non-profit organization, Local Futures, a pioneer of the new economy movement, and the convener of https://www.localfutures.org/world-localization-day/ (World Localization Day). She is the author of several books, including https://www.localfutures.org/publications/ancient-futures-book-helena-norberg-hodge/ (‘Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh’), and, together with a https://www.localfutures.org/publications/ancient-futures-book-helena-norberg-hodge/ (film of the same title), Ancient Futures has been translated into more than 40 languages, and sold half a million copies. Her latest book is https://www.localfutures.org/publications/local-is-our-future-book-helena-norberg-hodge/ (‘Local is Our Future: Steps to an Economics of Happiness’). Other publications include https://www.localfutures.org/store/#!/Bringing-the-Food-Economy-Home-Local-Alternatives-to-Global-Agribusiness/p/16039320/category=12119219 (‘Bringing the Food Economy Home’) and https://www.localfutures.org/store/#!/From-the-Ground-Up-Rethinking-Industrial-Agriculture/p/16039322/category=12119219 (‘From the Ground Up: Rethinking Industrial Agriculture’). We discuss: 🥥 the dangers of imposing a monoculture when everything is always in a state of change; 🥥 living in specific natural ecosystems to create an expanded self that is able to become; 🥥 shifting from I to We to move the narrative in our heads. Check out our website https://coconut-thinking.design (https://coconut-thinking.design), where you'll find our articles, podcasts, conference presentations, resources, and more. You can also find our articles and many wonderful writers and thinkers on Intrepid Ed News: http://www.intrepidednews.com (www.intrepidednews.com).
In this special episode, Charlotte and I introduce the WISR Framework, which was designed to help educators create spaces in which a regenerative world might emerge. It is takes us from that instant where awe is a released and embodied experience to a mindset and paradigm shift where we respect the unique essence of all life. WISR is not meant to be a prescriptive model, rather it is an invitation to take learning deeper through embodied and connected experiences in and with the natural world. A call to respond through the ripples that local engagement initiates. It is a framework that reminds us of our kinship to more than human life and encourages us to express our oneness and harmony with the natural world. Wonder: Learning is engagement with nature through an expression of awe, enchantment, mystery and curiosity Intra-action: Learning is empathy with nature as a result of immersion, reciprocal communication and agency Sustainability: Learning as guided by a set of ethics which emphasize balance of energy and resources in nature Regeneration: Learning as honoring and expressing the unique essence of every member of nature WISR is a co-creation between Coconut Thinking (Charlotte and me) and The Learning Future (Louka Parry). You can find more information on www.wisr.life. Check out our website https://coconut-thinking.design (https://coconut-thinking.design), where you'll find our articles, podcasts, conference presentations, resources, and more.
In this special episode, Charlotte and I introduce the WISR Framework, which was designed to help educators create spaces in which a regenerative world might emerge. It is takes us from that instant where awe is a released and embodied experience to a mindset and paradigm shift where we respect the unique essence of all life. WISR is not meant to be a prescriptive model, rather it is an invitation to take learning deeper through embodied and connected experiences in and with the natural world. A call to respond through the ripples that local engagement initiates. It is a framework that reminds us of our kinship to more than human life and encourages us to express our oneness and harmony with the natural world. Wonder: Learning is engagement with nature through an expression of awe, enchantment, mystery and curiosity Intra-action: Learning is empathy with nature as a result of immersion, reciprocal communication and agency Sustainability: Learning as guided by a set of ethics which emphasize balance of energy and resources in nature Regeneration: Learning as honoring and expressing the unique essence of every member of nature WISR is a co-creation between Coconut Thinking (Charlotte and me) and The Learning Future (Louka Parry). You can find more information on www.wisr.life. Check out our website https://coconut-thinking.design (https://coconut-thinking.design), where you'll find our articles, podcasts, conference presentations, resources, and more.
In this episode, I speak with Larissa Raymond. Larissa is a designer and leader of professional learning at EdPartnerships International. Prior to joining EdP she was a Head of Teaching and Learning at Caulfield Grammar School. Larissa has extensive experience supporting teachers to design and trial new forms of curriculum, pedagogy and assessment. Larissa pushes us to ask questions from different perspectives, including what can't be seen. She speaks thoughtfully about what agency really is (beyond the catchword) and what power relations are at play in any context. In this episode, we discuss: 🥥 How agency is a space to be realized; 🥥 How we might stick with the dialogue with young people to nurture trust and release creative energy; 🥥 Remaining deeply curious about others (all living and non-living things, including place) to we can move forward together. Check out our website https://coconut-thinking.design (https://coconut-thinking.design), where you'll find our articles, podcasts, conference presentations, resources, and more. You can also find our articles and many wonderful writers and thinkers on Intrepid Ed News: http://www.intrepidednews.com (www.intrepidednews.com).
In this episode, I speak with Larissa Raymond. Larissa is a designer and leader of professional learning at EdPartnerships International. Prior to joining EdP she was a Head of Teaching and Learning at Caulfield Grammar School. Larissa has extensive experience supporting teachers to design and trial new forms of curriculum, pedagogy and assessment. Larissa pushes us to ask questions from different perspectives, including what can't be seen. She speaks thoughtfully about what agency really is (beyond the catchword) and what power relations are at play in any context. In this episode, we discuss: 🥥 How agency is a space to be realized; 🥥 How we might stick with the dialogue with young people to nurture trust and release creative energy; 🥥 Remaining deeply curious about others (all living and non-living things, including place) to we can move forward together. Check out our website https://coconut-thinking.design (https://coconut-thinking.design), where you'll find our articles, podcasts, conference presentations, resources, and more. You can also find our articles and many wonderful writers and thinkers on Intrepid Ed News: http://www.intrepidednews.com (www.intrepidednews.com).
In this episode, I speak with Dr. Bayo Akomolafe. Bayo is a philosopher, psychologist, professor, and poet. He is a teacher and public intellectual renowned for his unconventional views on global crises, activism, and social change. (These are labels that Bayo may reject because posthumanism is also post-identitarian—we are processes of becoming that cannot be labeled.) Bayo speaks of the experiences of colonialism, extraction, climate disaster, multi-species relations, assemblages and entanglements. This is a special episode that examines post-activism, posthumanism, how we respond [with/in] the world, as part of the world and not separate. We discuss: 🥥 Sitting with the pain, in the gaps and the breaks and not taking action as if we were separate from the world; 🥥 How agency is entangled in the assemblages we cut, and does not belong to the person; 🥥 How worlds are enmeshed in the past, the present, and the future, which dissolve into the assemblage. I encourage you to stay with the possibilities offered. Check out our website https://coconut-thinking.design (https://coconut-thinking.design), where you'll find our articles, podcasts, conference presentations, resources, and more. You can also find our articles and many wonderful writers and thinkers on Intrepid Ed News: http://www.intrepidednews.com (www.intrepidednews.com).
In this episode, I speak with Dr. Penny Hay and Alex Soulsby. Penny is an artist, researcher and educator. She is a Reader at Bath Spa University in Creative Teaching and Learning and Senior Lecturer in Arts Education at Bath Spa University School of Education, and also Research Fellow, Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries. Penny has worked extensively in arts education across the UK and co-ordinated the professional development program for the National Society for Education in Art and Design (NSEAD). Alex is the founding director of Artist Residency Thailand and is an International Arts and Creative Education Manager and Consultant with over twenty years’ experience of Education, Creative Projects Management and Artist Mentoring. During his time in the UK as a Creative Projects and Education manager, he sat on numerous boards, trusts and steering groups that focused on arts and education engagement for young people. Alex will be sitting on panel discussions and presenting his work and approaches regarding arts integration within schools at Boston’s trans cultural exchange conference in November https://transculturalexchange.org/ (https://transculturalexchange.org/) He tweets at @soulsbyalex In this episode, we discuss: 🥥 How might we attend to ideas through creativity, opening space to inquires; 🥥 The importance of unleashing the creative potential in all learners, or risk further aggravation of the crises we face; 🥥 Sitting with not knowing, feeling the discomfort of not having the answers. Check out our website https://coconut-thinking.design (https://coconut-thinking.design), where you'll find our articles, podcasts, conference presentations, resources, and more. You can also find our articles and many wonderful writers and thinkers on Intrepid Ed News: http://www.intrepidednews.com (www.intrepidednews.com).
In this episode, I speak to Jennifer D. Klein and Kapono Ciotti, authors of The Landscape Model of Learning. Jennifer is the founder of Principled Learning Strategies, which provides professional development to support authentic student-driven global learning experiences in schools. She has a broad background in global education and partnership development, student-driven curricular strategies, inclusivity, and experiential, inquiry-driven learning. Kapono has worked internationally in educational change organizations, leading the work of Deeper Learning and place and culture-based pedagogy. In these roles, he has trained teachers in over 100 schools and school districts over four continents, impacting hundreds of thousands of students. In addition, Kapono spent 15 years as National Faculty for the National Association of Independent Schools in Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice, facilitating national and international learning experiences. We discuss: 🥥 How learning is a personal journey and imposing a set curriculum for everyone often harms the individual and society; 🥥 How standards were designed and are maintained as a tool of control; 🥥 The idea that learner-directed should replace learner-centered in order to achieve liberation. Check out our website https://coconut-thinking.design (https://coconut-thinking.design), where you'll find our articles, podcasts, conference presentations, resources, and more. You can also find our articles and many wonderful writers and thinkers on Intrepid Ed News: http://www.intrepidednews.com (www.intrepidednews.com).
In this episode, I speak with Maggie Favretti. Maggie Maggie Favretti has spent over 35 years happily helping her students to ask, “why not now?” Maggie has won scholarship and teaching awards from three professional historical organizations (WHA, AHA, OAH), a national organization of bankers (Sallie Mae Foundation Teacher of the Year), and a national organization of student leaders (21st-century Teacher of the Year). She has been recognized by President Obama for her work in environmental education, and by the Sousa Mendes Foundation’s Freedom Award for her work facilitating the next generation of rescuers, Students for Refugees. By far her greatest joy has been devising opportunities for students (and teacher-facilitators) to tap into their innate creativity, resourcefulness, and collaboration across disciplines, using design thinking to solve complex problems in their own communities and beyond. In this episode we discuss: 🥥 How learning is a function of time, which might be thought of cyclically, as birth and death; 🥥 The degenerative effect the race for "success" has had on education, which might be the opportunity some of us are looking for; and 🥥 How love and relationships are teachers' superpowers. Check out our website https://coconut-thinking.design (https://coconut-thinking.design), where you'll find our articles, podcasts, conference presentations, resources, and more. You can also find our articles and many wonderful writers and thinkers on Intrepid Ed News: http://www.intrepidednews.com (www.intrepidednews.com).
In this episode, I speak with https://gileshutchins.com/biography/ (Giles Hutchins), pioneering practitioner, keynote speaker and executive coach at the forefront of regenerative leadership and organizational development. Through his executive leadership coaching he applies advanced adult developmental psychology, regenerative leadership practices, consciousness raising techniques, deep-dive nature immersions, embodiment work, ancient wisdom tradition insights, and cutting edge research on leadership consciousness. He is currently Chairman of the Future Fit Leadership Academy, Lead Partner of The Natural Business Partnership, co-founder of Biomimicry for Creative Innovation, co-founder of Regenerators.co and partner/associate with a number of pioneering organisations, such as The Global Leaders Academy, Renewal Associates and The Laszlo New Paradigm Research Institute. In this episode, we discuss: 🥥 How we can open ourselves up to greater receptivity, responsiveness, and reciprocity; 🥥 How sensing into our own essence and into that of the living organization will inform how we and the organization adapt and evolve through emerging processes; 🥥 How a new world view based on life, on living systems (what Giles calls quantum complexity) can emerge only by moving beyond today's dominant, but increasingly fragile, mechanist worldview. Check out our website https://coconut-thinking.design (https://coconut-thinking.design), where you'll find our articles, podcasts, conference presentations, resources, and more. You can also find our articles and many wonderful writers and thinkers on Intrepid Ed News: http://www.intrepidednews.com (www.intrepidednews.com).
In this episode, I speak with Dawn Kau'i Sang. Kau'i is the first-ever director of the http://www.hawaiipublicschools.org/ConnectWithUs/MediaRoom/PressReleases/Pages/Hawaiian-Ed.aspx (Office of Hawaiian Education), which is charged with planning for the implementation a new policy, https://www.hawaiipublicschools.org/TeachingAndLearning/StudentLearning/HawaiianEducation/Pages/HA.aspx (Nā Hopena Aʻo) (Ha). Ha is a Department-wide framework to develop the skills, behaviors and dispositions that are reminiscent of Hawaiʻi’s unique context, and to honor the qualities and values of the indigenous language and culture of Hawaiʻi. One of the goals is to strengthen https://www.hawaiipublicschools.org/DOE%20Forms/NaHopenaAoE3.pdf (six outcome) in every student over the course of their K-12 learning journey: Belonging, Responsibility, Excellence, Aloha, Total well-being, Hawai'i... which spells BREATH. In this episode, we ask: 🥥 What is belonging in a system that seeks to homogenize and separate?
🥥 How might stories allow us to see each other and our community in different ways, beyond quantitative measures?
🥥 How might indigenous ways of knowing inform who we are as individuals, communities, and education systems.
Check out our website https://coconut-thinking.design (https://coconut-thinking.design), where you'll find our articles, podcasts, conference presentations, resources, and more.
You can also find our articles and many wonderful writers and thinkers on Intrepid Ed News: http://www.intrepidednews.com (www.intrepidednews.com).
In this episode, I speak with Gary Chapin of Educating for Good and Seed + Spark. Gary is the co-author of 126 Falsehoods We Believe About Education (2021). He has been working in education since 2000, first as a teacher, then as a curriculum director, then as a Dept. of Ed. researcher, and most recently as an advocate and supporter of equity based practices such as competency-based learning, performance assessment, adaptive leadership, and collaborative cultures. He is deeply fascinated by questions like: What should kids learn? How do we decide what kids should learn? How do we learn what they learned? How can learning what they learned help them learn more? We discuss: • How we can tell the story of learning in ways that bring in the voices of all stakeholders, not just the numbers in qualitative assessments; • Belonging as a relationship that cannot be undone; • How we might needto build something new so that the traditional system doens't subvert new thinking. Read Gary's article in Education Reimagined entitiled Talking Story: Embracing our Humanity on a Deeper Level: https://education-reimagined.org/talking-story-embracing-our-humanity-on-a-deeper-level/ (https://education-reimagined.org/talking-story-embracing-our-humanity-on-a-deeper-level/) Check out our website https://coconut-thinking.design (https://coconut-thinking.design), where you'll find our articles, podcasts, conference presentations, resources, and more. You can also find our articles and many wonderful writers and thinkers on Intrepid Ed News: http://www.intrepidednews.com (www.intrepidednews.com).
In this episode, I speak with Gary Stager, Ph.D. Since 1982, Dr. Gary Stager has helped school educators around the worldembrace computational technology as an intellectual laboratory, vehicle for self-expression, and window onto a world of possibilities for amplifying the potential of each student in preparation for an uncertain future. All of his work is rooted in the Piagetian notion that “knowledge is a consequence of experience.” His activities with teachers and students are guided by a focus on learning-by-doing. He is also the founder of Constructing Modern Knowledge. In thie episode, we discuss: How schools have an obligation to introduce kids to things they don't yet know they love, but then that becomes their project, and it's not driven by the curriculum; How a good a prompt that can fit on a post-it note is sometimes all you need for creativity to thrive; How we have oversold instruction; How the only thing we ever have to justify are the things kids love.
Check out our website https://coconut-thinking.design, where you'll find our articles, podcasts, conference presentations, resources, and more. You can also find our articles and many wonderful writers and thinkers on Intrepid Ed News: http://www.intrepidednews.com (www.intrepidednews.com).
In this episode, I speak with Bo Stjerne Thomsen, Chair of Learning through Play, Vice-President at The LEGO Foundation. Bo Stjerne advises executive leadership on how children and adults learn through play. He is a spokesperson representing the LEGO Foundation and the LEGO Brand Group internationally and advises leadership teams across the LEGO entities, in order to attain the overall LEGO Brand Vision of Learning through Play. Bo Stjerne has published widely on Creativity, Play and Learning and, he has been a visiting scholar at the MIT Media Lab, and an advisor to various international research organizations, including the University of Cambridge PEDAL Research Centre, the Torrance Centre for Creativity, Design for Play in Denmark and the Lifelong Learning Lab at Tsinghua University. We discuss: How learning and play operate dynamically through embodied and social experiences; How the Metaverse will continue to blend virtual and physical worlds of play; How connections toward deeper learning often begin in the natural world.
Check out our website https://coconut-thinking.design, where you'll find our articles, podcasts, conference presentations, resources, and more. You can also find our articles and many wonderful writers and thinkers on Intrepid Ed News: http://www.intrepidednews.com (www.intrepidednews.com).
In this episode, I speak with Andy Middleton. Andy is Founder Director of the TYF Group, an innovative and visionary social enterprise. TYF’s mission is to train revolutionaries – giving normal mums, dads & kids, business teams and community groups the confidence, skills and reason to revolutionize the way they play, think and connect with nature. TYF’s goal is to reach 100,000 people face to face in the next five years through with experience in education, adventure, retail and consulting. Andy is also a Founding Partner of the Do Collective, where he connects and orchestrates the potential power of a virtual consulting team of hundreds of the world’s best thinkers and doers. In this episode, we discuss: How often people who say it's not possible just lack imagination (including when we talk of creating new paradigms for learning);
How when learning is place-specific and contextualized, there is unpredictability, and that's what allows the experience to be magical;
How we can bring together groups that don't always talk to each in order to reach the tipping point necessary for change.
Listen to the episode and check out our articles, presentations, and resources on www.coconut-thinking.design.
In this episode, I speak with Stephanie Pace Marshall, author of The Power to Transform. Stephanie is a speaker, author, writer and advisor, she illuminates the inextricable connections between the future of learning and the future of humanity, and offers a fundamentally new story of learning grounded in the principles of https://stephaniepacemarshall.com/livingsystems (living systems) and how life creatively organizes itself to thrive. Her work has helped shape the re-imagination and redesign of learning. Stephanie’s career and life’s work has been dedicated to a singular truth: “Learning must liberate the goodness and genius that resides within each child; and its design must ignite and nurture the power and creativity of the human spirit for the world.” In this episode, we discuss: How the old lexicon will never allow us to write a new story because it traps us in the old paradigm
Why asking the question "what will it take" gets us toward a living systems framework better than the Newtonian "how?"
The differences between reform and transform, so critical when thinking about learning ecosystems.
Check out our website www.coconut-thinking.design, where you'll find our articles, podcasts, conference presenations, resources, and more. You can also find our articles and many wonderful writers and thinkers on Intrepid Ed News: www.intrepidednews.com.
In this episode, I speak with Rob Houben, from the Agora School, in the Netherlands. Agora is a school without using timetables, courses, or age groups. They teach students to manage their own learning process, starting each day with a simple question: What do you want to make, do or learn? This is a network of 20 schools that gives children "the opportunity to play, because when children are playing, they get interested." In this conversation, Rob and I discuss: How it's not about learner-centered, it's about growth; How you can design learning experiences based on what kids need and are interested in in that moment, not what the "curriculum" tells them;
Liberation as culture-building for deeper learning.
You can find out more about Agora in https://medium.com/pi-top/meet-the-school-with-no-classes-no-classrooms-and-no-curriculum-7cc7be517cef (this article). Check us out on www.coconut-thinking.design, where you'll find our articles, presentations, and resources. Get in touch! You can also find our articles and those of some fantastic thinkers and doers in education on Intrepid Ed News: www.intrepidednews.com
In this episode, I speak with Josie Warden, Head of Regenerative Design at the RSA—the royal society for arts, manufactures and commerce. Josie is particularly interested in the intersection between design, environment and economy and is currently leading the RSA’s work on circular and regenerative economy and manufacturing. She originally trained as a textile designer, and holds a Master's degree in Leadership for Sustainable Development. This is part of our series to bring in the voices of those calling for more regenerative frameworks. What will it take to shift the conversation away from "school" and toward learning ecosystems, which are themselves living systems? In this conversation, we discuss: How we can thrive in a world of complexity because we are built for an interdependent world, which is itself nonlinear and thus complex;
How our designs and actions need to be place-sourced and contextualized, because one size doesn't fit all;
How regenerative design draws on assets, not fixating on what people need.
Check us out on www.coconut-thinking.design, where you'll find our articles, presentations, and resources. Get in touch! You can also find our articles and those of some fantastic thinkers and doers in education on Intrepid Ed News: www.intrepidednews.com
In this episode, I speak with Sal Gordon, Head of Teaching and Learning and Principal at Green School, Bali. Sal is an ‘education revolutionary’ and he believes that Green School as a new model of what a school of the future needs to do and be, is well-placed to drive the revolution that this planet needs. Sal is passionate about how humans need to adapt (to bend like bamboo) - and how life-skills and values need to be the foundation of all learning experiences for all students. In this conversation, we discuss: Education models as drivers of culture, as the central core of what a community is;
How relationtionships blend from global to local and back again;
How sometimes you need to set yourself up to fail.
Join us for another episode and check out our website on www.coconut-thinking.design, where you'll find our blog, podcasts, presentations, and resources, all centered around learning and action to contribute to the thriving of the bio-collective. You can also find us and some great thinkers and doers in education on Intrepid Ed News: www.intrepidednews.com.
In this episode, I speak with John Watkins. John has over thirty years experience in consulting, coaching, designing, facilitating, researching, and evaluating in school and school district improvement efforts. Currently, he is Co-Director with Jal Mehta, Professor at Harvard, of the Deeper Learning Dozen, creating a community of practice for superintendents who are committed to the transformation of their districts to support equitable access to deeper learning. In this conversation, we discuss: Creating learning environments based on biodiversity, replicating nature to bring out our uniqueness and strengths;
How learning is an embodied experience that requires action to be deep, because without action, learning dissipates;
Ways we can go beyond the system we know, beyond school to liberate possibilities for learning as individuals and as a collective.
Check out this episode and visit website on www.coconut-thinking.design, where you'll find our blog, articles, resources, and links. You can also find our articles and podcasts as well as those of several wonderful authors on www.intrepidednews.com
This is a special episode of the Coconut Thinking podcast ahead of the World Education Summit, which will be held 21-24 March 2022. Charlotte Hankin interviews Benjamin Freud ahead of the 2 presentations he shares with Joanne McEachen on Contributive Learning and Curricula of Contribution, as well as the other presentation he will give on Portfolios of Impact and Contribution. In this episode, Benjamin speaks also about: How school is reaching the end of its life cycle;
How learning does not exist without action and how we might want to direct action toward good;
How ethics that contribute to a thriving ecosystem can bring us together in spite of our individual inner work.
Join us for this special episode. The complete schedule for the World Education Summit can be found https://info.osiriseducational.co.uk/acton/attachment/44140/f-4e4d894a-9aea-4218-b09c-5079f0338d86/1/-/-/-/-/The%20World%20Education%20Summit%20Guide%202022.pdf?sid=TV2:B9J4tMsZO (here).
In this episode, I speak with Jordi Diaz Gibson, co-Founder of the NetEduProject, which is an international interconnected community of leaders, educators and researchers that is growing, aiming to cultivate and weave local learning ecosystems to effectively respond to our social and planet challenges. Jordi himself is a system change leader, researcher, professor and weaver, committed to accelerating the transition into a more equitable and sustainable planet. In this episode, we discuss: How a collective consciousness emerges from our connection with others How social networks are important because they provide opportunities to belong and grow together
How the system hampers the uniqueness of the individual and the collective
Join us for another episode and check out our articles on https://coconut-thinking.design and Intrepid Ed News on www.intrepidednews.com
In this episode, I speak with Adriano Di Prato, founding partner of a School for tomorrow, a globally recognised educational network supporting students, teachers, and school leaders to thrive in a new world environment. Adriano is also the co-host of the popular podcast Game Changers. Throughout his work, he continues to commit to the emergence of young people under his care, actively promoting inclusion and learner agency, self-determined learning, growth mindset and holistic wellness of all students. In this episode we discuss: How we can consider the whole world a classroom, no longer tied to the physical space of the room itself;
How every person, community, and organization (including schools) has is on its own journey, with its own essence;
How we can continue to challenge a system in a world that has evolved and keeps evolving.
Check out our articles and resources on https://coconut-thinking.design and also be sure to go to Intrepid Ed News on www.intrepidednews.com, where you will find articles from amazing educators and thinkers.
In this episode, I speak with Dwayne Matthews, who makes his second appearance on the podcast. Dwayne is a Chief Innovation Evangelist and Future of Education Strategist. He helps school boards, educators and parents understand new and evolving themes in the 21st century, the future of work and how to help prepare children to thrive in a rapidly evolving digital information driven world. I have thought about and written on the possibilities of the Metaverse and wanted to speak with Dwayne about his experiences and insights. He brings a richness to the conversation that is unparalleled and I'm hope this opens up more conversations about possible futures, which don't have to be dystopian. In this episode, we discuss: How the Metaverse and other technologies might put school as we know it out of business;
How Dwayne and younger learners from around the world co-creates a (proto-)Metaverse learning experience.
How being underwhelmed by what we buy (including tech) and do may be the way out of climate disaster.
We hope you enjoy this episode and leave us your comments and read our blog on https://coconut.thinking.design. We are in collaboration with Intrepid Ed News. Read our articles and those of amazing educators and change makers on www.intrepidednews.com
In this episode, I speak with Ulcca Joshi Hansen, author, educational thought leader and social change advocate with a twenty-year career dedicated to shifting the foundational values and approaches that undergird America’s education system. She currently serves as the Chief Program Officer for Grantmakers for Education, a member organization that serves as a trusted partner for education philanthropists as they adapt to the changes impacting our world. Her latest book is The Future of Smart and she has a couple TEDx talks that are well worth a listen. We discuss: How this is the first time that employers want the skills that human liberatory models claim to provide (and Ulcca also defines what human liberatory models are!);
How the thinking that got us here won't get us out of here: mechanistic/Newtonian thinking needing to make way for quantum thinking/ancient wisdoms;
How blockchain and other emerging technologies are tools that might help us get to where we want to go, but they aren't the destination.
Check out our blog on www.coconut-thinking.design and also on www.intrepidednews.com
In this episode, I speak with Dave Strudwick, Principal of REAL School Budapest. REAL School is an independent, not-for-profit international learning environment that educates for sustainability, primarily through real-life, entrepreneurial learning. Their mission is to raise a new generation who can dream and build a more beautiful, equitable and sustainable world for themselves and for all living beings. Dave's background has a strong Arts component to it and his insights on learning and how to set creativity free are rich and provocative. We discuss: How questions are more important than answers in nurturing curiosity;
How learners of all ages can work together to contribute to the community and learn through these experiences;
How transforming learning means working with, not against, the tensions in education.
Check out our blog on www.coconut-thinking.design and Intrepid Ed News on www.intrepidednews.com
In this episode, I speak to Yong Zhao, Foundations Distinguished Professor in the School of Education with an appointment in the School of Business at the University of Kansas. He is also the Global Chair Professor of Education at East China Normal University, a global chair professor at the University of Bath in the U.K., and a Professorial Fellow at the Mitchell Institute for Education Policy at Victoria University, Australia.Yong Zhao has published over 100 articles and 30 books, including Reach for Greatness: Personalizable Education for all Children (2018), Counting What Counts: Reframing Education Outcomes(2016), and Never Send a Human to Do a Machine's Job: Correcting Top 5 Ed Tech Mistakes (2015). In this episode, we discuss: The need to cultivate every child's uniqueness and define success based on that uniqueness, not some external standard;
How to convert our uniqueness into valuable contributions, which doesn't happen in most school systems—contributions go beyond compliance;
How Entrepreneurial Product-Oriented Learning is the specificity that that might take PBL farther and deeper.
If you like this episode, subscribe, leave us a rating and check us out on www.coconut-thinking.design.
In this episode, I speak with Ginny Whitelaw. Ginny is the founder of the Institute for Zen Leadership, a Zen Master in the Chozen-ji line of Rinzai Zen, as well as President of Focus Leadership. She is a recognized expert in leadership development and executive coaching and has authored 4 books, including The Zen Leader. A biophysicist by training, she combines a rich scientific background with senior leadership experience at NASA, and more than 20 years developing global leaders. Ginny brings ancient wisdoms and contemporary science together to make us question the dominant narrative of control in schools, the one that is built on cause and effect to reach outcomes. We discuss: How quantum physics and Zen wisdoms share the same understandings of an interconnected universe;
How the mechanistic views upon which our schools depend are losing their legitimacy opening doors for regenerative, ecosystemic perspectives;
How learning is a shared experience built on dynamic relationships, not just with each other, but with the natural world, through capacity building.
Join us for this episode and check out our blog on www.coconut-thinking.design.
The Coconut Thinking podcast is made in partnership with Intrepid Ed News (www.intrepidednews.com) and you can find Ginny and more information on Zen leader on on https://zenleader.global
In this episode of the Coconut Thinking Podcast, I speak with Andrés Roberts, Founding Partner at The Bio-Leadership Project and Way of Nature UK. The Mission of the Bio-Leadership Project is to change the story of leadership by working with nature. Much of Andrés's work is around asking the question "How would nature change leadership?" This question is pertinent to all corners of society, but more and more so as learners become leaders. In this episode, we discuss: • How the mechanistic, reductionist narrative is become outdated;
• What is it to connect to something more than ourselves, to do good for the whole?
• Changing our definitions of success and progress by finding inspiration from nature.
If you like this podcast, subscribe, leave a review... and check us out on www.coconut-thinking.design.
This podcast is in partnership with Intrepid Ed News (www.intrepidednews.com)
In this episode, I speak with Daniel Christian Wahl, international consultant and educator specializing in biologically-inspired whole systems design and transformative innovation. He is the author of Designing Regenerative Cultures and has worked with local and national governments on foresight and futures, consulted companies like Camper, Ecover and Lush on sustainable innovation, and has co-authored and taught sustainability training courses for Gaia Education, LEAD International and various universities and design schools. Daniel's experience and views on regenerative cultures are part of a larger systemic conversation that involve education and the pressing need for change. In this episode, we discuss: The building capacity in ourselves, others, and life, over looking for fixed solutions; Making the teaching of bio-productivity a measure, if not the measure, of success; Being receptive to place so we can become expressions of place.
Join us for another episode and please visit us on www.coconut-thinking.design. This podcast is in partnership with Intrepid Ed News (www.intrepidednews.com).
In this episode of the Coconut Thinking podcast, I speak with Jane Bryant, former CEO of Artswork, the UK's national youth arts development agency, formerly chaired by Ken Robinson. Now a consultant, Jane works in the cultural sector, aiming to work with clients from arts, creative and cultural organisations, the education sector, funders, and local authorities. Much of her work focuses on increasing access, especially for children and young people. In this episode, we discuss: How the Arts can help us develop so much that can be transferred to other parts of our lives; How reducing education to assessment and sidelining the affective does a great disservice to us as individuals and a society; How the Arts and creative practice can be centralized in schools.
I take the phrase "liberating learning" from Santiago Rincón-Gallardo and I don't think there could be a better use of the phrase than when considering the connection between the Arts and creativity in schools. You can also check out our web site on www.coconut-thinking.design and we look forward to your thoughts and comments.
How can we use regenerative practices to help people reveal their essence? How can we move away from a deterministic approach to education and allow learners to set their own path in ways that are meaningful to them? What could a learning ecosystem without assessment look like? How do we draw on the commonalities of quantum physics and ancient wisdoms to frame our thinking? In this episode of the Coconut Thinking podcast, I speak with Carol Sanford. Carol is a consistently recognized thought leader working side by side with Fortune 500 and new economy executives in designing and leading systemic business change and design. Through her university and in-house educational offerings, global speaking platforms, multi-award-winning books, and human development work, Carol works with executive leaders who see the possibility to change the nature of work through developing people and work systems that ignite motivation everywhere. Carol is the author of https://carolsanford.com/the-regenerative-business/ (The Regenerative Business): Redesign Work, Cultivate Human Potential, Achieve Extraordinary Outcomes and several other books. She was recognized as a Thought Leader Lifetime Achievement Award from Trust Across America-Trust Around the World, and has received the Athena Award for Excellence in Business, Mentorship and Community Service. Check out our blog on https://coconut-thinking.design.
This episode is the second part of a two part series of exchanges between Louka Parry, CEO of the https://www.thelearningfuture.com (Learning Future) and host of the https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-learning-future-podcast-with-louka-parry/id1529079568?i=1000534075343 (Learning Future podcast), and me. I was thrilled to be a guest on Louka's podcast (part 1) and even more thrilled to have Louka on this episode. In addition his role at Learning Future, Louka is a Founding Executive of Karanga: the Global Alliance for SEL and Life Skills. A former teacher, he became a school principal at 27 years old and was named Inspirational Public Secondary Teacher of the Year for South Australia. He has since trained thousands of educators and leaders globally to increase their positive impact. He is a linguist, a world traveller, incredibly well-read and thoughtful, and his perspective on many issues are sure to move your thinking. In this episode, we ask: How can we move from one learning standard to one learning ecosystem, with many journeys possible? How does "success for us" change if we re-think the boundaries of "us?" What would an explicit curriculum of kindness look like?
We hope you'll enjoy this episode, subscribe, and come visit us on https://coconut-thinking.design.
In this episode of the Coconut Thinking podcast, I speak with Devin Vodicka, CEO of the Learner-Centered Collaborative, former CEO of Altitude Learning, and author of "Learner-Centered Leadership." You will probably have come across Devin's writings, talks, and thoughts as he is as deep a thinker as he is a prolific creator. Devin contributes so much to the conversation about what it means to be a leader inside and outside schools, how we can think and re-think assessment to be more learner-centered, and the role of identity in the process of learning. Oh yeah, and he knows a thing or two about quantum mechanics. We discuss: How the ways we have used to measure learning have impeded possibilities for learning; How knowing who we are is essential to the process of learning, but there are many ways to define "we;" How social connections need to power new ways of thinking, leaving egos behind.
Join us for another episode, check out our blog on www.coconut-thinking.design, and if you like what you hear, follow us and leave a rating.
In this episode, I speak with Joanne McEachen (Waitaha, Ngāti Māmoe, and Ngāi Tahu), CEO and Founder of The Leaner First. Joanne has spent over 30 years working as a teacher, principal, superintendent, and education change leader in countries around the world. She is a celebrated author, speaker, change leader, and executive coach, a Fellow of Salzburg Global Seminar, an Edmund Hillary Fellow, on the Executive Team of Karanga: The Global Alliance for Social Emotional Learning and Life Skills, and cofounder of New Pedagogies for Deep Learning (NPDL). She creates opportunities for learners, educators, and communities to learn who they are, how they fit into the world, and how they can contribute their gifts to humanity. We discuss: How contribution to ourselves, others, and the planet is the only way to acquire the new wealth of meaning and fulfillment; How we can move toward assessing collective rather than individual efforts; How knowing "where we come from" is the starting point for forging new relationships; How indigenous wisdoms remind us that we are interconnected with all life, which opens up a new (yet ancient) way of understanding learning and action.
Read our blog and leave your comments on www.coconut-thinking.design.
In this episode of the Coconut Thinking podcast (used to be called Meaningful Learning), I speak with Richard Louv. Richard is a journalist and author of ten books. He speaks internationally on nature-deficit disorder, a concept he first introduced in Last Child in the Woods; on the importance of children’s and adults’ exposure to nature for their health, and on the need for environmental protection and preservation for greater access to nature and the health of the Earth. Richard is the recipient of the national Audubon Medal, the San Diego Zoological Society Conservation Medal; the George B. Rabb Conservation Medal from the Chicago Zoological Society; the International Making Cities Livable Jane Jacobs Award; and the Cox Award, Clemson University’s highest honor for “sustained achievement in public service.” Richard has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Times of London, Orion, Outside and other newspapers and magazines. In this episode, we discuss: How thinking is seeing what is not visible, which leads to empathy; How we need to move beyond sustainability as a word and a goal; How we become more alive when we empathize with other living things.
Join us and check out our blog on https://coconut-thinking.design.
In this episode of the Coconut Thinking podcast (used to be called Meaningful Learning), I speak with Dominic Regester. Dominic is the program director at Salzburg Global Seminar. He is responsible for designing, developing and implementing programs on education, sustainability and innovation. He is a member of the International Union for Conservation of Nature's Commission on Education and Communication and a member of the Executive Committee for Karanga - The Global Alliance for Social Emotional Learning and Life Skills. Dominic advocates for centralizing social-emotional learning as a way to meet the challenges of the future, for the common good as well as our personal and professional fulfillment. We discuss: How we can change education by changing ecosystems of learning; How social-emotional skills can help us shape the life we want to lead; How social-emotional learning is necessary to solve the metacrisis we face.
Join us for another episode and come read our blog on https://coconut-thinking.design/thought-pieces/
In this episode of the Coconut Thinking podcast, I speak with Santiago Rincón-Gallardo, Chief Research Officer of Michael Fullan's team. As an educational change leader, consultant and scholar, Santiago's work looks at liberating learning and its power to change lives and the world. Through his work he seeks to understand how and under what conditions powerful learning can spread widely across entire educational systems. We discuss among other things: The difference between learning to be taught and learning to learn; How social movements are interconnected and education's role in creating change; and The role of play as an essential part of learning.
We have rebranded! The Meaningful Learning podcast is now the Coconut Thinking podcast—keeping things simple. We look forward to your comments and thoughts on our site coconut-thinking.design, where you'll also find our articles and other goodies.
In this episode, I speak with Jeremy Lent. Jeremy was described by Guardian journalist George Monbiot as “one of the greatest thinkers of our age,” and his work investigates the underlying causes of our civilization’s existential crisis, and explores pathways toward a life-affirming future. His new book, The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe, offers a coherent and intellectually solid foundation for a worldview based on connectedness that could lead humanity to a sustainable, flourishing future. In this episode, we discuss:
The power of social and network intelligences, which go beyond what the individual can do,
How instilling passion and purpose among our students might just save the planet,
How the greatest lesson we can teach is that there is no separation between us and nature.
Leave us a comment and check out our blog on coconut-thinking.design
In this episode, I speak with Jenny Finn, Head of School at Springhouse, a learning community with life at its center. Springhouse takes learning beyond traditional-progressive continuum as the school focuses on vitality, meaning, and cultivating wholeness. Jenny sees education as a primary agent to create regenerative cultures, reflecting how we are all connected, as inhabitants of the planet. This episode hopes to continue the conversation about what a post-humanist approach to learning could look like. We discuss:
How education is culture-making (so what kind of culture do we want to make?),
How if you're not encountering resistance, you're not trying anything new,
The dangers of being addicted to knowing.
Leave us a comment of get in touch on coconut-thinking.design.
In this episode, I speak with Chris Menagé. Chris is an interdisciplinary educational leader with over 20 years’ international and national experience across private enterprise, government administration and most recently education. Chris has lived around the world and has an award winning track record contributing to educational change through innovative practice. Chris is the founder of E2, which brings together innovators across education and industry. In this episode, we discuss:
How remote learning provides opportunities for deeper learning and meaningful connections,
How education is an ecosystem that exists beyond the classroom or the school building,
How we can all take action to have impact and grow together.
Join us for another episode and we look forward to your thoughts.
In this episode, I speak with Peter Sutoris. Peter is a development professional, researcher, writer and educator, who spent a decade working on issues of education, health and social development. Peter is the author of the article "Anthropocene skills need to be at the centre of curricula" and the author of two books: Visions of Development, about the history development policy in India, and Educating for the Anthropocene, about the refocussing of education interventions needed in the face of the current environmental crisis. We discuss:
• Breaking away from the meritocratic narrative to imagine our possible futures,
• How following the blueprint for success may be a threat to the planet as well as ourselves,
• How education is not the same thing as schooling.
Join us for another episode and we look forward to your thoughts.
In this episode, I speak with Helen Kopnina, Researcher in Sustainability and Biodiversity at The Hague University of Applied Science (HHS) and Coordinator of the Sustainable Business program. She conducts research within three main areas: sustainability, environmental education and biological conservation. Helen is the author of over two hundred articles and (co)author and (co)editor of seventeen books. She recently wrote an article with Haydn Washington on Ecocentrism is the pathway to sustainability. In this episode, we discuss:
The role of education in helping us take the little and bigger steps toward sustainability,
How so many experiences in school take from nature, but forget to give back,
How anthropocentrism opens the gateways to sexism, racism, economic injustice... as well as the degradation of the planet.
Join us for another episode and we look forward to your comments.
In this episode, I speak to Haydn Washington, environmental scientist and writer at the Institute of Environmental Studies at UNSW. His interests are sustainability (as a step toward regeneration), solutions to the environmental crisis, human dependence on nature, and humanity's denial of its problems. He is also keenly interested in wilderness and the 'sense of wonder' humanity feels towards nature. We discuss:
Thinking in terms of eco-reciprocity rather than sustainability,
Overcoming Nature Deficit Disorder through wonder and experience,
The politics of healing through small, meaningful steps.
This is the latest episode of a series that brings the voice of those outside K-12, opening up to the larger ecosystem where thinking, learning and action can contribute to the welfare of the bio-collective.
In this episode, I speak with Noah Sobe, Senior Project Officer in the Education Research and Foresight program at UNESCO. Noah is a key part of UNESCO's new flagship initiative on the Futures of Education, which brings together researchers of different backgrounds around the predicted, probable, and possible futures for the planet. He is a former president of the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) and holds a faculty position as Professor of Cultural and Educational Studies at Loyola University Chicago. In this episode, we discuss: Commoning—as a verb—to bring together all those who have an interest in the healthfulness of the planet,
The role of school as a place for new experiences, ones that often cannot exist outside of school,
The need to democratize education and open up to an ecosystem that drives purpose.
This episode marks the first of a series that goes beyond the education industry towards thinkers, writers, and activists who seek to open a conversation on a possible post-humanist future, one that starts to move away from anthropocentric worldviews. As always, we look forward to your thoughts.
In this episode of the Meaningful Learning Podcast, I speak with Valerie Hannon. Valerie is a global thought leader, inspiring systems to re-think what educational ‘success’ will mean in the 21st century. The co-founder of both Innovation Unit and of the Global Education Leaders Partnership, Valerie is a radical voice for change, whilst grounded in a deep understanding of how education systems currently work. A former Director of Education for Derbyshire and then an adviser in the UK Department for Education, she now works to release and harness the agency and creativity of both learners and educators. Currently, she is Senior Adviser to the OECD in its Education 2030 project. In this episode, we discuss: Thinking about learning in terms of "what for?" before moving onto "how?" Learning to thrive in a transforming world (ecologically and through biotech and infotech) How we need to re-write the story in order to build the public will for change.
Please leave us your thoughts and comments.
In this episode of the Meaningful Learning podcast by Coconut Thinking, I speak with Jennifer Groff. Jennifer is the Founder of Learning Futures and was the Chief Learning Officer at Lumiar Education. Her work largely focuses on redesigning systems, learning environments, and digital innovations that align with the learning sciences. Jennifer brings tremendous, positive energy and thinking to curricular innovation and supporting teachers, students, and schools through the pedagogical changes that education just might need. We discuss:
The emerging ecosystem of competency- and mastery-based evidencing (including digital passports)
Embedding Design Thinking into creating learning experiences
How maybe we just need to start over...
Join us for this episode where Jennifer's ideas and connections are sure to provoke. As always, we look forward to your thoughts.
Erratum: I referred to cyborgs when what I really meant were androids.
In this episode of the Meaningful Learning podcast by Coconut Thinking, I speak with Bern Nicholls. Bern is a school-based researcher who focuses on creating cultures of curiosity that support students and teachers to pursue their inquiries. She embraces curiosity as the fuel for her own learning and many interests. Bern and I had an earlier conversation about adopting a more biocentric worldview and set of values to address the problems that lay ahead for the planet and all living beings. I wanted to capture more of her inspiring thoughts in this podcast. In this conversation, Bern and I discuss:
How it’s not either/or; it’s both/and… breaking through binaries and dualism.
How curiosity is the precursor to thinking.
The need for teacher agency, not just student agency.
The power of animals in learning and well-being.
Join us for this episode and we look forward to your thoughts.
This is a particularly nourishing episode of the Meaningful Learning podcast by Coconut Thinking. Our guest is Dr. Thom Markham, considered one of the founding fathers of Project Based Learning. Thom Markham is an educator by trade, a positive psychologist by training, and a global entrepreneur dedicated to expanding educator mindsets in service to a positive future. This conversation is the first of I hope many amongst a nascent community of thinkers and doers who believe that we need to shift our values away from anthropocentrism toward biocentrism, toward purpose that benefits other living beings. We had the Agricultural Revolution, the Industrial Revolution... now it's time for another revolution, one where humans develop beyond themselves. In this conversation, Thom and I discuss:
How the neuro-cognitive model we use is breaking down
Social Growth Mindset
Sustainability as the driving standard for learning and doing.
Join us for another episode of the Meaningful Learning podcast by Coconut Thinking.
Erratum: at the end I say "beyond ecocentrism" when I meant "buying anthropocentrism!" Sorry about the confusion.
In this episode of the Meaningful Learning podcast, I speak with Michael Bunce. Michael is Curriculum Development and Enhancement Lead for Music and Performance, and Course Leader for the Masters in Global Learning Futures at the University of East London. He is engaged in practice and research as a teacher and curriculum innovator, educational technology developer, composer and music producer, and interdisciplinary arts practitioner. Michael is also the Founder of the Metapraxis Project, which facilitates the design, development and implementation of reflexive interdisciplinary learning projects in primary, secondary and tertiary contexts. In this episode, Michael and I discuss:
How learning is a transformation process that occurs within a context.
How learning is an experience this takes place in the moment and is oscillating.
How agency and metacognition feed off each other.
Join us for another episode of the Meaningful Learning podcast by Coconut Thinking. We hope you enjoy this episode and please let us have your thoughts and feedback.
In this episode of the Meaningful Learning podcast, I speak with Tanya Sheckley, Social Entrepreneur and Founder of UP Academy, an elementary school in San Mateo, California, which is the first school in the world where kids who are able bodied and kids with physical disabilities learn together in the same classrooms. UP Academy focuses heavily on Project Based Learning, showing that elementary school students aren't too young to engage in authentic experiences.
In this podcast, Tanya and I discuss:
How to develop core academic skills through student agency
How to build a school culture that promotes and sustains joy in learning and teaching
How to model lifelong learning to the students and adults alike.
Join us for another episode of the Meaningful Learning podcast by Coconut Thinking. We hope you enjoy this episode and please let us have your thoughts and feedback.
In this episode of the Meaningful Learning podcast, I speak with Will Richardson. Will is a former public school educator of 22 years and has spent the last 15 years developing an international reputation as a leading thinker and writer about the intersection of social online learning networks, education, and systemic change. Most recently, Will is a co-founder of The Big Questions Institute, which was created to help educators use "fearless inquiry" to make sense of this complex moment and an uncertain future. In 2017, Will was named one of 100 global "Changemakers in Education" by the Finnish site HundrED, and was named one of the Top 5 "Edupreneurs to Follow" by Forbes. He has given keynote speeches, lead breakout sessions, and provided coaching services in over 30 countries on 6 continents. (Come on Antartica!) He has also authored six books, and given TEDx Talks in New York, Melbourne, and Vancouver.
In this podcast, Will and I discuss:
Why we so seldom ask "What do you mean by learning?" and other existential questions
How change in education may come from mini-schools or schools on the fringes
How we can turn the COVID situation into opportunities to foster curiosity and creativity in all learners
Join us for another episode of the Meaningful Learning podcast by Coconut Thinking. We hope you enjoy this episode and please let us have your thoughts and feedback.
In this episode of the Meaningful Learning podcast, I speak with Tim Logan, long-time educator and consultant and strong advocate of bringing Agile into education. Tim explains how Agile principles and values guide us to respond to change and avoid ineffective rigidity, helping to meet student and group learning needs as they arise. Agile is about collaboration and personal interactions, bringing the human element to learning through doing. In this podcast, Tim and I discuss:
The value of going beyond quantitative measures as means to understanding learners and their potential
How Agile allows us to connect action and learning by having the tools to make good decisions for our students and our schools
Practical ways to implement Agile in your classroom
Join us for another episode of the Meaningful Learning podcast by Coconut Thinking. We hope you enjoy this episode and please let us have your thoughts and feedback.
In this episode of the Meaningful Learning podcast, I speak with Karl Millsom, Founder of the Rebel Teacher Network. Karl is a thought agitator who is not afraid to pose questions and frame issues in ways that force us to stop and re-consider why and how we do things in education. Karl helps and leads teachers to transform their practice to make learning experiences deeper by placing the student and the center of learning, but in ways that are fulfilling for the teacher as well. We discuss:
How we can find space to transform the curriculum to make it matter to all learners
How assessment connects to learning... or fails to in many cases
How the community can and should be involved in teaching to bring expertise
Join us for another episode of the Meaningful Learning podcast by Coconut Thinking. We hope you enjoy this episode and please let us have your thoughts and feedback.
In this episode of the Meaningful Learning podcast, I speak with Kyle Wagner, Learning Experience Co-Designer who uses PBL as a vehicle for deeper learning. Kyle has global experience leading transformation of schools and their cultures. In this episode, we discuss Micro-Schools—schools within schools that drive innovation and buy-in from all stakeholders. We also talk about:
Why authentic products and assessments provide opportunities for creativity and meaning for students and teachers alike
How to avoid the traps in setting up Micro-Schools and maximize momentum toward success
How to students can tell their stories to stand out from the crowd of university applicants.
Join us for another episode of the Meaningful Learning podcast by Coconut Thinking. We hope you enjoy this episode and please let us have your thoughts and feedback.
In this episode of the Meaningful Learning podcast, I speak with Michael Robbins, who has a long history of being at the center of education reform and innovation. We had an enriching conversation about the future of education and the possibilities and hopes in front of us. In this episode we discuss:
Learning led by interests, not standards
How students win back their learning through credentialing
The power of technology to strengthen relationships not just deliver content
Michael also explains the wonderful and exciting projects he has in store. Join us for another episode of the Meaningful Learning podcast by Coconut Thinking. We hope you enjoy this episode and please let us have your thoughts and feedback.
In this episode of the Meaningful Learning podcast, I speak with Mark Barnett, Learning Experience Designer, PBL consultant, maker space leader, machine learning scholar... a renaissance man in the world of education. In this episode we discuss:
Project-Based Learning as way to cultivate deeper learning
Going beyond traditional assessment to reframe our thinking about learning
How technology should be used to create, not just replicate what already exists
Mark's work pushes us to think in ways that challenges the traditional system so that all learners can find more meaning in what they do and learn. Join us for another episode of the Meaningful Learning podcast by Coconut Thinking. We hope you enjoy this episode and please let us have your thoughts and feedback.
In this episode of the Meaningful Learning podcast, I speak with Dwayne Matthews, one of the broadest and deepest thinkers I've met in a while. In this episode we discuss:
Learning Labs as an emerging innovation that allows students to break away from the traditional curriculum in order to explore their strengths and passions while developing authentic products
The importance outcomes to replace traditional assessment (including grades)
The role of technology as a tool, not an end.
Dwayne disrupts our traditional thinking about what learning is and how learning is demonstrated and applied in these changing times. Join us for another episode of the Meaningful Learning podcast by Coconut Thinking. We hope you enjoy this episode and please let us have your thoughts and feedback.
In this podcast, I speak with Dr. Dan Kreiness, instructional leader and host of The Leader of Learning podcast. Through his coaching, podcast, blog, and research, Dan is an influencer and expert in transformational leadership as a way to create the contexts for more effective learning and innovation in schools. Throughout our talk, Dan provides strategies and insights into:
How transformational leadership is about making sure everyone has the chance to be a leader in a school.
How we can adapt as educators to meet student needs.
Pushing ourselves to be risk-takers inside and outside the classroom
Join us for another episode of the Meaningful Learning podcast by Coconut Thinking.
In this podcast I speak with Dr. Trevor Soponis, Founder and Chief Learning Officer of the Sustainable Learning Projects. Trevor is dedicated to developing project-based learning opportunities addressing the fundamental environmental challenges of our time for students around the world. Trevor has moved my thinking as we discuss:
How we should trust students to take charge of their learning and solve the problems of their community.
The power of connections to the environment to drive learning, in the future, yes, but also right now.
The opportunities COVID and Black Lives Matter may provide to create a better world if we make the right choices.
Join us for another episode of the Meaningful Learning podcast by Coconut Thinking, which may be the last one from Saudi Arabia as new adventures await.
Listening to education podcasts, there are many conversations about the student experience that take place between adults, and while there can be so much to learn from pedagogical experts and leaders, it's all too rare that anyone asks the students themselves about their school years.
In this Podcast, I interview 3 recent High School graduates about what they learned the past 4 year, in school and outside, what resonates with them, what they would change in schools, and what how prepared they feel for life after High School.
We often talk about voice and choice for students, so this was a chance to give team space to express themselves. They have much to teach us if we want to design learning experiences that make an impact as well as make connections with the students.
In this episode, we learn (confirm?) that students value choice, relationships, and the space to pursue their interests. No surprise maybe, but these kids have some insightful ideas about how to go about it all.
Dr. Rena Upitis is a Professor of Education at Queen’s University. She has authored or co-authored 10 books and over 100 peer-reviewed articles. Her research and curriculum projects have explored teacher, artist, and student transformation through the arts. Rena herself is a musician, visual artist, and timber-frame carpenter. Oh yeah, and she lives off-grid!
In this podcast, Rena talks about how:
we learn best when we are emotionally-connected to questions that matter,
there are multiple paths for joy in post-secondary life,
some children are learning more under lockdown than in schools.
Join us for another episode of the Meaningful Learning Podcast by Coconut Thinking.
We look at why:
learning cannot be measured effectively through testing.
the education industry has reduced learning to a score (grade).
measuring the effects of learning as action is what matters most.