Future Learning Design Podcast

Welcome to this next episode in the series on the implications of Embodiment Science in education. After Episode 1 on intelligence and Episode 2 on learning, this is the third installment, where Guy Claxton and Emily Poel's take on what embodiment science has to say about how we understand memory and knowledge.
This is a hugely important call to those who have forgotten that the dominant way we talk about memory in education is actually a metaphor. And a bad one at that, that the science is now telling us needs to be replaced with something biologically plausible.

Rather than the narrow definition of schooling, if you think of education broadly, as raising children to become members of a community and as capable, functioning people contributing to the life and strength of that community, then the roles of schools and teachers in community can take on real significance. But from another perspective, becoming an "educated" person is often the thing that pulls people away from their community as they travel to nearby towns or cities to attend schools, and universities and pursue other careers. My guest this week, Sonia Bautista León is working in and with communities, across the Sierra Mixe in Oaxaca, Mexico co-creating educational responses to the challenges and opportunities being lived there. 
Sonia is Senior Coordinator at Radix Education (https://www.radixeducation.org/) and since 2020, she has been working on the Nuevo Maestro Project (https://www.proyectonuevomaestro.org/) in the state of Oaxaca, an organisation that trains teachers in primary and upper secondary education. She has worked as an educational consultant in various educational institutions and civil society organisations and has taught at university level at the National Pedagogical University 201, Oaxaca. She is a member of the Mexican Assembly of Former US Embassy Scholars and has also served as a mentor for the Indigenous Leaders Programme at the University of the Americas Puebla (UDLAP). 
Originally from the Sierra Juárez region of Oaxaca and a speaker of the Zapotec language, she firmly believes that education is the most powerful means of transforming the lives of children and young people, as well as their communities. Her professional development has focused primarily on the education of women and youth in indigenous and rural communities in the state of Oaxaca. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Educational Intervention from the National Pedagogical University 201, a Master’s degree in Educational Administration from La Salle University in Oaxaca, and a Master’s degree in Teaching at the Benito Juárez Autonomous University of Oaxaca.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/sonia-bautista-le%C3%B3n-377a281a7/

After last week's inquiry into Guy Claxton and Emily Poel's theory of "real-world intelligence", this is the second of four short episodes exploring the fuller implications of embodiment science to our core concepts and deep grammars of schooling and education.
Today we are exploring the concept of how learning might be described differently from an embodiment science perspective, and how it is an integral part of the process of making our way in the world intelligently, balancing concerns, capabilities and circumstances as we explored last week.

There is a lot of talk about increasing agency in education and schooling, for young people and for teachers and we've done many episodes over the last 6 years that touch on it. But there is a tendency sometimes for discussions of agency to lack a bit of clarity in exactly what we mean by this slippery concept! My guests this week, Profs. Gert Biesta and Mark Priestley, published a seminal book with Sarah Robinson in 2015 on the subject of teacher agency, which moved the field forward hugely. 'Teacher Agency: An Ecological Approach' has just been republished in its second edition last month so I was very keen to talk about it with them. But, while I am fascinated by the concept of agency for many reasons, what particularly attracted me to Gert and Mark's work on this was their 'ecological approach'. Taking an ecological approach to understanding the conditions that give rise to agency, or any other outcome in education for that matter, feels like a really vital way to be approaching our central questions.
As a now 3 time guest, Gert is known well to listeners of the podcast, but his he has also recently been appointed as Professor of Education at the University of Melbourne, and since 2023 has served as ordinary member ('kroonlid') of the Education Council of the Netherlands (Onderwijsraad), the advisory body of the Dutch government and parliament on educational matters. 
He was previously Professor of Public Education in the Centre for Public Education and Pedagogy, Maynooth University, Ireland and Professor of Educational Theory and Pedagogy at the Moray House School of Education and Sport, University of Edinburgh. He is co-editor of the Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education, and associate editor of Educational Theory, and previously co-editor of the British Educational Research Journal some time ago. 
Links:
https://www.gertbiesta.com/
https://www.goodimpactlabs.com/podcast/prof-gert-biesta
https://www.goodimpactlabs.com/podcast/gert-biesta

Mark Priestley is Professor of Education at the University of Stirling whose research interests lie in the school curriculum – theory, policy and practice – and especially the processes of curriculum making across different layers of education systems. He is the Director of the Stirling Centre for Research into Curriculum Making, a member of the Scottish Government’s key education advisory committees, the Scottish Education Council and the Curriculum and Assessment Board, and a Co-Convener of the EERA network 3, Curriculum. Alongside 'Teacher Agency: An Ecological Approach', his publications include 'Curriculum making in Europe: policy and practice within and across diverse contexts'.
Links:
https://www.stir.ac.uk/people/255862
https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/teacher-agency-9781350536333/

This is the first the 4 short episodes exploring the fuller implications of embodiment science to our core concepts and deep grammars of schooling and education.
As you will have heard on a previous episode I did with Prof. Guy Claxton and Emily Poel, their book 'Bodies of Learning: How Embodiment Science Transforms Education' is a really significant statement of some of the work we need to do to excavate these unhelpful myths that are holding us back in the decisions and designs that we make for new educational approaches.
In these four episodes, we're going to take a deeper look at the core concepts of intelligence, learning, memory & knowledge, and thinking & reasoning. And in this first episode, I ask guy and Emily, what does embodiment science have to say about the way that we think about intelligence.