Coconut Thinking

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.

In this episode, I speak with Zachary Stein. Zak has published two books: Social Justice and Educational Measurement, which traces the history of standardized testing and its ethical implications, and Education in a Time Between Worlds, which grapples with the relations between schooling and technology more broadly. Zak is a co-founder of The Consilience Project, which is dedicated to improving public sensemaking and building a movement to radically upgrade digital media landscapes. He is a scholar at the Ronin Institute, where he  researches the relations between education, human development, and the evolution of civilizations, and Zak serves as Co-President and Academic Director of the activist think-tank at the Center for Integral Wisdom, where he writes and teaches at the edges of integral meta-theory. We discuss: 🥥 How learning is not a finite journey: the more we learn, the more we are aware of all that we don't know;🥥 How teachers should model the emotional side of being a good learner;🥥 The importance of establishing the legitimacy of the vocabularies that are given to us to tell the stories about ourselves.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 Conrad Hughes, Campus and Secondary Principal at the International School of Geneva, La Grande Boissire, the oldest international school in the world. Conrad led two major projects with UNESCO to rethink the guiding principles for learning in the 21st Century and preventing violent extremism through education. He has published three books on different aspects of 21st Century learning. Conrad is a member of the advisory board for the University of the People, senior fellow of UNESCO’s International Bureau of Education and research assistant at the University of Geneva’s department of psychology and education. He is a regular contributor to the World Economic Forum’s Agenda blog and speaks in conferences across the globe. We discuss:🥥 How for us to have an inclusive society, everyone needs to be able to bring their multiple selves and identities to the table;🥥 How the process of becoming is non-linear, mysterious, and about connections;🥥 How capturing learning wherever and whenever it happens tells the whole story of flourishing.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 Intrepid Ed News: www.intrepidednews.com.

In this episode, I speak with Jon Ardern, designer, artist and technologist. As Co-Founder and Director of Superflux he develops long term vision and strategy for the Studio alongside constant, and deliberate, prototyping and material investigation. Over the last 14 years Jon has developed pioneering design, technology and foresight projects, projects, and exhibitions receiving critical acclaim, awards, and press internationally. His work has been exhibited at the MoMA New York and V&A London on numerous occasions, and has won prizes from UNESCO and New York’s Social Design Network. Find Superflux's manifesto here. We discuss:🥥 How we shouldn't decide the destination before taking the journey of exploration into design and learning;🥥 How "navigating a predicament" might help us avoid the traps of problem-solution approaches;🥥 How when we think we're designing experiences for others, we end up transformed ourselves.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 Intrepid Ed News: www.intrepidednews.com.