Manda: Hey people, welcome to Accidental Gods. To the podcast and the membership program where we believe that another world is still possible and that if we each commit ourselves in service to life, there is still a possibility that we might all together lay the foundations for a future that we would be proud to leave to the generations that come after us. And a key part of this is how do we help the younger people, the generations who do come after us, to learn what's most useful, to grow into the adults that they need to be, if they're going to become the elders that the generations yet unborn will look up to? This seems to me one of the absolute core questions of our time. So this week I am really, absolutely honoured and delighted to be joined by Tim Logan, who is, amongst other things, host to the Future Learning Design podcast. Other than that, he's an educator, part of the team at Good Impact Labs and co-leader of the International Baccalaureate Festival of Hope. He's a highly experienced school leader, management consultant, coach, educator and researcher who has previously held pedagogical and wellbeing senior leadership positions in a whole variety of international settings. He is proud to have consistently helped to build innovative, outstanding schools, supportive relationships and powerful educational visions.
Manda: Of himself, he says: 'The important question for now is can we intentionally create more spaces in our schools that provide a qualitatively different kind of educational experience? Transformational shifts are happening in educational and organisational cultures around the world right now, and I am incredibly fortunate to be able to play a role in this'. Which sounds very much like what Accidental Gods would love to talk about. And as it happens, I was on the Future Learning Design podcast just before the dark nights of the winter, with Ginie Servant-Miklos, who is rapidly becoming one of my heroes. Her book, Pedagogies of Collapse is free to download as a PDF on the Bloomsbury website, and I totally recommend it. With us were Raïsa Mirza, who teaches at the AWC Atlantic College, that we talk about a lot in the podcast, and educational researcher Will Richardson. We were talking about collapse and what might grow in its stead. So after that, I had absolutely been planning to invite Tim here to talk about the transformational shifts happening in education and how they can help us to lay the foundations for that world that we would be proud to leave behind.
Manda: Schedules being what they are, we had been planning something for later in the year, but then we had a cancellation and Tim had a tech misfire, and we both had an urgent need for something fast to get the schedules back on track. And so here we are with a joint conversation, one of those that will go out on both of the podcasts. One of those where we range wide over the landscapes of culture and learning, and the Citadel mind, and our history of optimising for everything. And how we could, instead, begin to expand into a more porous mindset. To look for resonance, and really to bring everything that we can to the table to help young people become part of the emerging transformation that is the web of life. Tim has some truly inspiring examples of what's happening around the world, where this kind of systems thinking is taking place in real time, and how this can build bridges forward towards a new way of being. So people of the podcast, please do welcome Tim Logan of Future Learning Design Podcast, A Festival of Hope and so much more.
Manda: Tim, welcome to the Accidental Gods podcast.
Tim: Thank you, Manda and welcome to the Future Learning Design podcast. The first time I've ever done a cross-posting podcast episode. So yeah. Super excited.
Manda: Yeah, yeah. Joint podcast. It's going to be fun. So from the Accidental Gods side, Inquiring of you: how are you and particularly where are you, this interesting Wednesday morning. We are recording, it's worth saying to everybody, two days after the US inauguration. So we are now two days beyond the end of democracy and into what might be techno feudalism, or might just be techno Christo something fascism, we don't know yet. So how are you and where are you as the world turns over?
Tim: Absolutely, no, strange times. Thank you. I love the question. I've been listening lots to the Accidental Gods podcast since we met. And yeah, I love the question. I think it's a great grounding at the beginning. So I'm feeling really good and excited to be talking with you. I feel like it's been a really special meeting, actually, since I met you, with our previous conversation with Ginie and Raïsa and Will on collapse and our little pre-Christmas festival that we had. And where am I? Interestingly, I am sitting in an empty barn in the middle of Bordeaux in France. So we've just bought a big empty stone barn, which is quite an adventure for us. I've got three kids and a dog, and we're all sleeping in one room right now and trying to stay warm, but it's on the way in a few years time to getting, well, doing it up, seeing what happens, making it as eco as we can. Composting toilets perhaps as we discussed off air. Yeah. Exciting.
Manda: Yeah. What temperature is it outside? Because I hadn't quite realised you'd moved in when you said you'd bought it. And we're living somewhere with with full amenities while we do it up. But you're actually in there...
Tim: Would be lovely, wouldn't it? It would be sensible. We tend not to do sensible things, and we can't afford to do the sensible thing. So yeah, we're in it and we're just doing it and it's been cold, but not cold like UK or Moscow or Kiev or wherever, or post AMOC collapse. But it's cold, like -2 or 3 in the mornings, it has been. So yeah. Good fun. Staying warm.
Manda: Gosh, that's sounding like Scottish childhood. Are you having to unfreeze the loos in the morning?
Tim: No. Not quite.
Manda: Goodness. All right. So thank you. In our joint podcast, it seemed to me that a useful kicking off point, because we are in very turbulent times, and yet I think a lot of us, whatever we call those of us who are really interested in the continuation of complex life on earth, which isn't necessarily everybody's focus. I'm feeling, along with the square eyed horror at the things that are happening in a lot of places around the world, not just the US, is also that sense of, okay, we can stop pretending that the world is working now and accept that it really isn't. And that there is therefore a chance for something to emerge that would take us towards a continuation of complex life. Are you feeling that in your educational sphere of the world?
Tim: Yeah. It's an interesting question. In a way, yes. Personally, I've been feeling it, and I think this is something we discussed previously. I've shifted the focus of the podcast over the last few years very much more towards, in a way, the big, more philosophical questions of what are we doing? And how is this going to be sustainable over any kind of medium or long term? I still feel that there are a lot of people, and this was other people's frustration I know too, that are not even thinking about these questions. So that's my hope for this kind of strange and beautiful year, that maybe that it throws into sharp relief, as you say, the fact that there is something very strange happening and that really might help people just sit up and take a bit more notice of the things that we have just taken for granted. My worry is people are so busy with just continuing and surviving, right? In institutional settings for example, you know, I work with schools and school leaders and networks of educational systems, and they're just kind of busy looking after the things that are in their gift at this moment. And that's a holding that's really challenging when there's these huge undercurrents or increasingly visible currents of collapse, change, radical movement, whatever you want to call them. So yeah, it's always a weird paradox for me.
Manda: Yes. This brings up a lot. I really do want to continue down the education line with you because I think it's so vital. Recently a group of us put in a grant application for an R&D sprint to create a feature film, and the remit was to explain the climate emergency better, specifically to explain the climate science. And I put quite a lot of effort in that application to very kindly and as far as I could, reminding them that the knowledge deficit model was debunked a very long time ago. It's not that people don't know the science, it's that they have got no options, they don't have anywhere to go, or any sense of empowerment or any agency to make things change. Or they don't understand that they could have those things. And absent those, frankly, why would you burden your sympathetic system with something you can't do anything about? Before we started, as you said, we were talking about the Amoc switching off, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current, which we used to call the Gulf Stream, which is much easier to say. And it is in the process of switching off, which is absolutely *expletive deleted* terrifying. But there's nothing that we can do about stopping that unless we have total systemic change. And if we don't have the routes to total systemic change, it's just another thing to lie awake screaming about, frankly.
Manda: And so I'm also aware, I follow Stephen Spoonamore on Substack, and he was the one right after the American election who was harvesting a lot of Reddit threads, with people going, oh, whoa, hang on, this is not right. And here's how it looks as if this election was massaged, because they have electronic voting machines, which run as far as I can tell, on windows 97, which is pretty easy to hack. And Donald Trump said at the inauguration, you know, Elon's really good with computers, he knew what he was doing, he got us the election. So, you know, they're not pretending not to. But there was a really interesting post that Stephen cross posted, and I'm just going to read a tiny little bit of it, because I think it's worth hearing. So this is written on the 10th of January: 'to whom it may concern. I am writing this with a heavy heart and no small amount of fear. As a former X, formerly Twitter employee on an H-1b visa, I cannot reveal my identity without risking everything. But I can't stay silent any longer about what I saw and was made to do. When Elon Musk took over, everything changed. What started as a social media company became something much darker. I was part of a team that was directly ordered to manipulate Twitter's systems to influence the 2024 US presidential election. It wasn't subtle and it wasn't ethical. We completely changed how the algorithm worked, pushing pro-Trump and right wing posts to the top of people's feeds. To make it look balanced we also boosted some left wing critics of Democrats, but it was all carefully calculated. These changes didn't just affect Americans, they impacted users worldwide'.
Manda: There's a whole lot more. But basically, he goes on to say that having done it in the US, they are now doing it around the world. 'I am terrified writing this, but I had to speak up. I just hope someone with the power to do something sees this letter' and they put a whole bunch of stuff onto GitHub, he says 'if you understand coding, we put breadcrumbs in there. We left breadcrumbs so you can see it, you can find it. You can understand what we did because we understood what we were doing'. And he signs off 'yours sincerely, a former employee who can't sleep at night'. And we know that we live in the best democracy that money can buy, and we have known this for quite a long time, it's been obvious around the world that the people with the money are the people who get to call the shots. And now the people with the money are doing actual fascist salutes in public at the US inauguration. And in the UK, we have the Guardian arguing whether it was a Mussolini salute or a Hitler salute, as if that were relevant.
Manda: Please, anybody out there, just stop buying the Guardian now and tell them why you're doing that. Because that's not how the media ought to be working. So we live in a world now where money buys democracy. And this is happening. And not only are people just struggling to keep the wheels on the bus turning. Whatever they're doing, in school, they're having to feed the kids, they're having to buy their books for them. They're just having to hold people together as the social net breaks down. And they're being forced to teach stuff that, as far as I can tell, is institutional gaslighting of children, because we're all pretending that they're going to have jobs and a social net and a world worth living in. And here, you've got to get an engineering degree, because it's going to be very useful as the AMOC shuts down. No, sorry, it isn't. And I wonder, in the networks that you're in, there are the people we need to reach who, who genuinely don't know what they could be doing. What kinds of agency are people seeing and taking, so that we can build, let's say, social media networks that are not toxic. And communities of place, purpose and passion that are generative. What are you seeing?
Tim: Yeah. It is THE question. And I think the first thing that comes to mind is the young people, and the way that the young people are having to live through and with this. When they see in their learning experiences, in their classrooms, they kind of feel this sense of disconnection with a lot of what they're learning. And they're holding, you know, young people talking about eco anxiety, as a kind of a catch all term. But, you know, there is a mental health crises all over the world. I was talking with a colleague in Beijing recently and, you know, you're seeing it everywhere, these young people who are basically questioning the things that they're being given every day. And by the same token, many of the teachers are as well. But again, they're trapped in the institutional kind of hamster wheel of, you know, keeping going. And the young people are having to hold this, as you say, what's my future? I was talking to some young people not that long ago in relation to AI particularly, but with regards to what is the future that they're working towards. And they're incredibly conscious of the fact that it is not guaranteed. Or these success narratives that have been the lifeblood of the education system forever, are no longer resonant with them. They just think, well, if I train to be a medic, is that actually going to be the thing that I've been told it will be? And therefore I've got to work, I've got to do these subjects, I've got to work incredibly hard to get these grades, to do the next thing, the next thing, the next thing with this promise of I mean, what exactly? But really some kind of promise of life, happiness and success which was the narrative before. And now they're just seeing everything that's going on in the world and thinking, well, that rings a bit hollow now.
Manda: Right. At the very least.
Tim: So what do I do with that, when I've got to go to my next lesson, you know, which I'm not loving, but I've been told I've got to do? And, there's such an interesting kind of trap that the young people are in and feeling very strongly. And as I say, the educators simultaneously, many of them are kind of feeling like there's more and more kind of bureaucratic performance management of accountability structures, particularly in the UK. I work internationally, so you see very different pictures in different kind of systems.
Tim: But there is this kind of new public management observation of teachers, to performance manage to get outcomes. I mean, the thing that I find interesting is it's all the same kind of logic of optimisation. I don't know if you know Hartmut Rosa's work? But I've been really interested in that recently. He talks about optimisation versus resonance as two different kinds of logic. And the logic of optimisation is just, how do we maximise, how do we be more efficient, how do we do more with less. All of this stuff Keir Starmer was coming out with about AI last week, you know, about how it's going to revolutionise the efficiency of government so we can get more for people in the public services because we can do more with less.
Manda: It's bonkers
Tim: Exactly. But it's these narratives of efficiency and optimisation all the time, which is kind of soul destroying, right? For young people in schools, they can feel that that's what's happening. It's like I'll do a bit more, get a bit of a better grade, do a bit more work so you can get a bit... plus you've got then this outside of school college application, university application, kind of treadmill that they're also thinking about. Should I be part of this club or this society so that I can show that I'm a well-rounded human? Jesus! You know, you can't be a well-rounded human in an optimising system that is basically the kind of treadmill of like, just keep going, keep improving.
Manda: And keep competing against your peers.
Tim: Exhausting.
Manda: People you should be building community with, you're all looking at each other sideways, because if you get half a mark better than me, you might get into a college that I don't get into, and then my whole life falls apart. It's horrible. I was listening to Zach Stein a while ago saying that in, I think, North Carolina, there are schools where every single child has gastric ulcers. And I was listening on your podcast to a lady saying that in the US, the parents are taking their kids to five separate things after school to prove how well rounded they are. You know, let's go to the violin lessons and then gymnastics and then you go and play chess. This is a form of torture and it's insane and it has to stop!
Tim: Absolutely. But I would temper that with that's not everywhere. I mean, it's really easy to catastrophize, I would say. And in many of the schools I work with, there are happy young people enquiring, learning together in class. So I think, this is partly my temperament, but I resist the catastrophizing blanket kind of description. It's not all like that. Right?
Manda: All right.
Tim: It needs to fundamentally change, don't get me wrong. But there are spaces where committed, loving educators are trying to do the best with young people, as are parents. But bringing in schoolishness, which is what you just did with Susan Blum in a recent podcast I heard, I mean, that concept of schoolishness has colonised so many spaces of life, right? It's the same kind of logic.
Manda: Well, it's the optimising, isn't it? It's just a word for optimising within schools, really.
Tim: And then as a parent she talks about it pedagogises everything. You know, everything's a learning opportunity, because I can teach my young person, my child, to be a little bit better so that they get the edge on the competition. It's a very weird concept that has colonised most of the world. And we are on that path dependency of that schoolishness which is almost everywhere now. So the question is how, what do you do about that, when we're on that path, on that treadmill?
Manda: How do we unwind it? Yes.
Tim: And that's the holding that I do a lot with the podcast and with all of the networks and amazing people I get to speak to, is what do you do when we're so far down that rabbit hole, you know? Because we still want to do something with the young people that we care about and work with every day.
Manda: So we're on to the question that we bring on Accidental Gods, which is clearly we need total systemic change. And it's relatively straightforward to see a future where what you're suggesting isn't happening. You were talking recently, your most recent podcast, to someone in New Zealand about the Maori concepts of education, and that seemed very much to key into a binary that, I don't really like binaries, but this concept that our culture is a trauma culture, this 'must optimise' culture. And that first of all optimisation is good, second, that it's essential, and third, that it's possible in the way the world is. Which I think particularly in the UK, we've got a generation of political leaders who came of age in the 1980s and whose emotional world has not altered since then. So they're still thinking as if we're at peak fossil fuels and GDP acceleration and they haven't got their heads out of that.
Manda: But leaving them to one side, if we accept that optimisation is not useful and not possible and not necessary, and that there are other models, and that what we need to do is to build a bridge from where we are to where we could be, what does that bridge look and feel like? What are you seeing in the educators that you talk to, who are actively building bridges towards systemic change?
Tim: Yeah. So just to slightly go back on what you've just said, I would slightly disagree that optimisation is not ever desirable. And the fact that you invoke bridge building. I had a fantastic conversation a few years ago with an MIT professor, Sanjay Sarma, and we were talking about this then. That in certain contexts you want to be systematic, you want to be you want to optimise, right? You know, if you're building a bridge, you want to make sure that the engineering is spot on. You really do. And so there's something really important in that holding, that for me that systematic optimising logic has colonised everything, it's not that it's not useful somewhere in some places. So I just wanted to kind of again bring that in, because I think that's an important point that we sometimes can sweep away the value that is in some of that, when there is also clearly a fundamental imbalance. Where that logic has moved into spaces where it is completely violent and unreasonable and shouldn't be there.
Tim: Like bringing up children. Like being in right relationship, in loving relationship with fellow humans. That is not a space where we should be thinking in an optimising way, I would say. For me, that's eugenics. So for me, balance is a really strong concept, because there is a sense that as we move away from the thing that we're in, there's a holding of the tensions of the cultural history and the tradition and the reason why we've ended up where we are. And that therefore, it's not all to be just dismissed somewhat.
Manda: So can we unpick this? Because I really still want to look at bridge building and green shoots, but this feels really quite core. So I start from a place where a fully realised human, and we have the potential for that and it's our birthright, is heart connected to the web of life, and that if the web says you need to build a bridge, then you will be co-creating bridge building with other nodes in the web of life. That might be beavers and the trees and the rocks and the wind. And what we would bring would be here's my concept of my understanding of getting from one side of the river to the other, and let's see what we can co-create. And absolutely I'm not suggesting that we don't optimise for a bridge that actually bears weight, because clearly that's what we want in the long run. But the impetus to do so would come from the hyper complex, endlessly emerging system that is the web of life. And I wonder in your world, where does the impetus to build, make, grow come from? Does that make sense as a question?
Tim: It does make sense as a question. I think many people, myself included, have lost touch to some degree with where that is coming from, the source of that. And that feels quite core to what's going on at the moment. And personally, as a reflection, I would say over the last few years I've maybe come back to an awareness of where that is coming from, or I've come to an awareness of, I mean, different people call it different things. But ecological awakening. I was listening to Bill Plotkin in preparation and it would be interesting to talk about that, but he calls it ecological awakening, right? And I find that to be a bit of an enlightenment type term, but actually at the core of the idea you've got a really interesting and important connectedness and interrelationship with each other, the web of life, as you're saying. I actually think a lot of people have completely lost touch with that sense.
Manda: Totally.
Tim: And I think that for me is a really interesting part of the 'problem', because reconnecting with that is not something you can mandate for everybody. It's not something you can put in a curriculum. It's not something you can optimise for, right? But there's this deep kind of need, yearning, to reconnect with that. And that for me is where the impetus comes from. But when people have lost touch with that intuition, you could call it, I guess; the heart mind, I love your Description. There's something really important there about how do we reconnect with ourselves, with our bodies, with our connection to the web of life, all of those things, that would allow us to then open up more of that impetus and more of the questions about where that's coming from, so that we can then respond to how do we build the bridges, you know?
Manda: Yes. And in the spheres that I work in, this is a question that we constantly come to, is the inner work is paramount. But for people who don't even know that inner work exists, you can't make it happen. You have to be asking the questions. But what I think we can do for people who are beginning to ask the question... So a lot of people, they feel very isolated, and what we get a lot with the shamanic work is people come along and say, I can't talk about this to anybody else. I can't talk about it to my family or my colleagues at work, or the people at the school gate when I go and pick up the kids. Because our culture has created the kind of Citadel mind that Tanya Luhrmann talks about. It's so hegemonic that even to suggest that it might not be a real thing is to risk ridicule and exclusion. And yet, what happens when people do begin to talk about it, they begin to get a little bit more secure in their own sense of where they're at, is people will deny it in public and then in private they'll come and want to talk. And we're finding that increasingly. And I think one of the things that I am working quite hard on is creating a space where it's okay to explore. And where the narrative of Citadel mind becomes less the only one. And it's frightening for a lot of people. It's really interesting watching, Rupert Sheldrake quite often talks about this. He goes and talks about his morphic resonance theory, and he'll be invited to big science conferences, basically so they can shout at him and tell him how he's wrong. But afterwards he says two glasses of wine in and they're queuing round his table to come and tell him about their own personal experiences of why he's right, but the public narrative has to still be that it's wrong. And that seems to be a very widespread experience.
Manda: And so we need, very fast I think, and this is somewhere where I think tipping points will happen. I'm a bit cautious about social tipping points, but this particular tipping point is not demanding total systemic change, it's just saying let's take down something that at heart, a lot of us know not to be true. And make it okay for us to be able to bridge between Western we are engineers we know how to build a bridge that works, and is it appropriate to build a bridge over this river at this particular time? I'm remembering back in Schumacher, first term we were taught here's conventional economics and here's why it's completely wrong. And now look at Buddhist economics and a bunch of other forms of economics that are slightly nicer. And because they knew I did the shamanic work, one of the main tutors went out and said, and here's this instance of shamanic economics. Look, they went and they they asked the river if it was okay to build a dam! But no they didn't. No, no. They went and did a ceremony to propitiate the river in order to build the dam. And of all the things that blew my fuses on that first understanding of the extent to which we were being lied to, that was the one. Because shamanic economics is not making an offering to the river before you pour millions of tons of concrete and totally destroy the ecosystem. Shamanic economics would be: we all need to thrive, what's the best way? And I would be seriously surprised if the River and the Web of Life said, oh really what you need is a dam. It's just not going to happen. So allowing for that mind shift to be a thing, becomes really important, I think.
Tim: I mean, just in the word economics it comes with all that baggage, right? You bring that in and you put it together with Shamanic, or like Charles Eisenstein, you put it together with sacred. Like sacred economics. Okay. Yeah, that sounds beautiful to me, but it's still bringing with it all this baggage of the Citadel mind stuff.
Manda: Yeah. The value is measured in in pound signs or dollars.
Tim: Exactly. And so much of my exploration over the last couple of years, particularly, for example, Carl Meeker I spoke to on the podcast recently, a Maori philosopher, and many others. It feels like such a step for, for example, a teacher working in a primary school in inner London to be then engaging with these Maori ontologies. It's a relationship with the world that is in context. And the same thing with Vanessa Andreotti when I spoke to her. I remember I said to her in the conversation, it feels like another planet. Or these really committed, loving, hardworking teachers who are there trying to do their best for these young people, holding all of the stuff that we're talking about. It's like, yeah, I want that. I want to go there, but how do I go there from here?
Speaker3: What's the thrutopia from here to there?
Tim: Perfect, exactly.
Manda: So we had recently on the podcast a young man called Elliot who was very aware of this, and what he's doing is introducing permaculture to the schools. Because that's probably at the edge limit of where their existing frame will allow. But within permaculture, we can begin to look at the whole of the cycles of life, really, in ways that then at least the kids know that food grows in the soil and doesn't arrive in plastic at Tescos. That's a bit of a cliche, but it's a thing. And he can begin to introduce the 'what happens if we just sit on the Land and ask what it wants?' at the edges of that. Because I think that also is a thing. You mentioned Bill Plotkin and I get very scared of, there's a whole movement within our field where people know that we need to be talking to, and they use the word 'nature' as if it were something out there. And really we can talk about it and we can get very self-righteous about it, and we can claim some kind of moral high ground, but we're not actually living it as if it were real. And that too, is a bridge we need to build. Is the difference between knowing that this is a thing and making it the way that we live. And I think just getting kids to sit on the ground, put their hands in the soil and see how they feel is a huge step. And that may be a thing that a primary school teacher can do. Let's just grow a bean.
Tim: Yeah, exactly. I completely agree with you and think that the permaculture or the nature based learning or these kinds of initiatives are the the steps that we need to be taking. Because you can only do what's possible within your current context. But sometimes I get a bit frustrated by the kind of 21st century skills language about these are the things our kids will need in the future. And actually, I think this kind of preparedness narrative about, oh, we've got to prepare them for the future.
Speaker3: Future prepping. Oh, God.
Tim: It's everywhere, but no, honestly, Manda, it's everywhere in education.
Manda: What kind of things are they saying? Because this is obviously better than okay, you need to go to school and get brilliant grades and stuff. But how is future prepping emerging?
Tim: So this is the kind of 'progressive' narrative I would say that's pretty dominant in the innovation spaces in education globally. So it's some kind of dispositions and characters and capabilities around creativity, innovation, critical thinking. It's not radically different. But it's all for me, and this is the deep irony of the name of the podcast as Future Learning Design, and actually the thing I think is so needed is like coming back into now, the present orientation, rather than this obsessive future orientation. And the skills language and it's like World Economic Forum type language, about what's the what are the skills and capabilities that the fourth industrial revolution will need. All of that kind of language is what motivates a lot of the calls for educational change. And yes, they're calling for educational change. But the logic for me is still that same logic of optimisation. And the thing that's much more of a radical move is exactly what you say; get the young people outside of the classroom to put their hands in the soil and just be. Just connect. And this is why resonance, I think, is a really interesting concept from Hartmut Rosa, as the counter to optimisation. Because you can't control resonance. It's like there is a presence that's required with resonance and there is just some, I don't know, a connectedness or a being, a kind of connectedness, a relationship with the world, a call and response he talks about, in relation to the world. It's like that's now, that's not in ten years time when you're in your career or when the economy's changed; it's now.
Manda: And it's an Emergent process that is wholly unpredictable.
Tim: Exactly. And so I had a really interesting moment of frustration yesterday watching Nate Hagens and Bill Plotkin have their conversation again, just again, partly preparing.
Manda: Brave man.
Tim: And there was a moment in that where Nate and Bill talk about why is there no ecology in psychology? And I was shouting at the radio, at the podcast, like there is a branch of psychology called ecological psychology! And it is all about the affordances of being in what is possible in this space right now. I've got a podcast coming up with a couple of guys who are professors of ecological psychology, because I think this is something that everybody should know about.
Manda: Yes. So we're both heading in the same direction. Isn't that interesting?
Tim: It's so important because I think education fundamentally has been based on cognitive and behavioural psychology, which has taken us into this control based, brain based, all of that stuff. And actually this ecological psychology is like, why didn't you just go down the corridor and talk to James Gibson at the time? Like, what did he have to say about the affordances of the space that you're in and the connectedness to this space, what's possible here, all of that kind of language. That for me is what is really possible actually in a classroom. And I had a podcast a while back with Alicia Guerrero, who wrote the book Context Changes Everything, and she's just incredible. She's just amazing. And again, it was the same thing. It's about when you have an attunement and an awareness to context, to the ecology that you're participating in. There's something really important there that I think we can bring more into educational conversations, again, to get away from this obsessive future orientation, with preparing young people for their futures. Like, no, it's now; this is Now.
Manda: But also I wonder to what extent, I haven't listened to that podcast and I need to, it seems to me, yes, you go down the corridor, you talk to James Gibson, you also go outside and you ask the trees. And you ask the hill, and you get the kids so that it's okay to look up at the sky and see three crows fly past and help that inform your decision making. And ask your dreams and work on how do we talk to each other in ways that aren't our mouths? I was talking to one of my shamanic peers recently, and he trained in North America, and he was expressing the fact that so much of the conversations that happen are not verbal. So he was sitting in a particular big gathering and people could ask questions of the shaman before you ate. And he was really hungry. He'd travelled a long way and the food's all laid out, and these people are asking question after question after question. And he's sitting there thinking shut up, shut up, shut up! I just want to eat. And he got this piercing headache suddenly, and his eyes were drawn round and the shaman was looking straight at him and he heard a voice in his head going, 'I think you should shut up'.
Tim: Oh, wow.
Manda: Silence in his head. And okay, you can all ask questions. And then later, same meal, he's next to a little three year old ish girl and her mother, and there's quite a lot of chocolate. People have brought gifts and offerings, and people bring chocolate because sacred. And the little girl's going, could I have some chocolate? And her mother's going, well, yes, I think so, you'd have to ask the shaman. And she opens her mouth to ask the shaman, and the mother goes, no, no, you ask inside. You don't have to ask verbally. And this is in our lifetime. This is a living thing that happened in the span of your and my lifetime. Why are we not teaching this to our kids? Why? Why not?
Tim: It's such an interesting question. Because again, I would come back to how much we've lost. We, I mean, many of us in these weird cultures who are so disconnected from even even our bodies, right? I mean, it's like it goes so deep, and I don't know whether I've said this to you before, but when I first heard your name was from Nick Mulvey at Cop26.
Manda: Oh, really? You haven't said this before at all. I'm intrigued.
Tim: So, Nick Mulvey, do you know who Nick Mulvey is?
Manda: It rings a bell. You're going to have to give me a context.
Tim: He's a singer songwriter from Cambridge.
Manda: Oh, yes, yes, yes.
Tim: And he was performing at Cop26 and he talks about you and the fact that we are awakening from a post-Roman nightmare. This is the quote he brings in, from Boudica.
Manda: Yes. And he's written songs.
Tim: He has, exactly. Mona and other songs he's written based on your writing.
Manda: And they're amazing.
Tim: I love his music and yeah, amazing.
Manda: We'll see if we can find them, put them in the show notes or links to them.
Tim: Yeah. The reason I bring it in is because what he's talking about there is how much we've lost from our European indigenous past. So that's exactly what he's trying to say there, is something about this post-Roman nightmare that we're awakening from, is this disconnection. Thousands of years of disconnection from something indigenous. Because we're all indigenous. I mean, you know, Wacanyi Hoffman; we're all indigenous, right?
Manda: We're all indigenous to somewhere. Yes.
Tim: So there's something really important, I think, in your point; how many skills and competencies, if you want to put that language on it, have we lost with this disconnection from our own nature?
Manda: But they are rediscoverable.
Tim: 100%.
Manda: In 300,000 years of human evolution 2000 years is a blink. And we're all born with this. I think this is our birthright. We're all born with this capacity. And in kids, it's still very much alive. I do CPD for the shamanic work, I'm doing a training in mediumship at the moment because it's similar. And almost to a person the people on the course are saying, I was doing this as a kid and I was told it was wrong and I had to stop because I had to fit in. And now I'm trying to open those doors again. And it's hard because I've had 20, 30, however many decades of slamming them shut. But they will open given time. And the kids, if we stopped telling them they had to not do it, then that's a whole generation that could grow with that. I think we're so afraid of what might arise if we allow the domestication of our Citadel mind culture to evolve into something different, because it's unpredictable. And we label a lot of things that are in other cultures 'normal' as psychopathies. One of my other teachers works a lot with people with schizophrenia. He says the difference between us, the shamanic practitioners, and them is that we choose where to go and we know how to come back. But perhaps if we gave these people the skills to choose how to go and to know how to come back, they would not be on lithium or whatever it is. That's a box for they wouldn't be given a label and treated in the Western way with drugs.
Tim: Sure.
Manda: Because the other realities exist. It just would be very useful to be able to navigate them with a degree of predictability. And we're afraid, I guess, we wouldn't know how to do that.
Tim: No, I completely agree with you. And I think it's also interesting, even the fact that we're talking about different branches of psychology, when it has a 'scientific language' around it, it's possible to say. But when it's shamanic or spiritual or whatever, it's kind of 'woo woo' and it's not possible to say actually. In many contexts, it's not possible to bring these things in. And I'm really curious, you must have had that exact experience so many times going into a space, have you not? I'm really interested, yeah.
Manda: Well, this is really interesting. So I was at the Oxford Farming Conference. We had a day before, called Listening to the Land, which was curated by the Animate Earth Collective and by the UN Conscious Food Systems Alliance. Which was really interesting. They had exactly woken up to the fact that shifting data points with World Economic Forum criteria was not what it was at, and that the people they worked with were talking to the land and they needed to to bring them together. It was beautiful and gorgeous and interesting. We had a bit where we were put together, just turn to the person next to you and talk. And I ended up talking with Colin Campbell, who's part of the Animate Earth Collective and was brought up in Botswana as a white child, but he spent a lot of time with the elders and has been initiated into their ways and with a member of the Conscious Food Systems Alliance. And we had this conversation, and I had just stood up and said something, and I wept as I was saying it, and so they were aware that I was capable of being emotional in public.
Manda: And it was, how do you talk about this? And actually, my experience is I grew up as, first of all, I was openly lesbian from when I was quite young. In a world of veterinary clinical academia, I was the only out person in six universities in the UK. And it wasn't that I was the only person who was not heterosexual, but I was the only one who was going, hey guys, come on, let's pretend this is 1980 something, shall we? And then I was doing shamanic work while being a clinical anaesthetist and telling some of the students, you know, we're taking our horses particularly, that's what I worked with, to the edges of the River of river of death, and we're bringing them back. And it really matters that we know where they are in that journey. And there were some students who got that, and there were some who were just, you know, you're crazy. But once you got the label of being eccentric, you can say whatever the **** you like and it doesn't matter. And I discovered that quite early, is I have a pass at the moment, in the culture we have. And, you know, if the techno feudalism comes, that pass may end quite quickly. But just at the moment I have a pass to say whatever I like, whenever I like, and I use it, and then the people come up afterwards and go, I'm so glad you said that, because nobody is saying that and it needs more of us need to break that boundary.
Tim: Absolutely. I mean, Rupert Sheldrake is another example, right? I mean, his books were being burned at Cambridge.
Manda: His TedTalk is one of the few that has been banned.
Tim: Exactly. There was such a violent reaction to what he was saying. But then at the same time, these weird, rational cultures pride themselves on this critical thinking.
Manda: Yes, which is nonsense.
Tim: Which is nonsense because it's all dogma. Because what you're saying is outside of the dogma of scientism or of the scientific biomedical paradigm, whatever. And so you can't say that here. You can say that in your strange spaces over there.
Manda: And we'll tell everybody that you're mad and then that's okay. Yeah.
Tim: I completely agree. I think it's really important that we have more of those different kinds of tonalities, I guess, of ways of being human coming into the space. Because this really is fundamentally important. And it makes me think, actually, I've been doing some work with Nora Bateson on warm data.
Manda: Right. So envious.
Tim: This has been such an interesting experience, because we've been taking the idea of a warm data lab into a school. And so for listeners who aren't aware, a warm data lab is effectively a kind of a space, a protocol that that Nora, based on decades of her own work and the work of her father, Gregory Bateson, and many others. Has kind of brought this space and this facilitation of essentially allowing complexity to emerge and for people to connect in that space and for this idea of warm data. Which is essentially a name that she's put onto the incredible, amazing, beautiful complexity of life, you know, in order to talk about it.
Manda: Emergence in process. But she's given it a scientific frame.
Tim: Given it a frame. And it's I think really Conscious, she's given it a scientific frame so that it can be participated in in a way that's palatable, let's say, to some extent in these different spaces. So she's doing really interesting work in conference spaces and in all sorts of amazing spaces. We've been trying to say, well, what does that look like in a school context? And it's like oil and water, right? I mean, it's so interesting because it is in a school context that is completely obsessed with outcomes. Pre-planned, clear outcomes. Emergence is a very dangerous concept in a school context, because everything is about well, what are these young people going to know? What are they going to know and be able to do by the time we finish this lesson, by the time we finish this unit, by the time they graduate from this school? It's predicated on pre-prepared outcomes.
Tim: And so a warm data lab is pure emergence basically, but with some really important and interesting enabling structures put in there. All the different contexts. So you can see how the different contexts like health and education and law and media and social media and how they all overlay and interact. It's absolutely fascinating to be a participant in and to observe, but it's also so interesting to see where this meets up against the kind of schooling, let's say. It butts up against the schoolishness.
Manda: So have you actually done it? Have you brought it into schools?
Tim: Yeah, yeah. Quite a few times.
Manda: So how do the people who participate, the young people, and I'm guessing you have teachers in there; how does it sit with them physiologically in their emotional space when they've done it? Because that seems to me critical. If they come out going, that was so amazing and my whole world feels brighter, then we're beginning to create the stepping stones.
Tim: So I would say a mix of experiences, right? So in certain contexts the scripts of the school have been so strong that it's actually been quite difficult to allow that to break through. So for example, if you've got a load of young people who are all part of the same year group, they've known each other for a long time, and you then have this strange lady coming in, bringing this strange concept on a Tuesday morning, that they're not quite sure why they're there. Then there's this interesting holding, of the friend groups end up hanging out with the friend groups, because in a warm data lab, you can move around, right?
Manda: Okay, so the cliques that already exist kind of self-organize.
Tim: Exactly. So and unfortunately what happens, there's still movement that happens, but I think it doesn't quite come to its fullest potential in those settings, because I think it works better when there's a little bit of a frisson of like, you don't quite know the other people in the space.
Manda: So in conferences where it's a lot of people all drawn together from a lot of different places.
Tim: Different mix of ages, different mix of different networks. So for example, I know if Nora is going into an organisation, for example, she'll invite them to bring in people from outside the organisation into the space so, that it gives it that sense of some kind of unfamiliarity that brings in a different energy.
Manda: So ideally you'd mix 2 or 3 year groups from 2 or 3 schools and try and persuade them to not just self-select into their people they knew.
Tim: Right. So there's that dimension I think that we've definitely noticed. And then the other one is having a frame as to why they're doing it. And this is something I've talked a lot to Nora about, but there's some challenges around Conscious purpose. And Gregory Bateson talks a lot about Conscious purpose. That it's quite a dangerous thing to get trapped in. Again, it's about planning why am I doing this and you know, I'm going to the market to buy bread versus I'm going to the market and buying bread.
Manda: Yes, exactly.
Tim: Which is a subtle but important distinction that Nora makes.
Manda: Although every supermarket is based on the fact that they put all the stuff that they want you to pick up while you happen to be there, so it's not like we don't experience the I went to the supermarket with a list of three things and came back having spent way more money than I expected.
Tim: Because I've been manipulated by the funnel of supermarket marketing.
Manda: Cognitive neuroscience has been applied to me. Would warm data work better if you did it in primary schools, where the kids have not yet been so inculcated into having to have a purpose?
Tim: It's a good question. We haven't yet done it with younger children. Be interesting.
Manda: It might be hard.
Tim: But I think it would be magic in all sorts of other ways, I'm sure. But just to finish that about the frame, I think it's important, the other place we've done it or one of the other places we've done it, is in an amazing college called UWC Atlantic College in Wales.
Manda: All right. With Raïsa.
Tim: With Raïsa. Exactly. Where Raïsa works. And the frame for that was they are the first school that is running the systems transformation pathway for the International Baccalaureate, which is a whole nother thing we could talk about.
Manda: Yes! Please. Start a new podcast.
Tim: It's an amazing development. It's a really, really important development. Within the establishment, There is a space being created for these conversations around systems transformation. It's really important and amazing. But the reason I bring it in there is because doing a warm data lab in that context, where the young people are already learning about systems thinking, complexity, systems change, food systems, energy systems, etc. they already had a sense of a 'why'. And I've had this conversation with colleagues within the Bateson Institute and with Nora herself. I think it's important sometimes to give people a bit of a 'why', because there's an orientation that happens about 'why'. You know, I don't want to know everything that's going to happen here, but I want to have a 'what's my invitation? Why am I coming into this space?'
Manda: Right. Otherwise, I just feel really lost and spend half the time processing that lostness inside, and all the trauma triggers that that's going to happen. And the little frozen places that get very upset if I don't know why. And being kind to those parts is quite important I would think.
Tim: That's a lovely way of saying it. So yeah, I think that's been also super interesting is the places where there's a bit of a frame has been incredible. And to your exact description, the young people come out of those thinking, wow, this is amazing. I want to do more, right? I want to learn how to hold the spaces, become a warm Datalab host. I mean really great, really amazing.
Manda: Isn't Wales amazing? Is this arising in Wales because it has the seven generation concept and it just is slightly different? Or is it pure chance that this is a Welsh thing?
Tim: I don't think it's entirely pure chance. I mean, I would say maybe nothing's pure chance in that sense, right?
Manda: Yeah. Okay. Yes. That's true
Tim: Because there is a an adventurousness about the UWC Atlantic College. And it's been there for what, 50 years? 60 years? I mean, there's something in Wales that has been there that has enabled Atlantic College to continue to thrive, as I would say a very progressive space.
Manda: Yeah. Because other progressive spaces in England like Dartington School and things were shut down, for being too progressive, as far as I could tell. I know someone quite well who was in the last year there, and the headmaster, the students were able to choose the new head, and this person came in saying all the right things. And the day they arrived, they started closing it down. And it felt like this place is just too progressive. And it's frightening the establishment that we are creating people who have the capacity for autonomous thought and understand Systems. Which is very sad. And so I'm curious with AWC in Wales, is the rest of the educational establishment on whatever scale we want to look at that, seeing what's happening and thinking, yes, this is stuff that we want all our young people to experience? Or is it like, we're just going to wall you off like some kind of strange foreign thing and make sure you don't infect our people?
Tim: It's a great question. I would say two things to that. One is there's a lot of interest in the systems transformation pathway. It's in the pilot stage. So it was started in Wales, now at UWC in SA in Singapore, it's then going to be in other schools around the world and with more of a general kind of invitation in a few years. So there's a lot of interest in that for progressive, committed educators who are wanting to do something differently. 100%.
Manda: And can you for those of us on my podcast who don't know what this is, can you very briefly tell us what actually systems transformation pathway is, but finish your sentence, go on.
Tim: Yeah well maybe I can kind of wrap it up with the 'and'. The And is that it needs to also manifest differently in different cultural contexts.
Manda: Okay. Because that's systemic.
Tim: Because that's systemic, right.
Manda: We're not imposing.
Tim: Yeah, exactly. And that's a really important dimension to this, is that because I work with the International Baccalaureate mostly, with Festival of Hope, which we can talk about if you want to. But the important aspect of that is it's global. It's in 155 countries and in every country there is a sense that it will show up differently, because of the cultural context in which that's happening. And particularly with something where you're talking about systems transformation, that is importantly different. That in a Singaporean context, what's possible to say, what's possible to do, the conversations that course is showing up in, are different to a more progressive Wales context. And a more isolated, I would say, context of that particular college. Because it's a boarding school and it's possible there. So there's a lot of really important aspects where it needs to show up differently. And so therefore, just to weave in what it is: it's essentially a program within the diploma program, which is the International Baccalaureate, 16 to 18, similar to A-levels. And it's coming in in response to global challenges, in response to the mission of the organisation to build peace in a better world through education. And it's also responding to the questioning of standardised educational experiences and standardised exams. So there's no external standardised examinations as part of the course, bearing in mind it's still in pilot phase so it's developing and changing. But it's really powerfully important to bring young people, for example in Wales, understanding food systems, energy systems and migration as three topic areas. But a lot of investigation around agency for young people in those spaces. How do they understand the systemic interactions of global supply chains and supply chains and all of those kinds of things.
Tim: Whereas in Singapore, it's more around project management, changemaker mindsets and other things. Around how do young people step into their own agency to make change in the world, for example. So importantly, interestingly different, but the commonality is kind of allowing young people to be more agentic around understanding systems and making change in those systems.
Manda: Right. And they're not necessarily either collapse aware or even predicated on a shifting climate and the necessity for total systemic change. They're just allowing young people to understand systems dynamics. Is that what I'm understanding?
Tim: Yeah, I think so. I mean, again, you know, allowing space for young people to find their own way in that. So to say we need global systemic change, neither you nor I know what that means really. It's easy to say; what it actually looks like is rather different.
Manda: How do we get there is an entirely different question.
Tim: And those young people will be holding a lot of that, in 10, 20, 30 years time, the responsibility of how they do that. So for me, the idea of enabling a cohort of young people, a critical mass of young people who are aware and able to navigate that kind of systemic change, is The Work, right, in a way? I mean, it's so important.
Manda: Yeah, totally. Wow. Gosh, this does feel like a whole other podcast. I really want to talk more about systems change and how it evolves, but we're already over an hour so we have to be careful. So I'm wondering where we could take it as a beginning to ramp down, rather than a ramping up, because going straight into total systemic change does feel like opening a very big door. But it's so essential. And so I have a question. I'm thinking back to the podcast we did with Elliott, and they're doing a lot of work on helping the young people to learn self-regulation and learning emotional literacy as an integral part of then also learning to work with the land. And we were talking about addressing the parts that get frozen. I'm exploring a lot with Thomas Hubl's work of the fact that trauma is a moment frozen in time, and that if we can thaw all those moments in time within ourselves and between each other; and he works a lot with ancestral trauma that's passed down generations and freezes still; then we could create the energetic space where healing is happening. And that's also an integral part of this systemic work. That the Citadel mind and the trauma culture is a whole cultural freeze in a way. And that allowing the thawing is part of something that we have to do quite urgently, (for me, he doesn't say this) but I think if we thaw and we can flow, then the connection to the web of life and to each other in the non-verbal, non-linear ways becomes much more accessible. Within the educational spaces that you're looking at is an awareness of internal dynamics and how to navigate them an integral part of what young people are being given?
Tim: Yeah, it's a good question. I wouldn't say integral, no. I would say it shows up with quite a different discourse surrounding it, obviously, compared to how you've just described it. But I would say for probably 20 or 30 years there has been an emerging discourse around emotional literacy. It gets captured by the intelligence language; so emotional intelligence, Daniel Goleman, all of that kind of work. Social and emotional learning is a big buzz phrase in education, so there is, I think, very definitely an awareness that this should be part of an educational space and educational diet for our young people, particularly, for example, with more challenges with mental health and wellbeing coming up, more discourses around wellbeing, flourishing; OECD talking about human flourishing. There is a sense that these things are being talked about. One of the challenges, though, is that they are often, and this is quite a systemic challenge, I think, in educational spaces; is that they're initiatives and projects that come in on the fringes, on the sides. It doesn't necessarily go to the heart of the business of what we do in classrooms in schools.
Tim: It's kind of bringing in mindfulness once a week or to support with a connectedness and awareness. And I've done that myself, honestly.
Manda: And it's better than nothing, I'm guessing.
Tim: And exactly, because it's like where are those spaces in an incredibly packed schedule, in a logic of optimisation; where are those spaces that you can carve out to have those moments where you can allow a little bit of emergence to happen. Allow young people to be a little bit more connected with themselves and with each other than they would otherwise be, going from lesson to lesson. And so for example, for me, in my career, that's been I used to teach and do a lot of work with programs around life skills, personal social education, citizenship, education. They show up in different systems with different names. I see your eyebrows go up at citizenship.
Manda: All I know about citizenship is a friend who was Hungarian, who had to sit citizenship exams here, and was asked questions that none of us knew the answers to. It was horrible.
Tim: It all sounds very nationalistic. Yeah. But my point is, there are some spaces in schools where they try to do some of this work, but it's always fringe, it's never core.
Manda: When in fact it is actually core to being human.
Tim: 100%. Yeah, exactly. The problem is, I would say one of the important pieces of work is to not allow the kind of capture of those things into a programmatic, optimising, systematic approach, because as soon as that happens...
Manda: They have more tick boxes.
Tim: Excatly. It's like, okay, we've done our mindfulness. And it's the capture. I mean, it's like the H2Minus Vortex. I don't know if you've read that piece by Jonathan Rosen? That's a whole nother conversation.
Manda: Is that the three horizons model and being sucked backwards?
Tim: Okay. Exactly. But it's the capture of these really well meaning initiatives being brought in to try and create more space for young people, but they get captured by the optimising system.
Manda: How do we change that?
Tim: That's a deep, that's like a meta challenge, I would say for education.
Manda: And I'm guessing you know about it, so other people know about it. I remember, again listening to your podcast, of somebody I think before Christmas, reminding us that during the Tory years they had the same education minister for ten years, which was Michael Gove. And he was shutting down everything because he basically still thought that everybody should just learn Latin and then they would be perfect. The level of inbuilt trauma that is then being imposed was truly disconcerting. And I'm being very kind there. But then you know, and therefore other people know, that optimising for internal healing is not a thing. How can it become, what are the bridges that we could build, to make it mainstream?
Tim: I would say that the things I'm seeing, the really exciting and important projects and green shoots that are coming up, are spaces whether online or in person schools where they are educational experiments, if you like. Where often it's built around a concept. So, for example, the green school in Bali where good friends work. There's a concept there that says, okay, we are a school that takes us as nature seriously, and we're going to enable young people to be part of that. Or, you know, nature based schools. There are lots of examples. The School of Humanity, an online school. That's just, you know, trying to bring more open, generative spaces of learning for young people. They are happening but they're not yet embedding themselves systematically, systemically.
Tim: Because and I would say this explodes the conversation into a much larger frame, of people like Indy Johar, it's like a paradigm of control. You know, these kind of cultures of control, as you were saying, about this fear of letting the wildness happen. Letting us explore. Based on those larger paradigms of control, it's really difficult to create genuinely open spaces where we allow for emergence.
Manda: Your teachers have to be in that place to begin with and they've also been through the optimising process.
Tim: Exactly, exactly. And, you know, Bill Plotkin again was saying, if all primary education was just nature based, you know, deeper connectedness on an ongoing basis until they're ten, 11, 12 years old. Great. That would make a significant difference. Clearly, that's not going to happen. And it's not possible in all climates. That's another interesting part of this when you work globally, you know.
Manda: Right. It's -40 out there, nobody's going to go and sit on the ground. Right.
Tim: Exactly. Or it's plus 40 out there and it's not possible to be outside in the sunshine. So there's sometimes a romantic European bias to some of these ideas.
Manda: So we need to do the reforesting first so that you can go and sit under the shade of the trees. Yes. Okay. Systems.
Tim: Systems. Exactly. But it's beautiful and amazing and there's so much possibility there, I really feel. And the fact that more and more of these kinds of conversations are happening, like the one we had with Will and Raïsa. You know, there are more and more people having the conversation about what is fundamentally disassociating about this optimising logic; something needs to change, but you can't just optimise your way out of that.
Manda: No. Exactly. Yes. The master's house will not be dismantled with the master's tools, and/or no problem is solved from the mindset that created it. And so where's your entry point? And I wonder as we're closing, you talked about the Festival of Hope because it seemed to me that that was an entry point.
Tim: It is.
Manda: Do you want to just say a little bit about what it is and how it works?
Tim: I'd love to, thank you. So it came up two and a half years ago, in conversation with Olli-Pekka Heinonen, who's the director general of the IB, the International Baccalaureate, as a response to the need amongst young people, really. The IB had seen really difficult challenges through the pandemic, with young people feeling suicidal, feeling the deep, deep challenges of the moment they were in, the disruption, the continued kind of pressure of assessments, etc. that didn't stop during that time. And their life goals were still hinged on getting these grades. In response to that, and with a really important mission that the IB has, of peace and a better world through education, we decided to think about how can we essentially create spaces for young people to come together and talk about these things that they care about, that they're passionate about, they want to change. Like climate, like mental health crises, honestly any issues that are coming up for them in their communities. So we framed it around the Festival of Hope. People can find out more about it online, in person spaces.
Manda: We'll put links in the show notes.
Tim: Yeah, absolutely. And I find it interesting that still two and a half years on, some people will still be slightly perplexed about what exactly is this thing? And I feel quite happy about that in a way, because there's something important about the fact that it's a frame that clearly invokes something around systems change. And, you know, hope of the future. And what is the world asking of you? These are the kinds of questions we ask. What are the things you care about enough to fight for? To hope for? These kinds of questions for young people. They're important questions for all of us, honestly.
Manda: Yeah. For sure.
Tim: But it shows up differently in different spaces. It's been amazing having festivals of hope in many countries. In India, with 100 schools all coming together for a festival of Hope. In Mumbai and New Delhi. We had one in Chicago back in 2022. In Wales We've been at UWC Atlantic College there, Costa Rica, Colombia, Rio. I mean, it's showing up in different places and online. We had about 4000 young people come and join us for the summit of the future online kind of festival that we ran.
Manda: Fantastic.
Tim: I say we ran. It's always co-created with young people. So the young people are really doing the design work of creating the spaces with support from us, with support from their teachers and leaders of the school that they're in, or community they're in.
Manda: So they're finding agency in the process.
Tim: Exactly. And that's a key part, right, is that we're practising what we preach as well. We're not just saying we want to create these spaces, but we'll do it and we'll make sure it's all perfect and lovely and then you'll come in and have a lovely time. So much of the learning is in how do we do this together. This practice of Co, that's really really important, co-creating through the process. So yeah, it's been amazing. We're learning lots along the way. It's part of a broader engagement with young people that the IB is developing.
Manda: And are you seeing, I'm thinking first of all, ripple effects out, but also, a kind of lift through time. The young people who were engaged in this two and a half years ago, are you seeing them... I don't know...I mean, we don't want to optimise, we don't want to be measuring, but I'm wondering if you're getting feedback from them that they're different, that something has shifted.
Tim: There's a trap there isn't there? Of like tracking the impact. We're measuring the impact. And we've got some hard data to show that we've had an amazing...
Manda: And my inner scientist really wants that, but that's not what it's about. This is warm data in action really.
Tim: Exactly. And I would say amazing signals that that is happening, is that we've got young people who stay connected with us, who want to Continue to be part of a community. And then we're partnering with other organisations like, I believe, a young people led organisation, to bring young people, mainly from IB contexts, together. So there's a really good ongoing connectedness that obviously not all the young people who participate, but quite a number of them want to stay connected. They feel something alive in the space and they say, yeah, this is great. I'd love to come and be an intern or continue and sign up for one of your other things. Or, we've got a grant making initiative to support young people's action, changemaker projects, called the Global Youth Action Fund. So that's part of it as well. So how do we support with some of the resources and invest in young people with the resources that they might need to continue some of the work? So yeah, I mean, there's different flows between different ways that we're trying to continue supporting young people. It's really fascinating. And yeah, it feels important. It feels like the young people resonate with it. There you go, that concept again.
Manda: Right. That's what we need.
Tim: They connect somehow with something here.
Manda: Creating space. Brilliant. Lovely. That feels quite a good place to end. Unless there was anything else that you had wanted to to bring to this space?
Tim: I mean, there's lots. There's lots.
Manda: We should do this again sometime.
Tim: For another time. Yeah.
Manda: Brilliant. All right. Well, from my side thank you for coming on to the Accidental Gods podcast Tim Logan.
Tim: Thanks, Manda.
Manda: Well, there we go. Wasn't that a lot of fun? Enormous thanks to Tim. Partly for showing up at at genuinely 24 hours notice, but also and more for what he's doing in the world. For how deeply he gets the urgency of what needs to happen and the routes forward. The Festival of Hope is amazing. The work he's doing with the rest of the International Baccalaureate sounds glorious. AWC in Wales. All of the other schools around the world that are doing their best to step out of the Citadel mind, to move beyond the boundaries of optimisation and the rigidity of what schooling education used to be. And aiming to give young people the flexibility to understand what emergence is, to take an active role, to have the agency to really be part of the change that needs to happen. And yes, absolutely every single one of us is a node in the web of life, and everything that we do is part of the emergent future. But I think there is such a huge role for education in helping young people to be conscious of the fact that this is the case. And actually to help those of us who are no longer young to become conscious of the fact that this is the case, and to do whatever we can to make the changes that need to happen to let the younger generations emerge into being something completely other than the world that is, in some places, being shaped around us.
Manda: These are quite frightening times. Watching some of the things that are happening on the other side of the Atlantic feels like living in the worst of dystopian novels. But emergence is a thing. Hypercomplex systems are not predictable. And as we've said so often on this podcast, the energy that we bring to the world is what will make the difference. We are the nodes in the web of life. And the more that we can consciously open to that, the more that we can be an active part in emerging into a future that we would actually be proud to leave behind. It's not guaranteed. It is still possible. And shifting our education system, transforming it into something generative and emergent, feels to me like such an important part of the process. So thank you, Tim. Thank you, thank you.
Manda: And we'll put links in the show notes to the places that you might want to visit so that you too, can become part of the process. And if you have young people in your life, please see if you can find ways to help them become part of the emergent process. To step beyond the boundaries of optimisation, to help their schools and other educational spaces become places of true learning, and not just indoctrination into the old system. That would be amazing.
Manda: So there we go. We will be back next week with another conversation. In the meantime, as ever, thanks to Caro C for the music at the Head and Foot. To Alan Lowles of Airtight Studios for the production. To Lou Mayor for the video, to Anne Thomas for the transcripts, to Faith Tilleray for the website, The Tech and all the amazing, vibrant conversations behind the scenes that keep our thinking alive. And as ever, to you for giving us the time, for listening, for caring, for being part of the solution. And if you know of anybody else that understands the role that education can play in the future that we want to build, please do send them this link. And while we're here, while we're talking about Tim's podcast and this podcast, please do like us, review us, subscribe and share us with your friends. This is how we grow the change in the world. So there we go. That is it for now. See you next week. Thank you and goodbye.