The Learning Future Podcast with Louka Parry

In this eighth episode of the Stanford d.school spotlight; Scott Witthoft conjures radical innovative thinking, a fundamentally novel and useful way of looking at design via flexible prototyping! He is author of dschool guide This is a Prototype.What is a prototype, how can we approach their design and creation, and what is their utility? Scott Witthoft works as an educator, designer, and author. Drawing from his past practice of forensic structural engineering, he incorporates that expertise with current pursuits in space, furniture, and product design—teaching and speaking widely. He is the co-author of Make Space, a tool for creating collaborative environments. His work has been featured in The Design Museum and publications such as Fast Company, Architecture and Urbanism, and Metropolis. This Is a Prototype: The Curious Craft of Exploring New Ideas by Scott Witthoft and Stanford d.school.Part of the Stanford d.school’s collection of creativity and design books, this guide presents practical tools, guidance and methods for creating a prototype to test an idea, which anyone can use to confidently turn the unknowns of a new idea into a learning experience. Hosted by The Learning Future’s very own Louka Parry, indulge your cortex in some modern thinking at the forefront of educational design with our amazing guest.Transcription upon request - e-mail hello@thelearningfuture.com

In this seventh episode of the Stanford d.school spotlight; Lisa Kay Solomon gives a peek of the thoughts around her upcoming book about her recent innovative civics exercises with learners. Are our systems designed for short term rewards and is the design of civics and business at odds with the future? The conversation features a broad range of topics from design, futures, civics, the importance of agency to extra high-quality civics education. Futures thinking, practices, and mindsets are teachable and learnable. How might we think differently about the image of the future that we could bring to life, to be a shaper as opposed to a reactor. It might seem hard, but we can start small. Lisa Kay Solomon is a futures and design educator, author, and social entrepreneur focused on helping people develop the leadership skills to become active, compassionate agents of positive change. With nearly over 20 years of design, scenario-planning, and leadership work, Lisa’s work focuses on the question: How do we help leaders and learners of all ages not just prepare for the future, but help them develop the mindsets, skillsets and practices required to shape more sustainable, inclusive, robust futures? Named to the Thinkers50 2022 Radar List, Lisa co-authored the bestselling books Moments of Impact: How to Design Strategic Conversations that Accelerate Change, and Design A Better Business: New Tools, Skills, and Mindset and Strategy for Innovation, which has been translated into over a dozen languages. Lisa created the popular LinkedIn Learning Courses Leading Like a Futurist and Redesigning How We Work for 2021, and has written extensively on helping leaders productively navigate ambiguity through teachable and learnable practices.Currently a Designer in Residence and Lecturer at Stanford University’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, Lisa teaches a variety of futures-oriented classes, including one of the d.school's most popular courses, Inventing the Future, which exposes students to practices of applied imagination, strategic foresight, immersive world building, and creativity. Lisa’s course design utilizes immersive experiences like participating in 50 year future utopia and dystopia debates on emerging technology in order to move beyond questions of “can we build it?” to "should we build it?” As one student commented after the class, “I used to think that thinking about the future was a gene intrinsic to talent, and now I think I have the skills and tools to shape it myself." In 2021, she launched The Futures Series at the Stanford d.school, which brought diverse futures thinkers from around the world to share and democratize future-shaping practices. Guests included Dr. Lonny Brooks and Ahmed Best on Afrofutures, Meredith Hutchison and Aisha Bain on Ancestral Intelligence, Leah Zaidi on WorldBuilding, Minister Faust on Science Fiction and Pro-social competitions, and Riel Miller on UNESCO’s Future Literacy, among others. She also initiated experiential professional development programs such as “Afro-Rithms in Classrooms” with the National Writing Project, and workshops focused on building futures literacies such as building empathy for the future and navigating time scales and polarities.Lisa is passionate about connecting her work between boardrooms to classrooms, bringing her work with executives and leaders at multinational companies to leaders and educators in K12 schools. She recently launched a new podcast called New View EDU, co-hosted with the National Association of Independent Schools, to help school leaders shift their posture and priorities to infuse K12 education with imagination, social and emotional wellbeing, and creative agency for the future. Named one of ixDA’s Women of Design 2020, Lisa is also the founder and driving force beyond Vote by Design, Building America’s Teammates, and #AllVoteNoPlay, a national initiative which transforms Election Day as a day “off” from official collegiate athletic activities into a day “on” for civic engagement. Working closely with college coaches, civic educational leaders and student leaders, the experiential programs reached tens of thousands of young voters, coaches, and administrators in relevant, accessible, meaningful civic learning and action. Lisa’s work in the civics arena is focused on helping next generation voters grow in their own sense of power and agency over the futures they want to inhabit. Through creating design-driven, agency-oriented programs with a bias toward changemaking action, Lisa aims to empower young people to create a more just and inclusive world.Hosted by The Learning Future’s very own Louka Parry, indulge your cortex in some modern thinking at the forefront of educational design with our amazing guest.Transcription upon request - e-mail hello@thelearningfuture.com

In this sixth episode of the Stanford d.school spotlight; Barry Svigals gives a peek of the thoughts around his book Changing the Conversation about School Safety. Published as a d.school guide. Read it here: https://issuu.com/stanforddschool/docs/changingtheconversationaboutschoolsafety-k12lab.Can over-securing reduce feelings of enjoyment and senses of safety? How does might an obsession with safety present obstacles and challenges when designing learning environments and systems?Barry Svigals offers a brave and bold approach to safety in schools from a unique and close perspective of school shootings and the following decision making. After all the safest place to learn would be a reinforced concrete padded box but we could imagine a-lot would be lost in such environments.Design for our environments and systems should be a way that isn't static and involve those who best know the environment, people, and the dynamic of safety in the context of creating a learning environment that will enliven and delight students of all ages.Barry' Svigals is an artist, architect, musician, keynote speaker and thought leader, Barry Svigals is helping communities and organizations become more creative and collaborative, making places that express who they are. Trained as both an artist and an architect, he wove those two worlds together in the founding of an architecture+art firm which he led for over 30 years.  Work, play, surprise, and fun are all part of the collective effort to infuse “making with meaning.” At the heart of it all is his passion to challenge his own creativity as well as the creativity of others in service of what is needed in the world. A graduate of Yale College and the Yale School of Architecture, Barry also studied sculpture at the École Nationale Supèrieure des Beaux Arts in Paris. Along the way he enjoyed another kind of education playing rock and roll in with a band that still plays today. All of that contributed to a long list of projects for diverse clients, among them major universities such as Yale, Boston College and the University of Connecticut as well as major corporations and institutions such PepsiCo and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Residential clients included Keith Richards and Patti Hansen as well as Garry Trudeau and Jane Pauley. The firm’s best known project is the Sandy Hook School in Newtown, Connecticut completed in 2016.In addition to speaking engagements, Barry is currently preparing for an exhibition of his paintings in Italy in spring 2020 and is working on a book, How We Are Matters, which will be published in late 2019.Hosted by The Learning Future’s very own Louka Parry, indulge your cortex in some modern thinking at the forefront of educational design with our amazing guest.thelearningfuture.com

In this fifth episode of the Stanford d.school spotlight; Susie Wise, author of Design for Belonging: How to Build Inclusion and Collaboration in Your Communities clarifies the subject and discusses how she arrived at the approaches of her book. Published as a d.school guide.The feeling of belonging is a fundamental human need. It's how we know we can show up, be ourselves, and thus enables learning. From a design perspective, we need to understand the feeling of belonging - and understand how to get there. Creating opportunity for belonging to emerge.Dr. Susie Wise is a design leader with experience in the education, tech, and the social sectors. She coaches leaders in equity design and innovation practices. She teaches at the d.school at Stanford and coaches with the Mira Fellowship. Previously she founded and directed the K12 Lab at the d.school and co-created Liberatory Design.Design for Belonging provides tools that any group or organisation may use to build inclusion. These might be rituals that bring us together, spaces that keep us calm, roles that create a sense of responsibility, and systems that make us feel respected.Hosted by The Learning Future’s very own Louka Parry, indulge your cortex in some modern thinking at the forefront of educational design with our amazing guest.thelearningfuture.com

In the fourth instalment of the Stanford d.school spotlight; Ashish Goel, author of Drawing on Courage: Risks Worth Taking and Stands Worth Making discusses the life canvas, inspirations, insights, and sources for him to publish his most recent book. Published as a d.school guide.Ashish forms a strong case for courage, the depth of courage, which is often only granted thankful or cursory visitations, is vast and the source of a-lot of power. Courage plays a role in learning, growth and development, and allows us to live fuller lives individually and collectively. From examples of every day life to decisions in the big-tech business realms: This sources and the universality of approaches to risk; this conversation offers a great taster for the themes discussed in his most recent book and d.school guide. For example fears, values form a scaffold from which to build an action.Ashish Goel is a designer, teacher and entrepreneur. He is a former teaching fellow at the Stanford d.school where he taught classes on design thinking, digital product design and mapmaking. He is also the former head of design at Zomato (India's Doordash and Yelp rolled into one!). He is the author of a new book, Drawing on Courage: Risks Worth Taking and Stands Worth Making, part of a series of guides being published by the Stanford d.school.He advises tech companies in the art and science of product design and is drawing on his courage by building Boca, an D2C sparkling water business based in India.Hosted by The Learning Future’s very own Louka Parry, indulge your cortex in some modern thinking at the forefront of educational design with our amazing guest.thelearningfuture.com

In the third spotlight of the Stanford d.school guides; Carissa Carter, author of The Secret Language of Maps: How to Tell Visual Stories with Data helps us navigate the far horizons and surprisingly detailed depths of maps. Maps are biased towards any number of variables - often driven by agenda or intention of the mapmakers. Carissa acts as a cartographer of the multi-faceted fields of mapmaking - discussing the dynamic effects of our maps on our real world perception and inversely our lenses and intention on our maps, their uses, gems of wisdom, and pitfalls.For an introductory example to see our how our world can portrayed in novel often wacky maps for yourself and your students, Carissa recommends https://worldmapper.org/. Carissa Carter is the Academic Director and an Adjunct Professor at the Stanford d.school. In this role she guides the development of the d.school’s pedagogy, leads its instructors, and shapes its class offering. She teaches courses on the intersection of data and design, designing with emerging technologies, and design for climate change. Carissa was one of the co-leaders of Stanford 2025, a multi-year d.school project that envisioned the future of higher education. Her work on designing with machine learning and blockchain has earned multiple design accolades, including Fast Company Innovation and Core77 Design Awards. Carissa’s first career was in the geosciences. As a geomorphologist she studied subglacial deposits, slot canyon incision, and bedforms and cross-bedding. She continues to pursue projects at the crossover between design and science. Maps, and the experiences they create, are a consistent thread in her work. Her book, The Secret Language of Maps: How to Tell Visual Stories with Data is forthcoming in April 2022. Carissa holds a B.A. in Geoscience from Williams College, an M.S. in Earth Science from U.C. Santa Cruz, and an M.S. Engineering–Product Design from Stanford University. She’s taken a photo at 6:06pm every day, for more than a decade.Hosted by The Learning Future’s very own Louka Parry, indulge your cortex in some modern thinking at the forefront of educational design with our amazing guest.thelearningfuture.com

In this second instalment of the Stanford d.school spotlight; Kelly Schmutte, co-author of Navigating Ambiguity: Creating Opportunity in a World of Unknowns (alongside Andrea Small, illustrated by Reina Takahashi) shares ideas about confidently approaching ambiguity and ambiguous situations with confident curiosity. She discusses how ambiguity should be seen as an asset, it enables freedom of outcome, a malleability of approach that allows for creative learning and action.Kelly Schmutte is a designer, educator, and entrepreneur. At the d.school she designs learning experiences with lasting impact, reimagining the future of higher education (Stanford 2025), creating life tools for high schoolers, and building out the Navigating Ambiguity curriculum. Kelly teaches core d.school classes alongside d.school founder David Kelley. She and her ballet shoe start-up, PerfectFit Pointe, were featured in theNew York Times.Hosted by The Learning Future’s very own Louka Parry, indulge your cortex in some modern thinking at the forefront of educational design with our amazing guest.thelearningfuture.com

The first feature of the Stanford d.school spotlight has Laura McBain and Dr Ronald Beghetto, authors of My Favorite Failure. They share ideas about consciously engineering learning and experience with uncertainty and surprise as an ingredient. Perhaps we are too rigorously over-engineering education and human experience to the point of unnatural predictability? Ronald and Laura discuss how they believe there can be good in risks and unplanned experiences, and how we might form healthy and beneficial relationships with failure as a way to build resilience and better inform pedagogy and practice.Hosted by The Learning Future’s very own Louka Parry, indulge your cortex in some modern thinking at the forefront of educational design with our two amazing guests: Laura McBain (@laura_mcbain) is a designer, educator and serves as co-managing director of the Stanford d.school and the co-director of the K12 Lab. Her work focuses on how human-centered design can be used to provide equitable and innovative educational experiences that will help all students thrive in a changing world. In this role she leads design challenges in education, designs new learning experiences for educators and serves as an adjunct professor at Stanford University. She is the author of My Favorite Failure: How Setbacks Can Lead to Learning and Growth which provides insights and narratives into how you can create the conditions to take risks and experience failure together. Prior to the d.school, Laura worked for 15 years at High Tech High serving as the Director of External Relations, principal of two school sites and a founding teacher. She has taught middle and high school students in both charter comprehensive schools. Laura has a Bachelors from Miami University-Oxford, Ohio and a Masters from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Dr Beghetto is an internationally recognized expert on creative thought and action in educational settings.  He holds the Pinnacle West Presidential Chair and serves as a Professor in the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State University. Dr. Beghetto is the Editor for the Journal of Creative Behavior, Editor for Review of Research in Education, Series Editor for Creative Theory and Action in Education (Springer Books), and has served as a creativity advisor for LEGO Foundation and the Cartoon Network.He is also a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, the Society for the Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts (Div. 10, APA), and the International Society for the Study of Creativity and Innovation (ISSCI).  He is the 2018 recipient of the Rudolf Arnheim Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts and 2008 recipient of Daniel E. Berlyne Award from Div. 10 of the American Psychological Association.  Dr Beghetto has received recognition and numerous awards for excellence in teaching, including the University of Oregon 's highest teaching award for early career faculty (2006 Ersted Crystal Apple Award), the 2015 ALD Faculty of the Year Award at the University of Connecticut, and the Provost's Recognition for Excellence in Teaching (University of Connecticut).His prior appointments include Professor of Educational Psychology, Director of UCONN's Innovation House, and Graduate Program Coordinator for the Cognition, Instruction, Learning, & Technology Program in the Neag School of Education at the University of Connecticut.   He also previously served as the College of Education's Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, Associate Professor of Education Studies at the University of Oregon, and Faculty-in-Residence for Research and Evaluation Projects for UO's Center on Diversity and Community (CoDaC). Dr Beghetto earned his Ph.D. in Educational Psychology from Indiana University (with an emphasis in Learning, Cognition and Instruction).

View CSE paper 06 titled “Learning on purpose” by Charles Leadbeater and the Student Agency Lab and also, CSE paper 07 titled “Learning in a floating world of disciplines: Reflections on the MetaPraxis Project” by Michael Bunce.Louka reviews the amazing takeaways shared by frontline educators during AISSA’s agency lab 3-year project featuring lessons of agency from Charles Leadbeater and stories of the MetaPraxis Project, chiefly designed by Michael Bunce. Louka also shares excitement for the upcoming season 6 with Stanford’s dschool guide spotlight series, releasing late June 2022.

Featured Guests: Karen Schoff - Good Shepherd SchoolVeronika Crilley - St. Johns GrammarJoyanne Gardner - St. Johns GrammarMetaPraxis is a 3-year approach led by educational philosopher and researcher Michael Bunce. MetaPraxis educators experience going beyond disciplines to move into the multi-dimensionality of learning, fusing knowledge skills, and capabilities so that our young people may thrive into their future. How might we bring about agency, cognitive skills, creativity, and design thinking; and couple that with an awareness to transfer these skills to transcend current boundaries? True meta-disciplinary work.In part four, Michael talks with three educators about their experience with MetaPraxis.See more of MetaPraxis project & get involved:https://www.metapraxisproject.orgthelearningfuture.com