Coconut Thinking

How might learning be flow between structure and emergence? How might we measure impact quantitatively and qualitatively?In this episode, I speak with Michael Bunce. Michael is an educator, researcher, and interdisciplinary sound artist, with wide-ranging international experience across education and the arts. As an educational researcher, he specialises in interdisciplinary learning design and innovation, working in leadership, teaching, research, and consultancy roles in schools, arts and community organisations, regulatory and advisory bodies, and universities.You'll want to check out http://www.learningmap.education/ for the visuals. This isn't a light conversation, yet Michael's work provides valuable insights into pedagogy and the cyclical and dynamic nature of learning, going from structured, to semi-structured, to emergent, to embedded forms of learning. Michael challenges us to reconsider how we might conceptualize learning. We discuss:🥥 Emergent learning as an unpredictable process that arises when learners have agency and are the source of knowledge creation;🥥 How content, capacity, and context find different value depending on the learning experience we have and need;🥥 How we can tell different narratives of learning that include stories of impact.Check us out on www.coconut-thinking.com

What might flourishing look like as collective and individual experiences entangled in environment?Eri Mountbatten-O'Malley is a Senior lecturer in education policy at Bath Spa University and is also a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. His research is philosophical in nature and helps us to better understand social problems and social research. Eri’s central pedagogical interest is in nurturing critical thinking and complex concept development in students. Eri’s research interests are at the cross-roads between epistemology and ethics. In particular, he is interested in using philosophical skills to better understand social problems. His interests in concepts such as ‘well-being’ and ‘happiness’ led him to focus his PhD research on a conceptual analysis of ‘human flourishing. He has had the opportunity to share his research and read papers at numerous international conferences on the problems of reductionist accounts of normative concepts such as ‘wonder’ and ‘human flourishing’, and will be reading further papers over the coming year on related topics. We discuss:🥥 How flourishing happens where the inner and outer worlds inter/intra-act;🥥 How empiricism requires conceptual understanding that cannot easily be measured; 🥥 The dynamic nature of language as encounter.Check us out on www. coconut-thinking. com

How might we tell new stories open up our imagination to what is possible?In this episode, I speak with Cindy Forde. Cindy’s career has been dedicated to transforming how we understand and act as human beings towards Earth. She works globally with leaders across sectors in education, communication and sustainability including University of Cambridge and the UN, and believes the biggest impact we can have in making change is how we, as a global community, shape the mind-set of our children. In 2022, her children’s book “Bright New World” came out. Cindy is the founder of Planetari, an organization that sets out a new vision for education, to enable all children to understand our planet as a living system and to have the capacity for creativity and innovation to be able to live successfully here. Prior to  Planetari, Cindy led the Cambridge Science Centre as CEO and the Blue Marine Foundation as Managing Director. We discuss: 🥥 The importance of storytelling for us to imagine and then create possibilities for new a new worlds; 🥥 How healing ourselves (including the planet) begins by listening to one another with open hearts and minds;🥥 How ecological breakdown finds its roots in colonialism and our spirit of extraction.Check out our website: www.coconut-thinking.com. You'll find our articles and resources.

How might we transform our relationality with the world, as the world, especially the non-human world?In this episode, I speak with Rūta Žemčugovaitė. Rūta is a writer, artist, and researcher, working with mycelium for regenerative futures. With a background in Psychology, she learned to facilitate trauma healing and shadow work in Costa Rica and now works with technology, mycology (and trying to build things out of mycelium), affective computing, spatial sound design, creating art, regenerative practices, and writing. Rūtais a philosopher, flirts with post-humanism, and asks how we can design with the living world in mind. We discuss: 🥥 How humans are embedded in the ecosystems around it, meaning that if we increase the thriving of the non-human, we increase the thriving of the human;🥥 How de-centering the human opens up spaces to changing our relationality [with/as] the living world, toward more regenerative approaches to life. 🥥 How we can re-draw the boundaries of our identities and idon'thave to stick to "human."Check out our website: www.coconut-thinking.comCheck out Rūta's consultancy: https://www.sympoiesis.world/

What might happen when the landscape is our place of learning?In this episode, I speak with Luis Alberto Camargo. Luis was named the 2023 Richard Louv Prize recipient, in recognition of his life’s work, which has impacted 130,000 children and youth across Colombia. Luis is Founder and Executive Director of Organización para la Educación y Protección Ambiental (OpEPA - Colombia & USA), Co-Founder of The Weaving Lab, Core member of Regenerative Communities Network and Founder of Colombia Regenerativa, and Director at Thundra Outdoors. Global Change Leader, Young Global Leader (2008), Ashoka Fellow. Prior, he held a number of roles, including Adviser to the Vice-Minister of Environment of Colombia, Adviser to the Department of National Planning, Researcher at Universidad de los Andes and WWF, Wilderness Medicine Instructor at the Wilderness Medicine Institute of the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) as well as wilderness educator in the US. We discuss:🥥 Listening to the silence as means of connecting and convening;🥥 Ways in which schools in urban settings can re-connect with/as Nature within their context;🥥 How if we want to live as Nature, we must learn as Nature.Check out our website: www.coconut-thinking.com.

What might it be like if we approached education and business as if we belonged to the living world?In this conversation, I speak with Gil Friend. Gil, a systems ecologist and business strategist, is widely considered a founder of the sustainable business movement. He is noted for inspiring, challenging, and supporting business, policy, and investment leaders to rethink business in light of the challenges posed by climate change and sustainability. Joel Makower describes him as "one of the most thoughtful and creative thinkers I know in the area of sustainable business, adeptly bridging the scientific and technical aspects of sustainability with the practical realities of the business world and its impact on people and the systems in which they operate." Gil is the founder and CEO of Natural Logic Inc., a strategy boutique advising the world's leading companies on building "massive value" through business-integrated sustainability strategies. He is an inaugural member of the Sustainability Hall of Fame and was named "one of the 10 most influential sustainability voices in America" by The Guardian. He is also recognized as one of the Bay Area's "top 25 movers and shakers" in CleanTech. Our discussion includes:🥥 How can we reconsider capitalism to be reciprocal, not extractive; caring, not alienating; regenerating, not just generating for the few?🥥 What would happen if we went to school to learn in order to contribute to all life, rather than simply attending prestigious institutions like Oxbridge?🥥 Approaching capital (of all kinds, not just financial) in ways that meet the needs of all life, re-evaluating even what those needs are systemically rather than individually.Check out our website: www.coconut-thinking.com

How might the stories we tell about the future help us bring about the futures we want?In this episode, I speak with Will Richardson. Will was a guest on the podcast a couple of years ago, and it's fascinating to notice how he his thinking has both shifted and stayed strong. A former public school educator of 22 years, Will has spent the last 18 years developing an international reputation as a leading thinker and writer about the intersection of social online learning networks, education, and systemic change. Most recently, Will is a co-founder of The Big Questions Institute which was created to help educators use "fearless inquiry" to make sense of this complex moment and an uncertain future. We discuss:🥥 Moving from a culture of teaching to a culture of learning;🥥 Telling oral futures, stories of how we imagine we will be in a decade or two and working together toward those stories;🥥 How more and more of us realize we are at a tipping point, opening hope for change toward more education for sustainability (and perhaps regeneration)Check out our website: www.coconut-thinking.com

Cordell Jacks, Co-founder and CEO of Regenerative Capital Group, discusses how capital can create net positive systemic change. They explore the concept of regenerative capital, its distinction from traditional capitalism, and its impact on stakeholders. The chapter also delves into Cordell Jax's journey and the vetting process for selecting entrepreneurs for investment. They emphasize the importance of joy and regenerative pursuits in their work.

How might we approach life from Nature's paradigm rather than from the dominant paradigm?In this episode, I speak with Denise DeLuca. Denise is the founder of Wild Hazel. She is an adjunct faculty and the former Director of MCAD’s Sustainable Design program. She was co-founder of BCI: Biomimicry Creative for Innovation, a network of creative professional change agents driving ecological thinking for radical transformation. Denise is the author of the book Re-Aligning with Nature: Ecological Thinking for Radical Transformation. She also teaches with the Amani Institute.Denise’s previous roles include Education Director for the International Living Future Institute, Project Manager for Swedish Biomimetics 3000, and Outreach Director for The Biomimicry Institute. Denise is a licensed civil engineer (PE) and holds a master’s degree in civil and environmental engineering with a focus on modelling landscape-scale surface and groundwater interactions. In addition, Denise is a Biomimicry Fellow and a member of the Advisory Council of The Biomimicry Institute,  Board Member of the International Society of Sustainability Professionals (ISSP), on the editorial board of the Journal of Bionic Engineering, and anExpert with Katerva.We discuss: 🥥 Emergent abundance as means of cultivating ego-less, curious, and thriving relationships, thinking, and feeling;🥥 How we can learn as Nature, not always from or about Nature, which is a shift in how we respond to the world (away from problem-solution mindsets)🥥 How imagining and describing the world we want to create opens up new possibilities for non-linear thinking and ways of becoming.Check out our website: www.coconut-thinking.comCheck out Wild Hazel: www.wildhazel.net

In this episode, I speak with Stefan Bauschard. Stefan is the Co-founder of educating4ai.com; the Owner of DebateUS.org, the Executive Co-Director of the New York City Urban Debate League and the Debate Coach @ Lakeland Schools. He is also the author of several substance articles that have received a tremendous amount of attention in the way they challenge us to re-think assessment, re-think our ways or learning, and re-think our relationships with evidencing what we can do... all due to AI. We discuss:🥥 How AI will be able to teach learners certain things better than any human ever could;🥥 How AI will end the primacy of single artifact assessments, in favor of more creative, individualized ways to demonstrate understanding;🥥 The notion that educators in the future will be those who care about and enjoy spending time with kids.Check our our website: www.coconut-thinking.comYou can find Stefan's substance articles here: https://stefanbauschard.substack.com/