Future Learning Design Podcast

The following conversation is definitely a wild ride*! It's not an argument often made, but I believe that one of the effects of our industrialised education systems is to create the illusion that the world is full of somewhat fixed and ordered things, that don't move or change much. Of course, we teach our children about orbiting planets, the water cycle or change in historical periods. But, for example, in episode 208, Vanessa Andreotti gave a great example of how we name objects in the world, such as trees, in order to teach about them. In doing so, we draw a boundary around a tree that separates it from all non-trees. This sounds kind of philosophical and abstract, but I think the effects of it are very real. Most young people then learn to read the world as a collection of more or less fixed objects, rather than as patterns of relations. 
My guest this week has been exploring the depths of these questions for a long time through the lens of movement. As you will hear, Professor Thomas Nail started this line of inquiry researching human migration, and went on to develop an entirely new discipline of the philosophy of movement by pulling at the threads of how far our collective obsession with order and stasis goes! And it definitely goes back at least a couple of thousand years!
Thomas Nail is a Distinguished Scholar and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Denver and author of numerous books, including The Figure of the Migrant, Theory of the Border, Marx in Motion, Theory of the Image, Theory of the Object, Theory of the Earth, Lucretius I, II, III, Returning to Revolution, and Being and Motion.
Some useful links:
https://liberalarts.du.edu/about/people/thomas-andrew-nail
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Nail 
The Philosophy of Movement website: https://philosophy-of-movement.com/
'The Birth of Chaos Before Physis': https://youtu.be/c3S4w7C2dGg?si=H-1RlmaK7p3x7C4a 
The Philosophy of Movement: https://www.youtube.com/live/YQUtX64uqNc?si=EeP3mP4Z-6_4-DK1
What is New Materialism paper: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337351875_WHAT_IS_NEW_MATERIALISM
'The Random Walk of the Brain' (article in Salon): https://www.salon.com/2021/08/28/walking-and-spontaneous-fluctuations-brain/ 
*In the conversation, Thomas uses the word 'cosmogony' which in hindsight I wished I had asked him to define. Simply put it is a theory about how the cosmos or universe originated.

It's pretty clear from the statistics that there is a huge youth demographic bulge on the continent of Africa. 40% of its population is aged 15 or younger (as of 2021). The population of young people aged 15-24 in Africa is projected to reach 500 million in 2080. But as Prof. Kingsley Moghalu from the African School of Governance said at Harvard University’s African Development Conference in April last year, there is no guarantee that this will lead to positive outcomes for individual young people, countries or the continent as a whole. In order to enable all these amazing possibilities education is going to be a key factor in these emerging possibilities and scenarios. 
There are few researchers, communicators or advocates of education across Africa more brilliant or well-placed than my guest this week to speak to these questions. 
Dr. Modupe (Mo) Olateju is a fellow with the Center for Universal Education in the Global Economy and Development program at Brookings Institution. She is an international development specialist with expertise in public-private partnership in education with additional research interests in education innovation and foundational learning. She established The Education Partnership (TEP) Centre and led the organization’s pioneering work in applied education research in Nigeria and across Africa for 10 years. She is also Board Chair at the Malala Fund and member of the Executive Board at Fab AI.  
Links to Mo's work: 
https://moolateju.com/ 
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mo-adefeso-olateju/
https://www.brookings.edu/people/modupe-mo-olateju/
https://tepcentre.com/

Ref. Africa By 2040: The Future of Africa’s Youth. Keynote Address by Professor Kingsley Moghalu  President, African School of Governance. Harvard University’s African Development Conference 2025, 12 April 2025. https://asg.ac/africa-by-2040-the-future-of-africas-youth/

In the current context of ubiquitous digital tech and runaway generative AI, you'd think that a book calling out our collective delusions about digital tools in relation to learning wouldn't make much of a splash! But Jared Cooney Horvath's latest book 'The Digital Delusion: How Classroom Technology Harms Our Kids’ Learning -- And How To Help Them Thrive Again' (https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-digital-delusion-jared-horvath/1148995809?ean=9798218880378) is currently #1 on the Amazon bestseller list in Educational Psychology and has been receiving a lot of love, including from actor and educational activist, Hugh Grant, and author of The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt!
Jared is an old friend of the podcast, so I was really happy to invite him back on for a conversation about our shared concerns about the impacts that digital tech is having on our young people, the dubious motivations of Big Tech and the strange and growing alliance that is developing between people of all educational persuasions!
Jared Cooney Horvath (PhD, MEd) is a neuroscientist, educator, and best-selling author who specializes in human learning and brain development. He is the creator of The Learning Blueprint, an international award-winning program helping educators and students understand how learning actually works.
Jared has conducted research and taught at Harvard University, Harvard Medical School, and the University of Melbourne, and has worked with more than 1,000 schools around the world. He is the author of six books, has published over fifty research articles, and his work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Economist, Harvard Business Review, and ABC’s Catalyst.
Jared currently serves as Director of LME Global, an organization dedicated to bringing cutting-edge brain and behavioral science to educators, students, and communities.
Jared's website: lmeglobal.com
Jared's previous books: https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/8069909.Jared_Cooney_Horvath
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jared-cooney-horvath/
Previous episode with Jared on the podcast: https://www.goodimpactlabs.com/podcast/dr-jared-cooney-horvath

In this final episode of 2025, you'll hear about some of the most exciting things happening around the world for pathways through the upper end of high school from the voices of the young people involved in them.
The final years of high school is often the 'business-end' of formal schooling, where we often demand that young people just knuckle down and suffer the "rigours" of high stakes standardised exams and college entrance tests. But these conversations really show you that alternatives to this are not only possible, but happening! 
Too often, we can talk a great game of hyperbole and hubris about our apparently "paradigm-shifting" designs, but the young people actually experiencing them are telling a different story. What better way to get at the truth than by hearing from the young people themselves! So in this mini-series (5 episodes), you'll hear from 19 young people about their experiences of the kinds of competencies they feel they are learning and need to learn, what they find energising and enabling, and how they feel about the adults who are very often giving so much heart and hard work into this work, to support and guide them.
You'll hear about five empowering high school pathways and curriculum innovations:
the International Big Picture Learning Credential in Australia;
the Greenstones at Green School Bali in Indonesia;
the African Leadership Academy programme in South Africa;
the IB Systems Transformation Pathway pilot programme at UWC South East Asia in Singapore and UWC Atlantic College in Wales;
and the Global Impact Diploma, being run at a number of schools around the world including American International Schools in Lima, Peru, Budapest, Hungary and Bucharest, Romania.
If you know of other innovations that you'd like to see featured on future mini-series, then please do share them with us at goodimpactlabs.com/contact.

In this first episode in this Innovative Student Pathways mini-series, I had the huge pleasure of chatting with Monty, Eliza and Lydia, three amazing graduates of the International Big Picture Learning Credential. There are few, if any, other new pathways and credentials that have been as successful in obtaining university recognition for such radical alternatives to the standardised exam factory system and credential capital monopolies! The phenomenon that is Viv White, the founder of Big Picture Learning Australia has joined me previously on the podcast so you can find out more about what they're up to across Australia in that episode. 
Previous episode with Viv White AM - https://www.goodimpactlabs.com/podcast/big-picture-learning-australia-a-conversation-with-viv-white
LinkedIn: @viv-white - ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/viv-white-am-297642142/⁠
Instagram: @bigpicture.edu.au - ⁠https://www.instagram.com/bigpicture.edu.au/⁠
@bigpiclearning - ⁠https://www.instagram.com/bigpiclearning/⁠ (US)
Website: https://www.bigpicture.org.au/