Warm Data in Education - A Conversation with Nora Bateson
Sep 3, 2023
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Nora Bateson, one of the most important thinkers challenging our current paradigm, discusses Warm Data and its relevance in education. The conversation covers the influence of eugenics, prefigurative culture, challenges in understanding and naming Warm Data, the role of art in communication, the tension between STEM and arts, and creating mutual learning in education.
Warm data is an overlooked form of deep, contextual information that should be valued in education.
Nora Bateson explores the influential work of her father and grandfather in biology, cognitive science, and systems theory.
Educators and parents should nurture curiosity, courage, and integrity to prepare young people for a complex and interconnected world.
Deep dives
The Role of Warm Data in Education
The podcast episode explores the concept of warm data and its implications for education. Warm data refers to the deep, implicit, and contextual information that is often overlooked in favor of decontextualized, quantitative data. The guest, Nora Bateson, discusses how the dominant paradigm of optimization and efficiency in education neglects the importance of warm data. She emphasizes the need for educators to pay attention to what is implied and to foster mutual learning through creating gaps. The role of an educator, according to Bateson, is not to fill empty vessels with information but to facilitate the exploration of connections and the development of relational sensitivity. By doing so, educators can support young people in navigating the complexities of the ever-changing world.
The History of Bateson's Family Influence
The podcast episode delves into the background of Nora Bateson's family and their significant contributions to fields such as biology, cognitive science, and anthropology. Bateson highlights the work of her grandfather, William Bateson, who coined the term genetics and emphasized the importance of studying how organisms change in context. She also mentions her father, Gregory Bateson, who was an influential thinker in the fields of cybernetics, systems theory, and complexity. Both William and Gregory Bateson challenged the prevailing ideas of eugenics and mechanistic thinking, advocating for a more relational and ecological approach to understanding the world. Bateson connects these family influences to her own work on warm data and ecological thinking in education.
Redefining Education and Parenting in the Context of Poly Crisis
The podcast episode explores the challenges and uncertainties faced by educators and parents in preparing young people for an interconnected and rapidly changing world. Nora Bateson discusses the tensions between the traditional focus on individuation and the emerging need for interdependency and ecological thinking. She questions the notion of defining success and preparing children for the future by fitting them into existing systems. Bateson challenges traditional parenting approaches that aim to create independent individuals and instead encourages embracing the complexities and paradoxes of the poly crisis. By nurturing curiosity, courage, and integrity in young people, she suggests that parents and educators can support them in navigating a future that requires collaborative problem-solving and sensitivity to relational processes.
Recognizing the Importance of Sensitivities and Implicit Learning
The podcast episode emphasizes the significance of sensitivities and implicit learning in education. It highlights the need to create spaces for mutual intergenerational learning, where perspectives and perceptions can be shaped through experiences rather than just propositional teaching. The example of an exercise where teachers and young children drew smells illustrates how this kind of immersive learning allows for a different way of perceiving and understanding the world beyond intellectualized theories. It challenges the idea of rigid categorization and encourages educators to embrace the art of teaching, where their enthusiasm and personal experiences can be shared to inspire curiosity in students.
The Value of Allowing Ideas to Evolve and Form in Their Own Time
The podcast episode emphasizes the importance of giving ideas and concepts space to develop and evolve naturally. It highlights that understanding complex systems and contexts cannot be achieved through instant gratification or rigid measurements. Using the metaphor of harvest, the episode encourages a patient and transformative approach to education, where ideas and stories can find new contexts and be shaped by their own movement. It emphasizes the interconnectedness of knowledge and the need for education that embraces ecology, where the possibilities of next year's rain are nurtured. This approach challenges the dominant cultural idea of finding fixed answers and instead encourages a more dynamic and open-ended perspective.
This week's episode is a wonderful conversation with Nora Bateson (https://batesoninstitute.org/nora-bateson/). In my opinion, Nora is one of the most important thinkers working today to challenge the dominant paradigm of optimization, separation and machine-like efficiency that pervades our institutions. She does so in her own beautiful style and in deep continuity with the ideas of her father, Gregory Bateson, and her grandfather, William Bateson, among many others. Nora's work with the International Bateson Institute (https://batesoninstitute.org/) brings the fields of biology, cognition, art, anthropology, psychology, and information technology together into a study of the patterns in ecology of living systems. She coined the term "Warm Data" and, as you will hear in our conversation, this was in response to the disproportionate credibility and authority given to information derived by decontextualizing. I have had the privilege of working with Nora and her team to explore what Warm Data means for the way schooling and education happens. If you would like to find out more, we are hosting some online sessions in early October and also visiting schools to run Warm Data Labs with young people, in partnership with International Baccalaureate. Nora is the author of Small Arcs of Larger Circles (https://www.triarchypress.net/small-arcs.html), released by Triarchy Press, in 2016. Her forthcoming book, Combining, which she is launching at an event in New York on September 30. You can find out more about the event here: https://nysgs.org/event-5402217
In our conversation you can hear Nora read two excerpts from the book - 'Mama Now' and 'Harvest'.
Nora also wrote, directed and produced the award-winning documentary, An Ecology of Mind, a portrait of her father, Gregory. http://www.anecologyofmind.com/
