Episoder
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A big part of where I see shifts happening in education systems is encouraging young people to get out into the world, into their communities and make a difference to issues that they care about. There is so much learning that can happen in this process. I have shared a few episodes in the past with fantastic people like Cathrine Berger-Kaye, Daniela Papi-Thornton and Zoe Weil, supporting young people and educators in this kind of work. But there are also some fascinating and important considerations to be aware of when we step into this work, so that we really have the impact that we are hoping to, and donât replicate past harms and unhelpful patterns. My guest this week, Anthea Lawson, has been working on the front line of this kind of work for decades and has learned through her own experience just how complex and entangled these issues are that we care about doing something about. And she has been sharing her gathered wisdom on it in her previous book The Entangled Activist, and very excitingly her new book, out this week, âHow Not to Save the World: Doing good without annoying everyoneâ. George Monbiot has described it as a wise, rich and crucial book! And I can certainly recommend it myself.
As a journalist, campaigner and writer, Anthea Lawson has fought for many issues over three decades including controls on the arms trade and an end to the financial secrecy offered by tax havens. She helped launch a campaign for transparency over company ownership which resulted in changes to the law in dozens of countries. After training as a journalist at The Times, she worked for campaign groups including Global Witness and Amnesty International.
Her writing helps people who want to change the world think about the psychological, spiritual and philosophical foundations of what theyâre doing, whatâs getting in the way, and how they can be more effective.
Links
Anthea's website: https://www.anthealawson.uk/
'How Not to Save the World' Book: https://www.anthealawson.uk/how-not-to-save-the-world
'The Entangled Activist' Book: https://www.anthealawson.uk/the-entangled-activist
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anthea-lawson/
Don't Talk About Politics: How to Change 21st-Century Minds by Sarah Stein Lubrano: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/dont-talk-about-politics-9781399413916/
More info about the Antidebate: https://systems-souls-society.com/praxis/antidebate/
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This week is a huge privilege to have my good friends Emily Poel and Guy Claxton returning to the podcast in celebration of the release this week of their fabulous new book, Bodies of Learning: How Embodiment Science Transforms Education. It's a really significant book! that lays out, unlike any other, the deep implications of 4E cognitive science that support and strengthen the case for a more healthy, more human(e), moregenerative educational experience for our young people; which is everything this channel is about.
Link to the book: https://www.bodiesoflearning.org/
Prof. Guy Claxton is a cognitive scientist, education thought leader, and author of The Future of Teaching and Intelligencein the Flesh among many other books, with decades of research on expanding human intelligence and applying learning science in real-world contexts.
He has spent most of his working life based in a variety of UK universities including Oxford, Bristol, Kingâs College London and Winchester. Increasingly his work has taken a more practical turn, and he has been involved with a wide range of organisations where a better understanding of human intelligence is needed. For example, he has been:
Consultant on education to the Royal Albert Hall; workshop leader for Premier League Youth Football Coaches; lecturer at the Siobhan Davies Dance School and the London College of Fashion; Inaugural lecturer at Her Majesty's Treasury Learning Centre; meditation teacher at Atsitsa holiday centre on the Greek island of Skyros (where I met my wife Judith); consultant to the Centre for Contemplative Education research project on mindfulness in European schools (under the auspices of HH The Dalai Lama); guest lecturer at the Harvard Learning Innovations Laboratory (LILA); consultant to the South Australian Department of Education and Child Development among many others.
Links: https://www.guyclaxton.net/
Recent Deans Lecture Series, University of Melbourne: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGFEswKBnMw
Emily Poel is a Berlin-based embodiment practitioner who has taught internationally for over fifteen years, developing practical methods that show how movement and physical awareness shape creativity, thinking, and learning.Originally from Michigan and with a degree in contemporary dance performance and history, she's worked internationally as a performer, choreographer and creative advisor. In 2004 she shifted her focus to embodiment training and hasnât stopped since. Over the last ten years she's developed a large collection of activities using physical awareness tools and movement training to better understand how creativity,learning and thinking actually work.
Links: https://embodimentatwork.co/
Move4Schools - https://move4schools.com/
Previous episodes featuring Guy and Emily:
We Need More Embodied Education! A Conversation with Arawana Hayashi, Prof. Guy Claxton, Dr. Akhil K. Singh, Emily Poel and Caroline Williams: https://www.goodimpactlabs.com/podcast/embodied-education
Finding 'Aliveness' in Schools - A Conversation with Prof. Guy Claxton: https://www.goodimpactlabs.com/podcast/guy-claxton
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If you think about which verbs dominate formal education youâll probably come up with a list like learning, thinking, reasoning, remembering, knowing, and maybe behaving. Now think about what images come to mind when you consider those verbs, or do a google image search and see what you get! Iâm willing to bet that the most common images coming up are of individual heads, maybe with a visible brain or cogs, doing the thinking, the reasoning, the learning, the cognition. And to emphasise the point further, when we want to highlight that itâs more than one thinker or reasoner doing the work, we have to put clarifying adjectives or nouns in front, like group cognition, collective learning or collaborative problem solving. But the fact is, we are actually already âintertwined creaturesâ in our entanglement with each other and the world. We think, learn and reason all the time with and through each other and the objects we interact with, and the places we are in. My guest this week, Professor Tony Chemero, has been a major proponent of âradical embodied cognitionâ for his whole career as a professor of philosophy and psychology. His latest book, brilliantly titled, âIntertwined Creatures: The Embodied Cognitive Science of Self and Otherâ is an amazing articulation of just how interconnected we are as creatures and learners in the world. Tony is a Distinguished Research Professor of Philosophy and Psychology at the University of Cincinnati, and a primary member of both the Center for Cognition, Action, and Perception[1] and the Strange Tools Research Lab.
As well as many academic articles, he is the author of:
Radical Embodied Cognitive Science (2009, MIT Press) - https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262516471/radical-embodied-cognitive-science/
Phenomenology, with Stephan KĂ€ufer (2015, Polity Press; second edition, 2021) - https://www.wiley.com/en-be/Phenomenology%3A+An+Introduction%2C+2nd+Edition-p-9781509540662
Intertwined Creatures: The Embodied Cognitive Science of Self and Otherâ (2026, Columbia University Press) - https://cup.columbia.edu/book/intertwined-creatures/9780231223195/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Chemero
https://researchdirectory.uc.edu/p/chemeray -
There are lots of reasons why well-intentioned work, trying to do things differently and shift the way that systems currently operate, often struggle and fail. But one of the reasons that I find most interesting is to look at the "dark matter" or deep codes that are built into our current ways of working. These might be things like the way we do contracts, the way insurance functions, and legal precedents. Or the way that value is defined and accounted for, and the way money functions and flows. Most of the time these things are simply constraints that we are told we just have to deal with in our work. But as you might have heard in a previous episode with Indy Johar and Adam Purvis (https://www.goodimpactlabs.com/podcast/indy-johar-and-adam-purvis), organisations like Dark Matter Labs are not accepting this status quo and, in fact, are actively trying to work towards redesigning these deep codes. But then you might say: âWell that's fine for those kinds of organisations who get to do that work, but that's not something that I can get involved with.â My guests this week are colleagues of Adam and Indy at Dark Matter Labs, but they are taking it one stage further and asking the question, what does it mean to educate for building the capabilities and sensibilities for this kind of work. They are calling it âsocietal designâ and in this conversation you'll hear them reflecting on the Masters programme that they are launching this September, in collaboration with Elisava Barcelona School of Design and Engineering. Applications are open until July 15th 2026. For further information about this and Emily and Martinâs other work, check out the links below.
Martin and Emilyâs âAnti-Briefâ website: https://anti-brief.org/
Further links about the Societal Design Master Degree Programme at Elisava, Barcelona at UVic: University of Vic - Central University of Catalonia.
https://www.elisava.net/en/masters/master-in-societal-design/
https://anti-brief.org/about/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/societal-design-master-at-elisava/posts/
Martin on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drmartinlorenz/
Emily on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emily-harris-fca-3b381565/
Dark Matter Labs: https://darkmatterlabs.org/
Life-Enobling Economics microsite: https://lee.darkmatterlabs.org/
Cornerstone Indicators report (2023): https://drive.google.com/file/d/176CNiZYM1v2xcEzDVO4SHuEfRQoosCVL/view
Cornerstone Indicators microsite: https://cornerstoneindicators.com/
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Collaboration, whether it's between young people in a classroom or between institutions across an educational ecosystem, is often seen as an unquestioned virtue. An assumed aspect of people simply working together on a shared purpose, but without much thought given to how it happens in meaningful and deep ways to generate genuinely expanded possibilities for everyone. Rose A. Dodd and her team at The Education Collaborative have been showing how this is done at a massive scale across Africa, for the last decade. Rose joined me this week to share what she and her network have been learning about how deep radical collaboration can really shift and transform systems across a whole continent.
Rose is a strategic leader mobilizing Africaâs higher education sector at a critical moment, when the continentâs youth population is rapidly growing, yet tertiary enrolment remains the lowest in the world. As Executive Director of The Education Collaborative, a pan-African initiative launched by Ashesi University in 2017, Rose leads a peer-driven network that has engaged over 400 institutions across the continent. Under her leadership, the Collaborative is driving transformation in teaching, institutional practices, and graduate outcomesâimpacting hundreds of thousands of students, with a goal to reach one million by 2030.With deep expertise in strategy and stakeholder alignment, she develops scalable models for institutional collaboration and system-wide improvement. Rose is driven by a commitment to social innovation and is shaping the future of African higher education by building the systems, networks, and models that enable institutions to lead transformative change at scale.
About The Education Collaborative: The Education Collaborative spearheads a collective engagement model that promises to transform higher education outcomes in sub-Saharan Africa. This initiative uses a network approach to build trust and foster collective commitments among higher education leaders and stakeholders to generate sustainable results within the systems they govern and influence. Central to this pioneering movement is a membership model that promotes open engagement, sharing, and community accountability among participating institutions.
Website: https://educationcollab.ashesi.edu.ghGiving Voice to Values Africa: https://educationcollab.ashesi.edu.gh/ehub/ecourse/giving-voice-to-values-africa
Read our latest Impact Stories Publication: https://educationcollab.ashesi.edu.gh/impact-stories-publication-issue-2
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-education-collaborative-network
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@theeducationcollaborative
Reach us via email: [email protected]
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How do we as educators respond in times of urgency and conflict? Not just in teaching, but also in exploring potentially transformative ideas and practices; in such moments of great challenge but also lots of opportunity. I had the huge privilege this week to talk with 3 amazing young people who doing just that in the context of the on-going conflict after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine just over 4 years ago. Yuliia Naidych, Marie Teich and Anastasia Tarasova have responded to these questions in deeply inspiring ways to develop what they are calling Third Floor, The Centre for Transformative Research. It's an emergent organisation that I first heard about from Ivo Mensch's article in Perspectiva. They are inquiring into questions about how to prevent the "brain drain" of young inspiring researchers leaving Ukraine for opportunities in other universities around the world, but also how to build bridges between the academic ivory tower and the world of practitioners in entrepreneurship local government and other sectors around Ukraine. And even what does it mean to do research in transformative ways that might support and enable some new ways of being and acting in the world.
Third Floor, Centre for Transformative Research Links:
Facebook page: facebook.com/profile.php?id=61562317967411
Instagram: instagram.com/third_floooor?igsh=ZWQxano1eW93a2g1&utm_source=qr
Summer School website: summerschool-transformativeresearch.com
YouTube: www.youtube.com/@ĐąŃĐ”ŃŃĐčĐżĐŸĐČĐ”ŃŃ
Yuliia Naidych: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yuliia-naidych-799b39201/
Marie Teich: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marie-teich-4714371b1/
Anastasia Tarasova: MA in Philosophy from V.N. Karazin Kharkiv National University, co-organiser of the summer school.
Ivo Menschâs article in Perspectiva, âThe Pedagogy of Urgencyâ: https://perspecteeva.substack.com/p/the-pedagogy-of-urgency
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Educational leadership is a tough challenge at the best of times, with many pressures from all sides. But particularly now, with so much shifting, high levels of uncertainty, and polarising issues at play, itâs arguably an even rougher sea to navigate. In such a context, my guest this week has done an amazing job of gathering vital insights from 67 amazing education leaders around the world, herself included, to bring some collective wisdom to bear on the subject.
Jennifer D. Klein is an author and former head of school with extensive international experience and over 30 years in education--including 19 in the classroom. She is a product of experiential project-based education herself, and she lives and breathes the student-centred pedagogies used to educate her. She became a teacher during graduate school in 1990, quickly finding the intersection between her love of writing and her fascination with educational transformation and its potential impact on social change. She spent nineteen years in the classroom, including several years in Costa Rica and eleven in all-girls education, before leaving the classroom to support educatorsâ professional learning in public, private, and international schools. Motivated by her belief that all children deserve a meaningful, relevant education like the one she experienced herself, and that giving them such an education will catalyze positive change in their communities and beyond, Jennifer strives to inspire educators to shift their practices in schools worldwide.
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 the 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. She is committed to intersecting global student-centered learning with culturally responsive and anti-racist teaching practices, and her experience includes deep work with schools seeking to address equity, take on brave conversations, build healthier community, and improve identity politics on campus.
Jenniferâs first book, The Global Education Guidebook: Humanizing Kâ12 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. Her third book, Taming the Turbulence in Educational Leadership: Doing Right by Learners without Losing your Job, to be released in September, 2025, is based on interviews with 67 educational leaders around the world who are facing resistance to practices they know are good for learners. Jennifer's experiences as a head of school in Colombia provide a through line as she explores the strategies leaders are using to manage resistance.
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. Most recently, she served as Head of School at Gimnasio Los Caobos (BogotĂĄ, Colombia) for three years, where she was able to put her educational thinking into practice with profound impact on the quality of student learning and their growth as agents of change.
Links:
Jenniferâs website: https://www.principledlearning.org/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jdeborahklein/
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This is the first part of a 4-part series exploring the ways in which artificial intelligence is impacting the lives of teachers and young people around the world, through the lens of Anthropicâs recently announced partnerships. In this episode, I talked with ĂĂłrdĂs JĂłna SigurĂ°ardĂłttir, the Director of the Directorate of Education and School Services in Iceland who is exploring the implications of AI for teachers' workload and working conditions, in partnership with Anthropic, Google and the Icelandic Teachersâ Union (KI). I was struck by how significant the learning focus of this pilot was, with a genuine openness to be both careful and curious in exploring the implications of AI in a country with diverse learning needs, and contrasting school contexts, both urban and very rural, in a historically very decentralised system.
ĂĂłrdĂs JĂłna is Director of the Directorate of Education and School Services. The Directorate of Education and School Services, active since April 2024 and taking over from the previous Directorate of Educations, plays a key role in promoting the education system in Iceland and implementing the governmentâs education policy. ĂĂłrdĂs JĂłna holds a BA in Political Science and an MA in Sociology from the University of Iceland, an MBA from Vlerick Business School, and a leadership and policy implementation program from Harvard Business School.
Links:
https://island.is/s/midstod-menntunar-og-skolathjonustu
https://www.csee-etuce.org/en/item/4428:icelands-ai-pilot-in-education-what-it-really-means-for-teachershttps://island.is/en/o/directorate-of-education-and-school-services/news/a-turning-point-in-icelandic-schooling
https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-and-iceland-announce-one-of-the-world-s-first-national-ai-education-pilots
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This is the second part episode in this mini-series looking into the ways in which artificial intelligence is impacting the lives of teachers and young people around the world, through the lens of recently announced partnerships with Anthropic.
In this conversation, I explored with Karishma Galani the way that Pratham Education Foundation, one of the largest NGOs in India, is integrating AI capabilities and platforms into its work reaching millions of underserved young people with quality education. They announced a partnership with Anthropic just over a month ago, but that is growing from much deeper roots in the vision of Prathamâs co-founder, Madhav Chavan, that you will hear Karishma talk about.
Karishma is the Co-Lead of PraDigi Innovation Centre at Pratham International. She leads a lot of the digital innovation and AI work at Pratham, building on her long career in tech startups, research & development and venture capital. Karishma founded a deeptech company developing educational assessment powered by machine learning out of Singapore and London and she has been an active researcher at the MIT Media Lab. Karishma is also an author of two books, 'Maker Minds' and 'Making A Shift: Social Entrepreneurship in Schools'
https://www.anthropic.com/news/bengaluru-office-partnerships-across-india
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This is the third episode in this 4-part series exploring the ways in which artificial intelligence is impacting the lives of teachers and young people around the world, through the lens of recently announced partnerships with Anthropic. In this episode, I explored Teach for Allâs thoughtful approach to these big questions with Global Head of AI and Edtech, Stephen Jull. How is collective leadership in Teach for Allâs 63 country contexts enhanced and extended by the creative use of free frontier AI models (and really dynamic WhatsApp communities!)? And how are they holding critical questions of equity, access and data sovereignty as they build communities of educators across the globe as co-architects of AI pedagogies and of the models themselves.
Stephen is the Global Head of AI and Educational Technology at Teach For All. Following an early career teaching in remote communities of Canadaâs far north, Stephen earned his PhD at the University of Cambridge as a Commonwealth Trust Scholar and has spent over 15 years building teams and strategic partnerships to deliver educational technology innovations at scale. Stephen was a co-founder of GeoGebra, one of the world's leading provider of dynamic math education software. And he has supported many young entrepreneurs and high-impact, high-growth startups and scaleups in roles such as as Visiting Fellow at the University of Cambridge Judge Business School and Entrepreneur in Residence with Founders at Cambridge Enterprise.
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This is the first part of a 4-part series exploring the ways in which AI tools are impacting the lives of teachers and young people around the world. In this episode, I talked with Kavi Ramburn and Stefan Coetzee from ALX Africa about their amazing work bringing professional foundational competencies programmes to young people across Africa through in-person hubs and online course offerings. They have recently announced a big partnership with Anthropic and the Government of Rwanda, so I was keen to talk with them about how this will boost their mission in introducing âChidi,â an AI-powered learning companion built to scaffold critical thinking and problem-solving about and with AI, to learners and educators across Africa and beyond.
Kavi is Vice President of Learning at ALX Africa. He has an extensive background in learning, research and sustainable development economics, and advocacy for social impact across many sectors.
Stefan is AI Innovation Lead at ALX Africa spearheading AI product research and early life cycle product development. He has a huge depth of knowledge as a data scientist, content developer and educator.
From the presse release from ALX Africa:
âFunding and Partnership
Anthropic will cover LLM/API-related costs to support the deployment of Chidi and Claude access.
ALX will contribute the training, delivery, and implementation infrastructure, ensuring smooth rollout and educator enablement.
The Government of Rwandaâthrough the Ministries of Education and ICTâwill provide policy guidance, institutional support, and access to schools, but will not bear any financial commitments under this partnership.â
More info:https://www.linkedin.com/in/kavi-ramburn-57212475/
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/designing-learning-millions-vision-kavi-ramburn-alxafrica-7vrvf/
https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-rwanda-mou
https://www.aa.com.tr/en/africa/rwanda-signs-mou-with-us-ai-company-anthropic-across-health-education-public-sectors/3832953
https://www.devex.com/news/is-anthropic-building-rwanda-s-ai-future-or-its-dependence-111946
https://www.edtechinnovationhub.com/news/anthropic-rwanda-and-alx-roll-out-chidi-ai-learning-companion-across-africa -
This week on the podcast weâre time travelling with the fabulous Professor Keri Facer. How we think about the future or futures makes a difference to the decisions we make in schools today, and Keri has been asking critically important questions about educational futures, pasts and presents for the last 20 years, that are still as important today as they were when she published her brilliant 2011 book âLearning Futures: Education, Technology and Social Changeâ.
Prof. Keri Facer is Professor of Educational and Social Futures at the University of Bristol, UK where she leads the British Academy âTimes of a Just Transitionâ Programme, which brings together scholars from 6 continents and 14 disciplines, to explore how temporal assumptions, frames and processes structure the possibility of just transitions. She is also Co-investigator on the ESRC Centre for Sociodigital Futures, where she works on the implications of mixed reality tools for collective imagination. Keri is also Professor of Public Education at Black Mountains College, led by recent podcast guest, Ben Rawlence: https://www.goodimpactlabs.com/podcast/ben-rawlence.
Keri was previously Zennström Professor in Climate Change Leadership at Uppsala University, expert advisory group member of UNESCOâs Futures of Education Commission and Research Director at Futurelab. Keri is collaborating with the poverty charity, the Joseph Rowntree foundation, on their âimagination infrastructureâ programme and is Editor-in-Chief of the journal Futures. Keri is also a co-Investigator of Transforming Education for Sustainable Futures: https://tesf.network/
In 2026, she is consolidating this work in three landmark publications:
Chronoberg: a handbook of creative methods for temporal imagination (with Johannes Stripple);
âTime & Possibility: A Field Guideâ (with Harriet Hand); and
Temporal Justice, a Special Issue for the Journal of Global Social Challenges.
Keriâs books include âLearning Futures: Education, Technology and Social Changeâ and âWorking with Time in Qualitative Researchâ. She is joint Editor-in-Chief of the Journal âFuturesâ and she edits the Routledge Book Series on âFutures and Anticipationâ with Prof Johan Siebers.
Keriâs personal website: https://kerifacer.wordpress.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/keri-facer-2a11b62/
https://www.temporalimagination.org/
https://www.conversationsociety.org/home
https://www.jrf.org.uk/imagination-infrastructures/educating-the-ecological-imagination-the-work-of-black-mountains
https://www.routledge.com/Learning-Futures-Education-Technology-and-Social-Change/Facer/p/book/9780415581431
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I've always been fascinated by questions of religion and spirituality and what they have to offer the educational conversation. Clearly on the big questions of life generally, transformation, meaning, values and purpose they have a lot to say, but educationally we can very quickly find ourselves in the territory of indoctrination. And surely indoctrination is the opposite of good education
This week I was so happy to chat with Shoukei Matsumoto, a secular Buddhist Monk who is doing amazing work bringing insights from Japanese Buddhist teachings and practices into leadership, economy and organisational development. And in particular his approach integrates a "post-religious" spirituality with practical methodologies for "becoming good ancestors," often mentoring corporate leaders worldwide to create emotionally intelligent and sustainable workplaces.
Shoukei is a Buddhist monk, author, and Director of the Living Dharma Centre in Vancouver, Canada, where he is spearheading the revitalization of the organisation as a hub for secular spirituality. He simultaneously serves as a Professor of Practice in the Faculty of Well-being at Musashino University (Tokyo), bridging ancient wisdom and modern society to architect "Ambient Buddhism" â an environmental operating system for a post-religious age.
Operating at the intersection of spirituality, technology, and ethics, Shoukei is a member of the World Economic Forum's Global Future Council on Leadership (2025-2026) and an alumnus of the Young Global Leaders (2013). In 2025, he was appointed as a Mercator Visiting Professor at the University of Bonn (Germany) to research AI in the human context, and joined the Vaticanâs Aurora initiative to shape global frameworks for moral innovation in artificial intelligence.
With a unique background holding a BA in Philosophy from The University of Tokyo and an MBA from the Indian School of Business, Matsumoto applies innovative management approaches to traditional Buddhist practices. He is the founder of Interbeing Inc. and has launched initiatives such as the Institute for Temple Management.
He is the author of the international bestseller 'A Monkâs Guide to a Clean House and Mind' (translated into over 20 languages). His latest book, 'Work Like a Monk: How to Connect, Lead and Grow in a Noisy World' (2025) https://www.simonandschuster.co.uk/books/Work-Like-A-Monk/Shoukei-Matsumoto/9781398551749, offers practical guidance on integrating Buddhist principles â such as mindful listening and interconnectedness â into modern life and work.
Shoukeiâs work touches on very relevant topics that we explore on this channel:
From "Software" to "An-Yo": How we can stop treating young people as machines to be optimized and instead cultivate "habitats" that allow for their natural flourishing.
The Grace of Being Wrong (Kuyo): In a world obsessed with "Known" mastery, how the Buddhist practice of Kuyo can liberate us to embrace the unknown.
The "True Person" (Shin-nin) in Dialogue: How mindful listening can unfreeze our words and allow our authentic selves to emerge, especially within the rigid structures of formal education.
Useful Links
Shoukeiâs substack: https://www.living-dharma.com/
The Living Dharma Center, Vancouver: https://www.bcc.ca/ldc.html
Shoukeiâs LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shoukeim
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One of the best things about this job is that I get to find out about and share some of the most exciting new developments in education all over the world, sometimes in the most unexpected places. My guest this week, the writer, human rights activist, turned educational entrepreneur Ben Rawlence and his amazing team are building just that in a small market town called Talgarth in mid-Wales. Black Mountains College is an incredible institution working with young people locally in mid-Wales and from across the UK, set up as an alive and direct response to the climate and ecological emergency to help create a future in which nature and human societies thrive. As youâll hear Ben describe, the college is part of a tradition of land-based alternative education organisations such as Dartington College in the UK (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartington_College_of_Arts) and Rabindrath Tagore's Visva-Bharati University in India (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visva-Bharati_University) and is continuing and updating this tradition to become one of the most inspiring examples globally of what is possible and needed in these times. Ben is an award-winning writer, activist, and former speech writer to Sir Menzies Campbell and Charles Kennedy. He was a researcher for Human Rights Watchâs Africa division, worked for the Social Science Research Council in the USA, the Liberal Democrats in the UK and the Civic United Front in Tanzania.
His books include The Treeline: The Last Forest and the Future of Life on Earth and his forthcoming book Think Like a Forest: Letters to my Children from a Changing Planet.BMC website: https://blackmountainscollege.uk/
Beth Nawr Festival: https://blackmountainscollege.uk/events/beth-nawr-festival-2026/
Ben's Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Rawlence
Ben's previous books: https://uk.bookshop.org/beta-search?keywords=Ben+Rawlence
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There aren't many things that prompt widespread agreement from people on all sides of the various educational debates. But whatever your educational stripes, young people becoming better critical thinkers usually gets unanimous support. And, arguably, it's being recognised as increasingly important in a world full of AI-generated content and chatbots pretending to be your friend! So I was completely fascinated when I discovered the work of my guests this week, who, as professors of Philosophy, are exploring the often overlooked embodied process of what it feels like to engage in critical thinking and how that process gets shaped by our experiences and inspirations.
The fact that thinking comes from somewhere, is very often forgotten in the encouragement of our students to develop their "analytical", "rational" and "logical" skills in pursuit of objectivity. This applies as much in sciences and maths as it does in other humanities subjects like philosophy. And it has major implications for how we teach critical thinking in sophisticated ways aligned with the latest cognitive science, rather than perpetuating the narrow idea that it is simply a dispassionate logical set of computations (which we're clearly seeing the LLMs are much better at than us squishy humans who care about stuff!).
Donata Schoeller - https://www.donataschoeller.com/ - is Research Professor, Philosophy, at the University of Iceland, Iceland and Associate Professor at the University of Koblenz. She is a Principal Investigator, and Conceptual Director of âFreedom to make sense: Embodied, experiential Inquiry and Research,â and the Academic Director of the European Erasmus programmes Training Embodied Critical Thinking and Understanding. She has researched and published extensively on embodied thinking, while developing international and interdisciplinary research and training cooperations on the topic. Recent publications: âThinking at the edge in the context of embodied critical thinking: Finding words for the felt dimension of thinking within research,â Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 2022, Close Talking: Erleben zu Sprache bringen, 2019, Saying What We Mean, with Ed Casey, 2017, Thinking Thinking, with Vera Saller, 2016.
SigrĂĂ°ur (Sigga) ĂorgeirsdĂłttir - https://english.hi.is/staff/sigrthor - is a professor of philosophy at the University of Iceland. She is Principal Investigator of the âFreedom to make sense: Embodied, experiential Inquiry and Researchâ project, and one of the leaders of the âTraining Embodied Critical Thinking and Understandingâ training programme. She specialises in the philosophy of the body, the philosophy of the environment, the philosophy of Nietzsche, feminist philosophy, and women in the history of philosophy. She is Chair of the Committee on gender issues of International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP) that sponsors the World Congress of Philosophy.
Useful Links:
Training Embodied Critical Thinking and Understanding (TECTU) 2024-2026: https://www.trainingect.com/
Freedom to Make Sense - Center of embodied, experiential and mindful research and education: https://makesense.hi.is/
Practicing Embodied Thinking in Research and Learning
Edited By Donata Schoeller, Sigridur Thorgeirsdottir, Greg Walkerden:
https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-edit/10.4324/9781003397939/practicing-embodied-thinking-research-learning-donata-schoeller-sigridur-thorgeirsdottir-greg-walkerden
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The following conversation is definitely a wild ride*! It's not an argument often made, but I believe that one of the effects of our industrialised education systems is to create the illusion that the world is full of somewhat fixed and ordered things, that don't move or change much. Of course, we teach our children about orbiting planets, the water cycle or change in historical periods. But, for example, in episode 208, Vanessa Andreotti gave a great example of how we name objects in the world, such as trees, in order to teach about them. In doing so, we draw a boundary around a tree that separates it from all non-trees. This sounds kind of philosophical and abstract, but I think the effects of it are very real. Most young people then learn to read the world as a collection of more or less fixed objects, rather than as patterns of relations.
My guest this week has been exploring the depths of these questions for a long time through the lens of movement. As you will hear, Professor Thomas Nail started this line of inquiry researching human migration, and went on to develop an entirely new discipline of the philosophy of movement by pulling at the threads of how far our collective obsession with order and stasis goes! And it definitely goes back at least a couple of thousand years!
Thomas Nail is a Distinguished Scholar and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Denver and author of numerous books, including The Figure of the Migrant, Theory of the Border, Marx in Motion, Theory of the Image, Theory of the Object, Theory of the Earth, Lucretius I, II, III, Returning to Revolution, and Being and Motion.
Some useful links:
https://liberalarts.du.edu/about/people/thomas-andrew-nail
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Nail
The Philosophy of Movement website: https://philosophy-of-movement.com/
'The Birth of Chaos Before Physis': https://youtu.be/c3S4w7C2dGg?si=H-1RlmaK7p3x7C4a
The Philosophy of Movement: https://www.youtube.com/live/YQUtX64uqNc?si=EeP3mP4Z-6_4-DK1
What is New Materialism paper: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337351875_WHAT_IS_NEW_MATERIALISM
'The Random Walk of the Brain' (article in Salon): https://www.salon.com/2021/08/28/walking-and-spontaneous-fluctuations-brain/
*In the conversation, Thomas uses the word 'cosmogony' which in hindsight I wished I had asked him to define. Simply put it is a theory about how the cosmos or universe originated.
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It's pretty clear from the statistics that there is a huge youth demographic bulge on the continent of Africa. 40% of its population is aged 15 or younger (as of 2021). The population of young people aged 15-24 in Africa is projected to reach 500 million in 2080. But as Prof. Kingsley Moghalu from the African School of Governance said at Harvard Universityâs African Development Conference in April last year, there is no guarantee that this will lead to positive outcomes for individual young people, countries or the continent as a whole. In order to enable all these amazing possibilities education is going to be a key factor in these emerging possibilities and scenarios.
There are few researchers, communicators or advocates of education across Africa more brilliant or well-placed than my guest this week to speak to these questions.
Dr. Modupe (Mo) Olateju is a fellow with the Center for Universal Education in the Global Economy and Development program at Brookings Institution. She is an international development specialist with expertise in public-private partnership in education with additional research interests in education innovation and foundational learning. She established The Education Partnership (TEP) Centre and led the organizationâs pioneering work in applied education research in Nigeria and across Africa for 10 years. She is also Board Chair at the Malala Fund and member of the Executive Board at Fab AI.
Links to Mo's work:
https://moolateju.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mo-adefeso-olateju/
https://www.brookings.edu/people/modupe-mo-olateju/
https://tepcentre.com/
Ref. Africa By 2040: The Future of Africaâs Youth. Keynote Address by Professor Kingsley Moghalu President, African School of Governance. Harvard Universityâs African Development Conference 2025, 12 April 2025. https://asg.ac/africa-by-2040-the-future-of-africas-youth/ -
In the current context of ubiquitous digital tech and runaway generative AI, you'd think that a book calling out our collective delusions about digital tools in relation to learning wouldn't make much of a splash! But Jared Cooney Horvath's latest book 'The Digital Delusion: How Classroom Technology Harms Our Kidsâ Learning -- And How To Help Them Thrive Again' (https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-digital-delusion-jared-horvath/1148995809?ean=9798218880378) is currently #1 on the Amazon bestseller list in Educational Psychology and has been receiving a lot of love, including from actor and educational activist, Hugh Grant, and author of The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt!
Jared is an old friend of the podcast, so I was really happy to invite him back on for a conversation about our shared concerns about the impacts that digital tech is having on our young people, the dubious motivations of Big Tech and the strange and growing alliance that is developing between people of all educational persuasions!
Jared Cooney Horvath (PhD, MEd) is a neuroscientist, educator, and best-selling author who specializes in human learning and brain development. He is the creator of The Learning Blueprint, an international award-winning program helping educators and students understand how learning actually works.
Jared has conducted research and taught at Harvard University, Harvard Medical School, and the University of Melbourne, and has worked with more than 1,000 schools around the world. He is the author of six books, has published over fifty research articles, and his work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Economist, Harvard Business Review, and ABCâs Catalyst.
Jared currently serves as Director of LME Global, an organization dedicated to bringing cutting-edge brain and behavioral science to educators, students, and communities.
Jared's website: lmeglobal.com
Jared's previous books: https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/8069909.Jared_Cooney_Horvath
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jared-cooney-horvath/
Previous episode with Jared on the podcast: https://www.goodimpactlabs.com/podcast/dr-jared-cooney-horvath
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In this final episode of 2025, you'll hear about some of the most exciting things happening around the world for pathways through the upper end of high school from the voices of the young people involved in them.
The final years of high school is often the 'business-end' of formal schooling, where we often demand that young people just knuckle down and suffer the "rigours" of high stakes standardised exams and college entrance tests. But these conversations really show you that alternatives to this are not only possible, but happening!
Too often, we can talk a great game of hyperbole and hubris about our apparently "paradigm-shifting" designs, but the young people actually experiencing them are telling a different story. What better way to get at the truth than by hearing from the young people themselves! So in this mini-series (5 episodes), you'll hear from 19 young people about their experiences of the kinds of competencies they feel they are learning and need to learn, what they find energising and enabling, and how they feel about the adults who are very often giving so much heart and hard work into this work, to support and guide them.
You'll hear about five empowering high school pathways and curriculum innovations:
the International Big Picture Learning Credential in Australia;the Greenstones at Green School Bali in Indonesia; the African Leadership Academy programme in South Africa;the IB Systems Transformation Pathway pilot programme at UWC South East Asia in Singapore and UWC Atlantic College in Wales;and the Global Impact Diploma, being run at a number of schools around the world including American International Schools in Lima, Peru, Budapest, Hungary and Bucharest, Romania.If you know of other innovations that you'd like to see featured on future mini-series, then please do share them with us at goodimpactlabs.com/contact.
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In this first episode in this Innovative Student Pathways mini-series, I had the huge pleasure of chatting with Monty, Eliza and Lydia, three amazing graduates of the International Big Picture Learning Credential. There are few, if any, other new pathways and credentials that have been as successful in obtaining university recognition for such radical alternatives to the standardised exam factory system and credential capital monopolies! The phenomenon that is Viv White, the founder of Big Picture Learning Australia has joined me previously on the podcast so you can find out more about what they're up to across Australia in that episode.
Previous episode with Viv White AM - https://www.goodimpactlabs.com/podcast/big-picture-learning-australia-a-conversation-with-viv-white
LinkedIn: @viv-white - â https://www.linkedin.com/in/viv-white-am-297642142/â
Instagram: @bigpicture.edu.au - â https://www.instagram.com/bigpicture.edu.au/â
@bigpiclearning - â https://www.instagram.com/bigpiclearning/â (US)
Website: https://www.bigpicture.org.au/
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