In episode 181 with Robert Barnett, Rob and I were discussing the real constraints and difficult conditions teachers find themselves in as they try to prioritise the meaningful learning and growth of their young people. This week, we are taking a broader look at the kinds of institutional structures that might actually help rather than hinder these more generative ways of living and learning - the kinds of institutions suited to the transformative adaptations and systems change that we desperately need.

As educators, a great deal of our understandings of what learning is has been dominated by behaviourist and cognitivist ideas, but what if our decisions about how we design learning environments, and think about pedagogy and curriculum had taken in ecological insights of Eleanor Gibson & James Gibson and the branch of psychology known as ecological psychology. So few educators know that such a sub-discipline even exists!

Systems change is a big phrase, which can mean a lot of different things to different people. Quite possibly the system doesn't actually change "up there" in the realms of national and trans-national policy-making. Perhaps it changes in individual classrooms with teachers choosing to do something different. I was so happy to sit down with ⁠Robert Barnett⁠, co-founder of the Modern Classrooms Project to talk about this and find out how he, and his co-founder ⁠Kareem Farah⁠, have made some very specific and not particularly easy choices about which leverage points they were going to work.

As Manda Scott's BRILLIANT podcast suggests, "another world is possible… we have the power of gods to destroy our home, but we also have the chance to become something we cannot yet imagine." This week's special episode is a joint podcast with Manda on her Accidental Gods podcast (https://accidentalgods.life/ ). In all of her shamanic work, bestselling novel-writing, podcasting and convening, Manda Scott is gathering people around the vital question, how we can create a future that we would be proud to leave to the generations to come?

This week it was a huge pleasure to be able to welcome⁠ Carl Mika, Professor of Māori and Indigenous Philosophies⁠ from Aotearoa, the country now known as New Zealand. As you can probably guess from the title of this episode, this conversation with Carl went pretty deep pretty quickly! That's because underlying the most apparently basic concepts like learning or logic that people use all the time are some pretty fundamental assumptions about the way the world is. And they're certainly not universal to all humans.