Coconut Thinking

How might we create regenerative learning experiences through healthy soils?Founder of Fearless Farmers, Amy Milliron creates online and onsite regenerative farming curricula for kids of all ages. Amy advocates for regenerative agriculture as a path to reverse climate change, heal the soil and improve health. She also works to promote regenerative food sources of all kinds, from the rights of breastfeeding mothers to feed in public to teaching people to grow their own foods, to creating curriculum that opens up communities around teh world to different ways of connecting with the earth and each other. We discuss:🥥 The need to be connected to the land and know where your food comes from;🥥 Opening up spaces so that we can learn from each other, not impose our views—this is regenerative;🥥 Creating networks of that work on shared principles, but adapted to their local contexts. You can find Fearless Farmers here: https://www.fearlessfarmers.org/Check out our website www.coconut-thinking.com for articles, episodes, resources, and lots of other things.

How might we embrace complexity to open more to life?In this episode, I speak with Michelle Holliday. Michelle is a consultant, facilitator, author and researcher. Her work centers around “thrivability” — a set of perspectives and practices based on a view of organizations and communities as dynamic, self-organizing living systems. Her research, perspectives and practical experience are brought together in the highly acclaimed book, The Age of Thrivability: Vital Perspectives and Practices for a Better World, as well as in a popular TEDx talk and an online slideshow with close to 65,000 views. We discuss:🥥 How a life-aligned worldview requires us to be ok to engage with complexity;🥥 How wherever there is life, it is worthy of our reverence, and we can design with life, as life, opening us up to a differnet consciousness;🥥 Culivating a learning ecology, where everyone is changed through the process entangling living and non-living things.Check out our website www.coconut-thinking.com, where you will find articles, resources, links, and more.

What would it take for us to embrace decay as means to creating new life?In this episode of the Coconut Thinking podcast, I speak with Lennart Hennig. Lennart is a founder, teacher, and facilitator. He explores the edges of individual and collective development through the angles of consciousness, embodiment, safety, trauma, metaphysics, philosophy, and deep ecology, using an integral framework of the whole, undivided cosmos. This is a conversation about regeneration, about appreciating that there can be no white without black, no life without death, no change without composting. We discuss:🥥 How spaces are opening up in our collective consciousness to bring forth Western Science and ancient wisdoms;🥥 How life and death are the same and lead to composting for new living systems to emerge;🥥 That success might just be obsolescence because that would signify that something/one has reached their purpose and can become something/one else.Check out the Coconut Thinking website https://coconut-thinking.com where you'll find our articles, podcasts, conference presentations, resources, and more.

What would it take to bring about a world that weaves modernity and ancient wisdoms?In this episode, I speak with Joe Brewer. Joe is the co-founder of the Design School for Regenerating Earth. He has a background in physics, math, philosophy, atmospheric science, complexity research, and cognitive linguistics. Joe was the co-founder and research director of Culture2 Inc., a culture design lab for social good. He is a former fellow of the Rockridge Institute, a think tank founded by George Lakoff. We discuss:🥥 The indigenous notion of Third World, which brings together the best of Western science and indigenous knowledge;🥥 How everything happens somewhere, and that somewhere is connected to somewhere else, creating a fabric of time and space and opening up spaces for bringing about the futures we imagine;🥥 How composting the current dominant system allows for new life and new ways of being to emerge and grow.Check out our website www.coconut-thinking.com, where you'll find our articles, podcasts, presenations, as well as resources.

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.