Future Learning Design Podcast

Guy Claxton & Emily Poel

A recent guest, Prof. Tony Chemero highlighted that anthropology is one of the more underestimated and often excluded of the ‘cognitive sciences’. I completely agree and since I discovered it in the early 2000s when I did my undergraduate degree at the University of Sussex, I have personally experienced anthropology not as a subject discipline, but rather as a way of approaching the world and cognition itself. That's why this week I was so happy to bring together four amazing anthropologists who care deeply about educational transformations to explore these questions.
Pascale Mompoint-Gaillard, PhD
Pascale is a social psychologist, trainer and facilitator, researcher and CEO of Learn to Change, Change to Learn, bridging theory and practice working in the area of collective intelligence, cooperative and transformative learning, with 30 years of professional practice. Pascale’s PhD (2021) focused on ‘Conversation as a learning ecology’ and how professionals develop through engaging in online professional learning communities. She has co-authored several handbooks of which the European Reference Framework of Competences for a Democratic Culture (RFCDC), (Council of Europe, 2018) and the TASKs for Democracy handbook, (Council of Europe, 2015) dedicated to student and teacher competence. 
https://pascalemompoint.com/
Conversation as an Ecology of Learning
Education for change: 
https://share.google/8K1PEdbaYIgbRuRqF
Developing intercultural education in schools: 
https://share.google/Of1MSlVTmedxoQ9Gm
A European framework for Democratic citizenship in education: https://share.google/8QSEiz5cAmg3HQjHz
Corina Enache 
Corina is the founder and system worker at Kotka (which means ‘eagle’ in Finnish and ‘female cat’ in Polish!) a consultancy helping living things grow well. She is also the host of The Human Show podcast. Corina’s work sits at the intersection of leadership development, organisational development, and anthropology, and unfolds through learning, dialogue, and real-time practice. She draws on experience across international corporate environments, consulting, academia and European projects, and work with different ways of knowing — thinking, sensing, and intuition — while staying close to what is actually happening in the system.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/corinaenache/ 
https://kotka.world/ 
https://worldpodcasts.com/the-human-show/ 
Patrick Alexander
Patrick is a social anthropologist specialising in education, childhood and youth studies. Patrick’s research and teaching interests include the sociology of schooling, youth and youth subcultures, gender, ethnography, and social theory. He is Reader in Education and Anthropology in the School of Education, Oxford Brookes University, as well as Research Lead for the School of Education, and Director of the Centre for Educational Consultancy and Development (CECD), where he leads consultancy and contract research activity in the field of education.
Patrick is a Fulbright Scholar, Fellow of the RSA, HEA, Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI), and a Fellow of International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES). Patrick is also Research Fellow at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford and Editor of the journal Teaching Anthropology (https://teachinganthropology.org/ ).
https://www.brookes.ac.uk/profiles/staff/patrick-alexander 
https://patrickgalexander.org/about-3/  
Zineb Mouhyi
Zineb is a mother, daughter, writer, educator, scholar-activist, and PhD candidate in Anthropology and Social Change at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Zineb was also the co-founder of ⁠YouthXYouth⁠, a global organisation that she set up with Valentina Raman, to convene youth-led action around transforming education systems.
Young People are Reclaiming their Education and Making New Worlds Possible - A Conversation with Zineb Mouhyi (Ep185)
Sarah Pink (2025). ⁠Futures Anthropology for the Polycrisis⁠. Anthropological Forum, 1–18.

There aren’t many people who can say that they have learned their hard-won leadership lessons through the experience of steering an educational transformation across a whole country, let alone a country made up of nearly 300 million people across 17,000 islands! My guest in this episode, Dr. Iwan Syahril, has taken the time and care to reflect on some of these lessons in his fantastic new book, ‘Students, Students, Students!: The Human Journey in Leadership and System Transformation’. But he was also kind enough to join me to reflect on it on the podcast this week. As Iwan argues, the only way to align a massive, complex educational system transformation is a clear, simple purpose and to move away from bureaucratic jargon and complex policies to focus relentlessly on the child. And then for that transformation to be sustainable, it must be rooted in a society’s own values rather than imported models. For Indonesia, that meant drawing on the philosophy of Ki Hajar Dewantara and the spirit of gotong royong (mutual cooperation). 
Iwan is a global leader shaping the future of human-centered education in the age of AI. An authority on leading change at scale, he advises global organizations and governments on building resilient, future- ready systems. His expertise is grounded in his tenure as Director General at Indonesia's Ministry of Education, where he architected the Merdeka Belajar reforms, digitally empowering 3.3 million teachers and improving outcomes for 53 million students. A former Chair of the G20 Education Working Group, his strategic vision is informed by frontline experience teaching in Indonesia, the US, and Canada, and his leadership as Dean of Education at Sampoerna University. He holds graduate degrees from Columbia University, a dual PhD and Honorary Doctorate from Michigan State University, and a fellowship from HP-Cambridge.
His work now sits at the frontier of policy, practice, and technology, helping education systems move faster, fairer, and with greater resilience. In his book, Students, Students, Students!: The Human Journey in Leadership and System Transformation, he outlines many of the powerful principles for leading complex change.Iwan’s wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iwan_Syahril 
Iwan’s website: https://sites.google.com/view/studentsstudentsstudents/ 
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iwan.syahril/ 
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/iwansyahril

Cognition is a strange word and not a very commonly used word by practicing educators.  It feels academic and detached from the act of a group of young people learning in the world. 
But when you look at the dictionary definition of cognition – the "mental action or process of acquiring, storing, retrieving, and processing knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses" – this seems pretty fundamental to what we do as educators. But what if our understanding of what it means has been heavily biased by the Western modern scientific paradigm? For example, in the difference between learning the world and learning about the world via the linguistic labels and symbols that we create to represent aspects of it. 
My guest this week Jinan KB is offering a radically different description of what natural cognition or the biological roots of cognition actually are.  I absolutely love these kinds of conversations as they challenge me right at the edge of my understanding given my own conditioning into particular ways of knowing about the world. It also feels like a really alive part of what we're being asked to do now more broadly, to explore more generously and expansively the space of what is possible in order to think differently about the educational and societal predicaments in which we find ourselves.
Jinan is a researcher of natural cognition, cognitive autonomy, and the biological foundations of knowing. His work began with a simple but unsettling question: How do human beings naturally create knowledge? In 1991, Jinan stopped reading in order to investigate this question directly. For over four decades, he has explored this question through lived engagement with children, non-literate artisans, indigenous communities, design education, and everyday life. He is the author of Awakening Beauty and works with parents, educators, designers, researchers, and communities interested in recovering the conditions that allow human intelligence to flourish naturally.
Website: https://www.jinankb.in/ 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jinan-kb-5386676/ 

Impact of literacy on consequence: https://youtu.be/WG9uJN-UoSc?si=0sMtaGuwLe4sn9Py 

How do Children Create knowledge? How teaching is detrimental to a child's learning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3A-8iI4Py4 

What is Knowledge? Implicit and explicit knowledge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IhVFs4b8wA 

How schools and toys are damaging children? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z72rbcSpi7o 

Storytelling and Reading are damaging for children: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4ZVLDpfzLI 

Word and the World form two different Cognitive systems: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qHZNIEwio8&t=1s

"How do we learn what we already know?" (Carlos Alvarez Pereira). A lot of so-called innovation is old ideas, tried in a different place at a different time, packaged up in new wrapping to seem like a "new" idea. Whether it's from 50 years ago or 10000 years ago, there is a huge amount, if we're open to it, that we can learn from the accumulated wisdom of fellow humans making their way and learning in the world. My guest is this week is Richard Bawden who led Hawkesbury Agricultural College in Richmond, Australia in the 1970s and 80s. At that time and in that place, they were doing some incredible work using systemic and complexity-informed approaches to agriculture as rural development. There is so much resonance between the work that Richard and his colleagues were doing then and the changes taking place in educational ecosystems around the world today.
Richard was a Professor Emeritus of Western Sydney University (WSU, previously the University of Western Sydney [UWS]), and an honorary research fellow in the Office of Sustainability at WSU. He was one of the foundation professors (of Systemic Development) of WSU (in 1989) and its inaugural Dean of the Faculty of Agriculture and Rural Development. For the decade preceding that, he was Head of the School of Agriculture at Hawkesbury Agricultural College which was incorporated into the then UWS at its establishment. 
Below you will find a range of Richard's, and other's, writings about Hawkesbury if you would like to find out more:1.  Bawden, R.J. (2016). Transforming systems: The Hawkesbury initiatives in systemic development. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/21528586.2015.1131192
2.  Bawden, R.J. (2005). The Hawkesbury Experience: Tales from a Road Less Travelled. In: Pretty, J. (ed.) The Earthscan Reader in Sustainable Agriculture. Earthscan, London.
3.  Bawden, R.J. and Packham, R.G. (1993). Systemic Praxis in the Education of the Agricultural Systems Practitioner. Systems Practice, 6(1): 7–19. [Paper first presented at the1991 annual meeting of the International Society for the Systems Sciences,Österund, Sweden]
4.  Bawden, R.J. and Packham, R.G. (2023). Agriculture and the Environment: Ethical Issues. Chapter 6 in: Zimdahl, R. (ed.) Agricultural Ethics. Burleigh Dodds, London.
5.  Bawden, R.J. and Packham, R.G. (undated). Soft Systems Thinking, Soft Systems Practice and the Evolution of Systemic Development. Unpublished manuscript.6.  Bawden, R.J. (various / collected). Hawkesbury Chapters. Collected chapters including'The Community Challenge: The Learning Response', originally published in NewHorizons in Education, 99 (1999): 40–59; republished in Blackmore, C.P. (ed.)(2010).
7.  Bawden, R.J. (2005). Systemic Development at Hawkesbury: Some Personal Lessons from Experience. Systems Research and Behavioural Science, 22: 151–164.