Coconut Thinking

What would it take for us to respond to the planetary Crisis with our collective imagination(s)?This is a special episode: a conversation between three thinker-doers around this question. Their complementary backgrounds augment the importance of the message.Penny Hay is an artist and educator, Research Fellow in the Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries, Reader in Creative Teaching and Learning, Senior Lecturer in Arts Education at Bath Spa University and Director of Research for House of Imagination, an arts research charity.Andy Middleton brings over 30 years of experience as Managing Director and Chief Exploration Officer at the TYF Group, which creates experiences that help people connect deeply to nature and purpose to trigger transformative shifts in life and at work. He is also a Partner at NOW Partners and one of the most versatile people I know.Joanna Choukeir is the Director of Design and Innovation at the RSA. She is a life-centric designer with serveal hats: practitioner, entrepreneur, thought leader, and educator. Previously, Joanna was Health Director at FutureGov and had spent 10 years leading Uscreates – a service design agency for health and wellbeing.We discuss:🥥 The connectedness and interdependence of all things, including the crises we face as a civilization and alongside all other life forms—there is but one Crisis;🥥 The importance of creating safe spaces for imagination if we are to respond to the Crisis as connected to ourselves and all life;🥥 How values underpin learning rather than curriculum and thus should be cared for ecologically.Check out the Coconut Thinking website https://coconut-thinking.design, where you'll find our articles, podcasts, conference presentations, resources, and more.

In this episode, I speak with D'Arcy Lunn and Kenny Peavy.D'Arcy is the Group Head of Sustainability & Global Citizenship at Education in Motion. For the past 20 years, D'Arcy has experienced more than 90 countries, given over 1300 presentations to 120,000+ people, and worked with leading development, environmental, social justice, and global education organizations and people. His self-initiated concept and organization, Teaspoons of Change, focuses on the personal choices, decisions, and actions that have a positive impact on people and the planet.Kenny holds several roles at Green School Bali. He's been teaching in the region for 20+ years as a science teacher and expedition leader in Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia, and Vietnam. Kenny speaks, writes, and supports teachers to create experiences that take learners outside in order to love nature and feel connected with nature. He's ridden a bamboo bicycle from Thailand to Bali to raise awareness for sustainability and paddled a kayak while circumnavigating Phuket, Thailand to spotlight marine conservation issues in Southeast Asia.We discuss:🥥 How can we cultivate our connections with nature by finding opportunities to go outside;🥥 How the reality is that we are nature and the rest is make-believe;🥥 Exploring how we are global citizens without getting caught up in the "hairy spider's" web of what that means.Check out the Coconut Thinking website https://coconut-thinking.design, where you'll find our articles, podcasts, conference presentations, resources, and more.

In this episode, I speak with Michelle Blanchet. Michelle is the founder of the Educators’ Lab, which supports teacher-driven solutions to educational challenges. Michelle is the co-author of The Startup Teacher Playbook, and  Preventing Polarization: 50 Strategies for Teaching Kids About Empathy, Politics, and Civic Responsibility. She has worked with organizations like PBS Education, the Center for Transformative Teaching and Learning, the Center for Curriculum Redesign, and Ashoka. We discuss: 🥥 Social entrepreneurship as purpose that changes our understanding of process and outcome;🥥 The important of students learning the skills they will need, which depend on the students, but also on the coherence with the world we want to bring about;🥥 How critical it is to engage in civic society in order to shape policy, the most effective means of change on a larger scale.Check out the Coconut Thinking website https://coconut-thinking.design, where you'll find our articles, podcasts, conference presentations, resources, and more.

In this episode, I speak with Joe Rice. Joe is the Co-founding Director of Philips Indigenous Education Network, specializing in holistic learning for well-being rooted in Nature. The mission of Phillips Indian Educators is to dramatically improve education for Native American students by insuring that all educators of Native American students incorporate indigenous best practices into their teaching, and to continuously work towards a Native consensus of what those best practices are and should be. Joe has over 40 years' experience as an administrator, teacher, and advocate for indigenous education. We discuss:🥥 How we often see the world through artificial constructs, illusions that prevent us from connecting to the coherence of the world;🥥 Letting go of control and linearity in education to make space for play and creativity;🥥 Telling a different story, not one of individualism, but rather one of how we are all related, including to the more than human world.Check out the Coconut Thinking website https://coconut-thinking.design, where you'll find our articles, podcasts, conference presentations, resources, and more.

In this episode, I speak with Dean Bragonier. Dean is an entrepreneur, public speaker, and advocate for people with dyslexia. He is the founder of NoticeAbility, a non-profit organization that aims to empower students with dyslexia to recognize and use their unique strengths to achieve success in education and life. This is a conversation about what happens when we approach learning—and life!—from abundance, not scarcity. It also speaks to what can happen when we appreciate the unique gifts and points of view that we each bring. We discuss:🥥 How what we have learned about teaching people with dyslexia can apply to all learners, perhaps re-framing what schools should be;🥥 Purpose as a powerful energy for learning and growing (we even came up with the word "teleodiversity");🥥 How responding to the crises we are in requires the unleashing of imagination and diversity.Check out the Coconut Thinking website https://coconut-thinking.design, where you'll find our articles, podcasts, conference presentations, resources, and more.

In this episode, I speak with Pavel Cenkl, Head of College at Schumacher College, Devon, England. Previously, Pavel was a Professor of Environmental Humanities and Associate Dean at Sterling College, Vermont. With more than 25 years of experience in higher education, Pavel's goal is to continue to interweave a life-long passion and professional dedication to higher education teaching and administration in an organization dedicated to progressive transdisciplinary approaches to contemporary environmental, social, and economic challenges. We discuss:🥥 What learning programs that integrate the landscape might look like;🥥 The importance of observation, and noticing our experiences in embodied and social ways;🥥 What it would take to create networks of networks to augment the work.Check out the Coconut Thinking website https://coconut-thinking.design, where you'll find our articles, podcasts, conference presentations, resources, and more.

In this episode, I speak with Tom Rippin and Oliver Matikainen. I came across their article Are the SDGs a dangerous distraction? a few of weeks ago. It asks "Are we addicted to quick-fix painkillers – and still failing to address the underlying causes of our ailing economy?" In this conversation, we explore whether the worldview that created the SDGs is born from the same paradigm that created today's major problems. Tom is the CEO of On Purpose, an award-winning social enterprise developing purpose-driven leaders and a Trustee at Global Action Plan. Oliver is an Associate at On Purpose and has a rich background in sustainability development. We discuss: 🥥 How development as a linear, one size-fits-all path doesn't open up to different ways of becoming;🥥 How the SDGs isolate problems in ways that don't recognize the interconnected whole;🥥 How there is no unradical future: either we respond radically to create conditions for thriving or we don't and we risk facing radical futures that aren't so pleasant.Here is the link to Tom and Oliver's Article in Pioneers Post: https://www.pioneerspost.com/news-views/20230105/are-the-sdgs-dangerous-distraction?Check out the Coconut Thinking website https://coconut-thinking.design, where you'll find our articles, podcasts, conference presentations, resources, and more.You can also find our articles and many wonderful writers and thinkers on IntrepidEd News: www.intrepidednews.com.

In this episode, I speak with Curtis Ogden. Curtis has served as Senior Associate at the Interaction Institute for Social Change since 2005 and brings to IISC his experience in education, community building, leadership development, and program design, as well as an abiding passion for work at the intersection of racial justice and environmental sustainability. For the past several years he has built a robust practice in support of numerous multi-stakeholder collaborative change networks. We discuss:🥥 How relational trust building is where genuine equity work begins;🥥 Fusion organizing of different movements to create a bigger we;🥥 Regeneration as what it takes to nurture healthful relationships across nested living systems.Check out the Coconut Thinking website https://coconut-thinking.design, where you'll find our articles, podcasts, conference presentations, resources, and more.You can also find our articles and many wonderful writers and thinkers on IntrepidEd News: www.intrepidednews.com.

In this episode, I speak with Vlad Glăveanu. Vlad is Full Professor of psychology in the School of Psychology, Dublin City University, and Professor II at the Centre for the Science of Learning and Technology, University of Bergen. He is the founder and president of the Possibility Studies Network (PSN). His work focuses on creativity, imagination, culture, collaboration, wonder, possibility, and societal challenges. He edited the Palgrave Handbook of Creativity and Culture (2016) and the Oxford Creativity Reader (2018), co-edited the Cambridge Handbook of Creativity Across Domains (2017) and the Oxford Handbook of Imagination and Culture (2017), authored The Possible: A Sociocultural Theory (Oxford University Press, 2020. We discuss:🥥 How the concept of potential is linear and mechanistic, whereas possibilities are open-ended and emergent; 🥥 How affordance is the movable meeting point between person, object, and environment. It is intra-active;🥥 Distributed creativity as shared creative responsibility, enacting our ethics as a collective, rather than individually.Check out our website https://coconut-thinking.design, where you'll find our articles, podcasts, conference presentations, resources, and more.You can also find our articles and many wonderful writers and thinkers on IntrepidEd News: www.intrepidednews.com.

In this episode, I speak with Karen O’Brien. Karen is a Professor in the Department of Sociology and Human Geography at the University of Oslo. Karen’s research emphasizes the social and human dimensions of climate change and implications for human security. Her recent books include You Matter More Than You Think: Quantum Social Change for a Thriving World and Climate and Society: Transforming the Future. Karen has been named by Web of Science as one of the world’s most influential researchers of the past decade. In 2021 she was co-recipient of the BBVA Foundations Frontiers of Knowledge Award for Climate Change. Karen is currently co-chair of the International Science-Policy Platform for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) Transformative Change Assessment. We discuss:🥥 How it's not just the actions that we take that matter, it's how we engage with the system as a whole in everything we do; 🥥 How thinking in terms of quantum social change means appreciating we are all entangled, connected, and a (bio-)collective;🥥 How everything has agency and thus we can move beyond linear, problem-solution models of thinking and action.Check out our website https://coconut-thinking.design, where you'll find our articles, podcasts, conference presentations, resources, and more.You can also find our articles and many wonderful writers and thinkers on IntrepidEd News: www.intrepidednews.com.