Coconut Thinking

In this episode, I speak with Dr. Penny Hay and Alex Soulsby. Penny is an artist, researcher and educator. She is a Reader at Bath Spa University in Creative Teaching and Learning and Senior Lecturer in Arts Education at Bath Spa University School of Education, and also Research Fellow, Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries. Penny has worked extensively in arts education across the UK and co-ordinated the professional development program for the National Society for Education in Art and Design (NSEAD). Alex is the founding director of Artist Residency Thailand and is an International Arts and Creative Education Manager and Consultant with over twenty years’ experience of Education, Creative Projects Management and Artist Mentoring. During his time in the UK as a Creative Projects and Education manager, he sat on numerous boards, trusts and steering groups that focused on arts and education engagement for young people. Alex will be sitting on panel discussions and presenting his work and approaches regarding arts integration within schools at Boston’s trans cultural exchange conference in November https://transculturalexchange.org/ He tweets at @soulsbyalexIn this episode, we discuss:🥥 How might we attend to ideas through creativity, opening space to inquires;🥥 The importance of unleashing the creative potential in all learners, or risk further aggravation of the crises we face;🥥 Sitting with not knowing, feeling the discomfort of not having the answers.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 to Jennifer D. Klein and Kapono Ciotti, authors of The Landscape Model of Learning. Jennifer is the founder of Principled Learning Strategies, which provides professional development to support authentic student-driven global learning experiences in schools. She has a broad background in global education and partnership development, student-driven curricular strategies, inclusivity, and experiential, inquiry-driven learning. Kapono has worked internationally in educational change organizations, leading the work of Deeper Learning and place and culture-based pedagogy. In these roles, he has trained teachers in over 100 schools and school districts over four continents, impacting hundreds of thousands of students. In addition, Kapono spent 15 years as National Faculty for the National Association of Independent Schools in Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice, facilitating national and international learning experiences. We discuss:🥥 How learning is a personal journey and imposing a set curriculum for everyone often harms the individual and society; 🥥 How standards were designed and are maintained as a tool of control; 🥥 The idea that learner-directed should replace learner-centered in order to achieve liberation.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 Maggie Favretti. Maggie Maggie Favretti has spent over 35 years happily helping her students to ask, “why not now?” Maggie has won scholarship and teaching awards from three professional historical organizations (WHA, AHA, OAH), a national organization of bankers (Sallie Mae Foundation Teacher of the Year), and a national organization of student leaders (21st-century Teacher of the Year). She has been recognized by President Obama for her work in environmental education, and by the Sousa Mendes Foundation’s Freedom Award for her work facilitating the next generation of rescuers, Students for Refugees. By far her greatest joy has been devising opportunities for students (and teacher-facilitators) to tap into their innate creativity, resourcefulness, and collaboration across disciplines, using design thinking to solve complex problems in their own communities and beyond. In this episode we discuss:🥥 How learning is a function of time, which might be thought of cyclically, as birth and death;🥥 The degenerative effect the race for "success" has had on education, which might be the opportunity some of us are looking for; and 🥥 How love and relationships are teachers' superpowers.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 Giles Hutchins, pioneering practitioner, keynote speaker and executive coach at the forefront of regenerative leadership and organizational development. Through his executive leadership coaching he applies advanced adult developmental psychology, regenerative leadership practices, consciousness raising techniques, deep-dive nature immersions, embodiment work, ancient wisdom tradition insights, and cutting edge research on leadership consciousness. He is currently Chairman of the Future Fit Leadership Academy, Lead Partner of The Natural Business Partnership, co-founder of Biomimicry for Creative Innovation, co-founder of Regenerators.co and partner/associate with a number of pioneering organisations, such as The Global Leaders Academy, Renewal Associates and The Laszlo New Paradigm Research Institute. In this episode, we discuss:🥥 How we can open ourselves up to greater receptivity, responsiveness, and reciprocity;🥥 How sensing into our own essence and into that of the living organization will inform how we and the organization adapt and evolve through emerging processes;🥥 How a new world view based on life, on living systems (what Giles calls quantum complexity) can emerge only by moving beyond today's dominant, but increasingly fragile, mechanist worldview.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 Dawn Kau'i Sang. Kau'i is the first-ever director of the Office of Hawaiian Education, which is charged with planning for the implementation a new policy,  Nā Hopena Aʻo (Ha). Ha is a Department-wide framework to develop the skills, behaviors and dispositions that are reminiscent of Hawaiʻi’s unique context, and to honor the qualities and values of the indigenous language and culture of Hawaiʻi. One of the goals is to strengthen six outcome in every student over the course of their K-12 learning journey: Belonging, Responsibility, Excellence, Aloha, Total well-being, Hawai'i... which spells BREATH. In this episode, we ask: 🥥 What is belonging in a system that seeks to homogenize and separate? 🥥 How might stories allow us to see each other and our community in different ways, beyond quantitative measures?🥥 How might indigenous ways of knowing inform who we are as individuals, communities, and education systems?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 Gary Chapin of Educating for Good and Seed + Spark. Gary is the co-author of 126 Falsehoods We Believe About Education (2021). He has been working in education since 2000, first as a teacher, then as a curriculum director, then as a Dept. of Ed. researcher, and most recently as an advocate and supporter of equity based practices such as competency-based learning, performance assessment, adaptive leadership, and collaborative cultures. He is deeply fascinated by questions like: What should kids learn? How do we decide what kids should learn? How do we learn what they learned? How can learning what they learned help them learn more? We discuss:• How we can tell the story of learning in ways that bring in the voices of all stakeholders, not just the numbers in quantitative assessments;• Belonging as a relationship that cannot be undone;• How we might need to build something new so that the traditional system doesn't subvert new ideas.Read Gary's article in Education Reimagined entitiled Talking Story: Embracing our Humanity on a Deeper Level: https://education-reimagined.org/talking-story-embracing-our-humanity-on-a-deeper-level/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 Gary Stager, Ph.D. Since 1982, Dr. Gary Stager has helped school educators around the worldembrace computational technology as an intellectual laboratory, vehicle for self-expression, and window onto a world of possibilities for amplifying the potential of each student in preparation for an uncertain future. All of his work is rooted in the Piagetian notion that “knowledge is a consequence of experience.” His activities with teachers and students are guided by a focus on learning-by-doing. He is also the founder of Constructing Modern Knowledge. In thie episode, we discuss: How schools have an obligation to introduce kids to things they don't yet know they love, but then that becomes their project, and it's not driven by the curriculum;How a good a prompt that can fit on a post-it note is sometimes all you need for creativity to thrive;How we have oversold instruction;How the only thing we ever have to justify are the things kids love.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 Bo Stjerne Thomsen, Chair of Learning through Play, Vice-President at The LEGO Foundation. Bo Stjerne advises executive leadership on how children and adults learn through play. He is a spokesperson representing the LEGO Foundation and the LEGO Brand Group internationally and advises leadership teams across the LEGO entities, in order to attain the overall LEGO Brand Vision of Learning through Play. Bo Stjerne has published widely on Creativity, Play and Learning and, he has been a visiting scholar at the MIT Media Lab, and an advisor to various international research organizations, including the University of Cambridge PEDAL Research Centre, the Torrance Centre for Creativity, Design for Play in Denmark and the Lifelong Learning Lab at Tsinghua University. We discuss:How learning and play operate dynamically through embodied and social experiences;How the Metaverse will continue to blend virtual and physical worlds of play;How connections toward deeper learning often begin in the natural world.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 Andy Middleton. Andy is Founder Director of the TYF Group, an innovative and visionary social enterprise. TYF’s mission is to train revolutionaries – giving normal mums, dads & kids, business teams and community groups the confidence, skills and reason to revolutionize the way they play, think and connect with nature. TYF’s goal is to reach 100,000 people face to face in the next five years through with experience in education, adventure, retail and consulting. Andy is also a Founding Partner of the Do Collective, where he connects and orchestrates the potential power of a virtual consulting team of hundreds of the world’s best thinkers and doers. In this episode, we discuss: How often people who say it's not possible just lack imagination (including when we talk of creating new paradigms for learning);How when learning is place-specific and contextualized, there is unpredictability, and that's what allows the experience to be magical;How we can bring together groups that don't always talk to each in order to reach the tipping point necessary for change.Listen to the episode and check out our articles, presentations, and resources on www.coconut-thinking.design.

In this episode, I speak with Stephanie Pace Marshall, author of The Power to Transform. Stephanie is a speaker, author, writer and advisor, she illuminates the inextricable connections between the future of learning and the future of humanity, and offers a fundamentally new story of learning grounded in the principles of living systems and how life creatively organizes itself to thrive. Her work has helped shape the re-imagination and redesign of learning. Stephanie’s career and life’s work has been dedicated to a singular truth: “Learning must liberate the goodness and genius that resides within each child; and its design must ignite and nurture the power and creativity of the human spirit for the world.” In this episode, we discuss:How the old lexicon will never allow us to write a new story because it traps us in the old paradigmWhy asking the question "what will it take" gets us toward a living systems framework better than the Newtonian "how?"The differences between reform and transform, so critical when thinking about learning ecosystems.Check out our website www.coconut-thinking.design, where you'll find our articles, podcasts, conference presenations, resources, and more.You can also find our articles and many wonderful writers and thinkers on Intrepid Ed News: www.intrepidednews.com.