The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed—William Gibson We might find comfort–even some excitement—when we witness schools unveil and roll out their sustainability programs. We hear about fresh new solar panel installations, commitments to reduce printing by 50%, the deployment of carpooling schemes to get vehicles off the road, and promises [...]
Tag: progressive curriculum
New stories of power that matter
This article was published in IntrepidEd News on 28 December 2023. All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.—Friedrich Nietzsche I used to teach Global Politics. One of the throughlines of the course was the concept of power. We started the year [...]
Emergent Learning
This article was published in a slightly abridged version on IntrepidEd News on 1 August 2023. No two journeys are ever alike, because no two pupils are ever alike —Daniel Quinn I spent the best two months of my life during the summer of 2019. I’m not suggesting it was the easiest or most relaxing [...]
Chapter 5: From I to We—The Source of Becoming
This article was published on Intrepid Ed News on 14 July 2022. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. —Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In the previous four chapters, I have tried to bring to light the tension between the emerging infinite world—where the Metaverse may [...]
Chapter 4: Starting Small to Make Big Changes for a New Education Narrative
This article was published in IntrepidEd News on 9 June 2022. There is no distinction at all between the everyday world (samsara) and freedom (nirvana). There is no distinction between freedom and the everyday world. —Nagarjuna Futurephobia is not a word that we come across very frequently considering its potential impact. You’ll find only a [...]
Chapter 3: Decentralized Networks of Learning as Biomimicry
This article was published on Intrepid Ed News on 12 May 2022. I ended the previous chapter with a teaser, one that I promised in this installment to explore: Can we really have learner-centered and competency-based education in our current education system? The thing is, this might be the wrong question to ask because it [...]
Writing a New Narrative for a New System
This article was published in Education Reimagined's Voyager on 4 May 2022. This article was the #1 read in 2022 in Voyager. No matter what happened during the pandemic, no matter how much we think the world may have changed, if we continue to hold the same values that make the old system thrive, nothing [...]
We are not beings, we are becomings
This article was published on UNESCO’s IDEAS LAB on 11 March 2022. While the UNESCO report Futures of Education came out with much fanfare and generated much excitement, its most powerful consideration has received surprisingly little attention. It’s not that the authors haven’t put this consideration front and center—on the contrary—yet somehow it has eluded [...]
Chapter 1: The Metaverse will open up an infinite world and may help local worlds thrive
This article was published in Intrepid Ed News on 23 March 2022. This is the first installment of a longer series, a long conversation. It builds on the idea that there is no one future of education because we are all on our own journeys and this includes schools. With not even one-fourth of the [...]
Let’s stop talking about the future of education: let each of us do the inner work
This article was published on Intrepid Ed News on 18 Feb 2022. I have been wrestling with a question for months, looking for clues to an answer in conversations, books, podcasts, and quiet moments of reflection. I’m not the first person to have posed this question, and for centuries it has created significant, sometimes bloody, [...]
The Long Game: Everything changes and so will the narrative of school
This article was published on IntrepidEd News on 4 Jan 2022. I can’t keep track of how many conversations I have had where at some point my counterpart declared that something or other I’ve proposed “will never happen because…” I’m not suggesting I’m some kind of soothsayer or that I’m the holder of Truth. I [...]
Interconnected Learning: A Contextual Experience
The Metaverse will bring school closer to the end of its product life cycle
This article was also published on 2 December 2021 in IntrepidEd News. Every once in a while you come across an idea that is so full of possibilities, your imagination runs wild, unleashed. When you share your thoughts with others, you might indulge in fantasizing together about what how future might unfold; or you might [...]
The Holon: Toward a consciousness that we are both parts and wholes
Note after weeks of reflection: I also want to let the reader know that the word "part" can, and maybe should, be substituted with "nested whole." Parts as a word is problematic because it is associated with mechanisms ad machines. Nester wholes connotes essence in itself. That said, I will leave this as an issue of [...]
A Curriculum of Kindness
This article was inspired by my conversations with Louka Parry and David Penberg. It was published in IntrepidEd News on 1 October 2021. Sometimes I fixate on a subject or idea and find myself buying a bunch of books and watching videos to feed my curiosity and further my understanding of a single topic. Recently, [...]
A Learning ecosystem that values questions not answers
What if instead of an education system based on “show what you know,” which can discourage curiosity and creativity because of the right answer syndrome, what if we built a learning system that conceived achievement as the quality of questions the learner asks, not what they are asked to know? The power of this learning system of questions is in how it would foster curiosity and creativity, because if a learner stops asking questions, they stop learning.
Embracing the Interconnectedness of Learning
“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” —John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club So much space is taken up rebuking the Industrial Revolutionary model of education that still inspires most schools today. You can hear, watch, and read people questioning why it [...]
What if schools became intergenerational learning spaces?
What if we used Portfolios of Impact to evidence learning, thinking, and action?
This article was published in Intrepid Ed News on 10 August 2021. Our lives take different courses based on the decisions concerning us made by people we often don’t even know. This is because selection processes that are out of our control determine what will happen. Most people taste this process for the first time [...]
Twenty-first century skills: Are they just the same old story?
This article was published in a slightly different form in Intrepid News 18 June 2021. There is something insidious about pushing schools to change so they can prepare students for jobs that do not yet exist, for problem-solving to address threats to productivity, or for new business models with geographically and culturally distributed workforces. There [...]
What if we created a Curriculum for the Commons?
This article was originally published in Intrepid Ed News on 4 June 2021 under the title "Student Pathways into Curriculum: Chaotic or Empowering?" We justify our need for a set curriculum by invoking our responsibility to prepare students for the future, expose them to ideas that will make them respectable well-rounded citizens, and equip them [...]
How Could Ethics Guide a New Purpose for Education?
This article was originally published on 21 May 2021 in Intrepid Ed News. Every once in a while, a report comes out from a behemoth transnational organization that rings alarm bells, warning us about how the education system is not equipping young minds to meet the challenges of tomorrow. A lengthy document outlines the skills [...]
Bio Scale (A Response to Jason Preater)
This is a response to Jason Preater’s thoughtful and considered article Human Scale. I am writing this in the same spirit as Jason; I don’t propose to “have the right answers and welcome your ideas.” I realize that many of these issues are addressed in superficial, generalized ways, but I am writing an article not [...]
Will androids replace teachers? Maybe, if the system keeps valuing what it values
Trying to measure learning is absurd because there is no dualism between the student and the world
"When we measure something we are forcing an undetermined, undefined world to assume an experimental value. We are not 'measuring' the world, we are creating it." —Niels Bohr, recipient of the 1922 Nobel Prize in Physics and contributor to our understanding of quantum theory. Last week, I led a staff workshop to launch a new [...]