Future Learning Design Podcast

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.

What are the questions we should be asking of the radically new and rapidly accelerating technologies that we are all living with now? Where are the possibilities? What are we hungry for? Where are the challenges and dangers? What are our responsibilities as care-givers, parents, educators and policy makers? How are we creating opportunities for our young people to really connect with themselves, with each other and with the world; to develop their own perceptual and relational capacities? This week’s episode is a wonderful reflective space exploring these profound questions with Nora Bateson, Zak Stein and Olli-Pekka Heinonen.
This episode begins with a dialogue between Nora, Zak and Olli-Pekka, which was recorded as part of the Warm Data Lab Host training online earlier this year. The second part of this episode is then a dialogue that Nora, Zak and I shared on the way in which warm data is meeting many of the challenges being raised now by the ubiquitousness of advanced artificial intelligence in our young people’s lives and learning, as well as the very exciting ideas being shared by Nora, from her father Gregory Bateson’s work on ‘second order teaching’, being published in a new book edited by Phillip Guddemi, entitled Gregory Bateson's 'Ecology of Mind': The Course.
Nora Bateson is the Founder and President of the International Bateson Institute (https://batesoninstitute.org/) and currently serves as President of the International Federation for Systems Research (IFSR). Nora is the author of Small Arcs of Larger Circles (2016), and Combining (2023), both published by Triarchy Press. Nora also wrote, directed and produced the award-winning documentary, An Ecology of Mind, a portrait of her father, Gregory Bateson: ⁠http://www.anecologyofmind.com/⁠.
Nora’s new book Belly is launching the same day that this episode is released, July 19th 2026, at a special event in London! You can find out more here: https://www.warmdata.life/belly-book-launch-2026. And you can pre-order a copy of the book here: https://www.triarchypress.net/belly.html. You can also find out more about Warm Data Lab Host training here: https://www.warmdata.life/wdtraining 
Also check out Ep116 'Warm Data in Education' (Sept '23).  
⁠Dr. Zak Stein (https://www.zakstein.org/)⁠ is a philosopher of education, psychologist, futurist, and author. He is a founding member of the AI Psychological Research Coalition, The Civilization Research Institute and the ⁠The Consilience Project⁠ (a publication of the CRI), with Daniel Schmachtenberger. Zak is also co-founder of ⁠Lectica, Inc.⁠ (with Dr. Theo Dawson), and the Center for World Philosophy and Religion.
Zak is the author of ⁠Social Justice and Educational Measurement⁠ and ⁠Education in a Time Between Worlds: Essays on the Future of Schools, Technology, and Society⁠.
Also check out Ep106 'The Philosopher and the Neuroscientist (with Mary Helen Immordino-Yang)' (May '23).
Olli-Pekka Heinonen is a Finnish political leader, educator, and Director General of the International Baccalaureate (IB). He served as Finland’s Minister of Education and Science and later as State Secretary to the Prime Minister, before becoming Director General of the Finnish National Agency for Education. At the IB, he leads a global education organisation that reaches 2 million students annually in more than 160 countries. It is known for its rigorous programmes and its mission to develop inquiring, knowledgeable and caring young people. He is the author of the recently published and very popular book: Learning as If Life Depended on It: Why We Must See the World Anew, and Figure Out What Follows, published by Perspectiva Press (find out more here: https://www.opheinonen.com/)
Also check out Ep41 'On Leading a Learning System' (March 2021) and Ep212 ‘Learning as If Life Depended on It’ (October 2025).

There are amazing people building innovative and responsive educational alternatives all over the world right now. They are seeing challenges in their communities and not waiting for others to act, or waiting for systems to change, but creating, connecting and building themselves. Today's episode is with one such person who is doing this incredible work in some of the most resource constrained environments in Nakivale Refugee Settlement. Munguzo Kapera is a refugee systems builder and educational entrepreneur, removing barriers to information, skills, and opportunity for displaced people. He is the founder of the CAMPUS Digital Hub (https://campusdigitalhub.org/) and creator of the ConnectRefugee app (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.connectrefugee.userug&hl=en_GB).
Munguzo is also an alumnus of the International Training Centre of the International Labour Organization (ITCILO) (https://www.itcilo.org/) and an advisory board member of Kiron (https://www.kiron.ngo/).
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/munguzo-jean/