Future Learning Design Podcast

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.

A recent guest, Prof. Tony Chemero highlighted that anthropology is one of the more underestimated and often excluded of the ‘cognitive sciences’. I completely agree and since I discovered it in the early 2000s when I did my undergraduate degree at the University of Sussex, I have personally experienced anthropology not as a subject discipline, but rather as a way of approaching the world and cognition itself. That's why this week I was so happy to bring together four amazing anthropologists who care deeply about educational transformations to explore these questions.
Pascale Mompoint-Gaillard, PhD
Pascale is a social psychologist, trainer and facilitator, researcher and CEO of Learn to Change, Change to Learn, bridging theory and practice working in the area of collective intelligence, cooperative and transformative learning, with 30 years of professional practice. Pascale’s PhD (2021) focused on ‘Conversation as a learning ecology’ and how professionals develop through engaging in online professional learning communities. She has co-authored several handbooks of which the European Reference Framework of Competences for a Democratic Culture (RFCDC), (Council of Europe, 2018) and the TASKs for Democracy handbook, (Council of Europe, 2015) dedicated to student and teacher competence. 
https://pascalemompoint.com/
Conversation as an Ecology of Learning
Education for change: 
https://share.google/8K1PEdbaYIgbRuRqF
Developing intercultural education in schools: 
https://share.google/Of1MSlVTmedxoQ9Gm
A European framework for Democratic citizenship in education: https://share.google/8QSEiz5cAmg3HQjHz
Corina Enache 
Corina is the founder and system worker at Kotka (which means ‘eagle’ in Finnish and ‘female cat’ in Polish!) a consultancy helping living things grow well. She is also the host of The Human Show podcast. Corina’s work sits at the intersection of leadership development, organisational development, and anthropology, and unfolds through learning, dialogue, and real-time practice. She draws on experience across international corporate environments, consulting, academia and European projects, and work with different ways of knowing — thinking, sensing, and intuition — while staying close to what is actually happening in the system.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/corinaenache/ 
https://kotka.world/ 
https://worldpodcasts.com/the-human-show/ 
Patrick Alexander
Patrick is a social anthropologist specialising in education, childhood and youth studies. Patrick’s research and teaching interests include the sociology of schooling, youth and youth subcultures, gender, ethnography, and social theory. He is Reader in Education and Anthropology in the School of Education, Oxford Brookes University, as well as Research Lead for the School of Education, and Director of the Centre for Educational Consultancy and Development (CECD), where he leads consultancy and contract research activity in the field of education.
Patrick is a Fulbright Scholar, Fellow of the RSA, HEA, Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI), and a Fellow of International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES). Patrick is also Research Fellow at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford and Editor of the journal Teaching Anthropology (https://teachinganthropology.org/ ).
https://www.brookes.ac.uk/profiles/staff/patrick-alexander 
https://patrickgalexander.org/about-3/  
Zineb Mouhyi
Zineb is a mother, daughter, writer, educator, scholar-activist, and PhD candidate in Anthropology and Social Change at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Zineb was also the co-founder of ⁠YouthXYouth⁠, a global organisation that she set up with Valentina Raman, to convene youth-led action around transforming education systems.
Young People are Reclaiming their Education and Making New Worlds Possible - A Conversation with Zineb Mouhyi (Ep185)
Sarah Pink (2025). ⁠Futures Anthropology for the Polycrisis⁠. Anthropological Forum, 1–18.

There aren’t many people who can say that they have learned their hard-won leadership lessons through the experience of steering an educational transformation across a whole country, let alone a country made up of nearly 300 million people across 17,000 islands! My guest in this episode, Dr. Iwan Syahril, has taken the time and care to reflect on some of these lessons in his fantastic new book, ‘Students, Students, Students!: The Human Journey in Leadership and System Transformation’. But he was also kind enough to join me to reflect on it on the podcast this week. As Iwan argues, the only way to align a massive, complex educational system transformation is a clear, simple purpose and to move away from bureaucratic jargon and complex policies to focus relentlessly on the child. And then for that transformation to be sustainable, it must be rooted in a society’s own values rather than imported models. For Indonesia, that meant drawing on the philosophy of Ki Hajar Dewantara and the spirit of gotong royong (mutual cooperation). 
Iwan is a global leader shaping the future of human-centered education in the age of AI. An authority on leading change at scale, he advises global organizations and governments on building resilient, future- ready systems. His expertise is grounded in his tenure as Director General at Indonesia's Ministry of Education, where he architected the Merdeka Belajar reforms, digitally empowering 3.3 million teachers and improving outcomes for 53 million students. A former Chair of the G20 Education Working Group, his strategic vision is informed by frontline experience teaching in Indonesia, the US, and Canada, and his leadership as Dean of Education at Sampoerna University. He holds graduate degrees from Columbia University, a dual PhD and Honorary Doctorate from Michigan State University, and a fellowship from HP-Cambridge.
His work now sits at the frontier of policy, practice, and technology, helping education systems move faster, fairer, and with greater resilience. In his book, Students, Students, Students!: The Human Journey in Leadership and System Transformation, he outlines many of the powerful principles for leading complex change.Iwan’s wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iwan_Syahril 
Iwan’s website: https://sites.google.com/view/studentsstudentsstudents/ 
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iwan.syahril/ 
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/iwansyahril