Riel Miller returns for a conversation about where education systems need to go and he brings with him some friends who have conducted research on this very question, Stephen Murgatroyd and JC Couture - the authors of Education Futures for School Leadership
Interviewed by: Peter Hayward
References
Biesta, G 2024, 'From the point where I stand to the place where I can be found: The critique of perspectival reason as philosophy for education', Educational Philosophy and Theory, pp. 1-15.
https://www.pure.ed.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/485889692/BiestaEPT2024FromThePointWhereIStand.pdf
Couture, J-C and Murgatroyd, S. (2024). Education Futures for School Leadership – Evidence-Informed Strategies for Managing Change. New York: Routledge.
https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003497776
Murgatroyd, S. (2024). Interregnum: Disruption and the in-between time in higher education. Journal of Open Distance and Digital Education, 1(2), 1-13. https://doi.org/10.25619/dpktzt39
Shirley, D. (2019) The Untapped Power of International Partnerships for Educational Change: The Norway Canada Project (NORCAN).
Audio Transcript
Peter Hayward: In election campaigns and the discussion of significant social problems, it comes up time and time again. How the education system has to educate young people to adapt to a changing world skill. 'EM for a jobs market that is rapidly changing, embrace the latest social change and learn the skills to maintain their mental health.And it's no surprise that almost everybody agrees that it's not doing that. But what to do.
Riel Miller: I feel that the constraints of the existing educational system are significant. Worrying about automation and technology and change and the problem of matching education to skills, and meeting the workforce needs of employers, and the anxieties of graduates about finding jobs. It seemed to me that we were not only repeating a pattern that had been going on for a long time but that it was very difficult to break out of the functional position that schooling's played in the development of industrial society. The fundamental need to keep children off the streets while their parents are at work and to ensure good behavior in the face of authority and showing up on time still to be the really bottom line for K 12. It seems to me so clear that this whole approach to learning it is bankrupt. And I wanted to bring this out into the open because I think it's really worth grappling with.
Stephen Murgatroyd: I don't disagree that we are not really leveraging the opportunities to work with communities and young people in powerful and creative ways. And so the strategy that JC and I have been pursuing is one school at a time. You can make a real difference somewhere through the people in that location . I don't think we're gonna see a big sudden realization we've been wrong for the last 50 years but it does happen at the level of a school. If you work with the leaders of that place and the community around it you can begin to have lighthouse effects on other parts of the system.
JC Couture: Teachers and school principals, when they have the inevitable contact with the parents. And the question from parents is, will my child be okay? And we see school systems increasingly being overmanaged and under imagined. The role of the school leader in creating and shaping a culture and sustaining a culture where anticipation, is allowed to open a space where people really can imagine alternatives to take on risk and to do really innovative and creative things.
Peter Hayward: Those are my guest today on Future Pod Riel Miller returns with Steven Murgatroyd and JC Couture
Welcome back to Future Pod Riel Miller.
Riel Miller: Thank you. Peter.
Peter Hayward: Now Riel, this is a little bit different because just for a change, instead of me chasing you, you chased me and you said, I want to come back on the pod and I wanna bring some people with me. So do you wanna explain to the listeners what we are here to talk about?
Riel Miller: Yeah. And thank you for that generosity and the opportunity. It's that currently what I'm calling these days the knowledge ecosystem is in turmoil, not the first time. I think we've all experienced it plenty of times. But this time around it feels like there's more of an opening to question at a fundamental level, and I thought that, that was particularly relevant in light of the work that's been going on.
And I'll let the other speakers here give a quick intro as to what they're up to. But I think that each of us is has an angle into. Something that, that might be considered on the cusp of a significant or a structural transition. I don't know what that'll turn into.
So I don't, for me, transformation is unknowable in advance, but transitional change and the imaginaries that gives rise to are certainly I think. There for us to work with right now and of in the forefront of a lot of people's minds.
Peter Hayward: So who have you invited to join you on this journey and conversation?
Riel Miller: Well, Steven go.
Stephen Murgatroyd: I'm Steve Murgatroyd, British by birth, but Canadian by instinct. I am living and working Canada in Edmonton, Alberta. Though I have a business background(I'm a former business school dean) I've been working in school systems and higher education, policy strategy, leadership development since the 1970s.
And what we've been doing recently, withmy colleague JC Couture who will introduce himself in a minute, is teaching graduate studentswho are all school leaders the science of anticipation and the power of agency and the importance of taking ownership of their future and the future of their school.
So that's the kind of context which we're operating from. But I've been doing all this with my good friend and colleague, and we've been working together for a while. It seems since the Battle of Hastings, really, I've been working with my colleague John Claude Couture. So JC introduced yourself.
JC Couture: Yeah. Great to be here. And thanks for the invitation to both you, Peter and Riel. As Steven indicated we, we've been working in the future space, what we think is the future space. It's a multiplicity, obviously, especially related to school leadership. And that arcs back to my previous experience working both as a classroom teacher for two decades.
And then I had the good fortune to work with the Alberta Teachers Association here in Alberta, Canada, and we started a strategic planning group, a foresight group within the teachers union, which was a bit unusual back then. We're talking about the early two thousands, and since that time and having left the teacher's Association, I've continued to work in the foresight space, both in the undergraduate program and the graduate program at the University of Alberta.
So really looking forward to the conversation the next while.
Peter Hayward: And I'll just jump in. You did publish a book in 2024 Evidence Education Futures for School Leadership - Evidenced Informed Strategies for Managing Change.
Stephen Murgatroyd: Correct. Actually, the formal book launch was in Melbourne during a big conference that si Sahlberg was running.
And we had a lot of real interest in the book. It's doing well. And the book is a combination of thinking tools, resources, practical advice and essentially it's a kind of leadership handbook to help people navigate this kind of volatile, uncertain future. And that was it's based on the teaching we've been doing for the last several years at the University of Alberta.
Peter Hayward: Now Al you did say off camera that you have many interest in this thing. One of the things you possibly thought might be a starting point was what is the current state of education futures leadership in education, let alone having futures included in curriculum?
Riel Miller: Yeah. Yeah. I guess it's a bit of a a quandary for me. Because in many ways I feel that the constraints of the existing educational systems are significant. That and having been in the past in situations of talking about how to lead change in educational systems. Particularly when burdened by the imperative of instrumentalizing education to solve societal problems – to serve as a change agent that is supposed to find solutions.
This has been happening for many years now. I'll just recall that in 1988 I was working for the Ontario government as the manager of policy and research on something called Vision 2000, which was an attempt to review the community college system. The vocational training system in Ontario at the time inspired in part by what was happening in the UK around polytechnics.
But in many ways it was just another cycle, when there is a peak in people worrying about automation, technological change, and the problems of matching education to skills – how to meet the workforce needs of employers, how to address the anxieties of graduates about finding jobs. This happens over and over again.
So already then, back in 1988, it seemed to me that we were repeating a pattern that had been going on for a long time. Which draws attention to how difficult it is to break out of the, the functional position that schooling plays in the development of industrial society.
And I've only become more convinced of that as the years have gone by. When I worked with the National College for School leadership, the NCSL in the UK under, when Tony Blair was in power and I collaborated with Tom Bentley, Director of Demos, at the time. We wrote something called Unique Creation: Four Scenarios for 21st Century Schooling. Education is stuck in delivering on this functional need in industrial societies to keep children off the streets while their parents are at work and to ensure good behavior in the face of authority and showing up on time. This remains the bottom line for K 12.
And so I have a difficult time actually. With this question now, when it seems to me so clear that this whole approach to learning it is bankrupt. I realize that this is a tricky balancing act, between being constructive and being let's call it transformative from that point of view.
And I wanted to bring this out into the open because I think it's really worth grappling with. Over to Stephen and JC.
Stephen Murgatroyd: I don't disagree that we are not really leveraging the opportunities to work with communities and young people in powerful and creative ways. I don't disagree with that. And, as a lifelong organizational change and transformation consultant, it'd be nice to see system level, ecosystem level change, but it's not gonna happen.
And so the kind of strategy that, that JC and I have been pursuing is one school at a time. You can make a real difference somewhere through the people in that location. If we wait for the system to change, wll I don’t know! I'm 74, I've just watched England win the Euro 25 semifinal against Italy. That's about as exciting as my life is gonna get!
So I don't think we're gonna see a big sudden realization we've been wrong for the last 50 years. Let's start again. Doesn't happen, but it does happen at the level of a school. And so given that if you work with the leaders of that place and the community around it. That place, you can begin to have lighthouse effects on other parts of the system.
And that's the way in which JC and I have been working for the last 20, 30 years, trying to find pockets. And it, a friend of mine once said, pockets of innovation are great, but a collection of pockets doesn't make for a great suit. And so what we're looking at is trying to move incrementally.
Best we can do. There's just two or three of us incrementally to make a real impact on some kids in some location now, while at the same time pushing some of these other bigger policy questions. And I think we, we can all be pessimistic about the way the world is playing. What are we gonna do?
And I think that's the duty of us as futurists to help shape possibilities for the next generation of leaders. And that's what this work is all about.
JC Couture: Yeah. And if I may jump in here you nicely described earlier the questions. We all around having a theory of change and one of the difficulties we all have in the education system is the imaginary.
That is one former minister of education who we worked with closely when I was at the Teacher's Association here in Alberta. Minister David King, got himself into a lot of difficulty in his first few months as minister of Education. When he pointed out to a meeting with superintendents there is no education system, there are only schools, and he really leaned into the notion of where is the locus of change, local of agency, but locus of agency around affecting change.
And surprise he did nail the role of the school principal, the school leader. And that for us, as Steven's already alluded to, has been historically a priority in our work. Recognizing again, we have these jurisdictional, or what Sam Seller famously calls statistical boundaries called education systems formed around numbers and imagined numbers about, what is the system, how is it performing?
But at the end of the day, and this can be very frustrating work, working one school at a time through networks of school leaders, we've, it's been our experience in the past through partnerships with schools in Finland and Norway, for example. That is where we can see some traction. The other question, and this, causes many of us to awake.
Richard Elmore, who is a well educational researcher did.
And very fruitful career that all of the books and all of the articles and all of his presentations around the question we have pockets of innovation, but how do we scale it? And he basically said that question for me is now a waste of time. We'll never be able to figure out how to scale change within systems because, and again for the sake of over determining a bit the imaginary of that system again goes back to the question, who's actually populating this system and who's having, who has agency and influence and time again, and we can only speak for our.
Limited experience with our work here in Alberta. And feel free, Steven, to jump in some of the experiences we've had in terms of when the system leaders and system leadership recognize the efficacy, the impact of some changes that the school level, interesting and exciting things can happen.
But I don't know if you wanted to give some examples of that. For example Steven or maybe the Norway project we did with mathematics and the dumpster fire that is mathematics education and in many jurisdictions here, including Canada.
Stephen Murgatroyd: Yeah one of the things we had for a number of years ago was a big slush fund.
Where teacheschools and teachers could apply to this fund to do action research to change something in their school and the only proviso was they write it up or share it with everybody else in the system. And for a number of years, we had lots of action research and lots of real innovation taking place right across the jurisdiction for a cost of less than a million dollars per school jurisdiction, not a lot of money.
And so that demonstrated the power of possibility. Now with one of the things we're doing is working with AI. And working with teachers and school leaders saying, “you could be really terrified of all this stuff, or you could see this as a co intelligent partner for your future. How do you want to play this?”
And so that's what we're now working on for the new project that JC and I are writing about with our students is and with students how can we leverage AI as a way of becoming the architect resource for a different future for teaching, learning and assessment. And so we've had lots of experience of this.
JC mentioned pilot projects we've had in which we've paired schools in Norway with schools here, with schools in Finland, with schools here and exchange not just teachers, but students who've moved freely between the two places. And that's produced profound long-term challenges in the way in which.
Riel Miller: Yeah I think that this is symptomatic of one of the main thrusts of the work arising from an anticipatory approach to thinking about the future. I see this all around the world and not just in the education sector. Today, everyone is contending with the pressures, the anxieties that arise from what appears to be the decline or the decrepitude of existing institutions, old patterns that are no longer working or no longer credible..
People are trying to cope with the inadequacy of entrenched systems – there is a lack of confidence in old ways of doing things, in existing institutions. All of which was given a nice push by COVID which forced people's ideas of the future to change in the space of five days. As a result people were obliged to confront the weaknesses of their capacity to imagine the future.
For some this meant falling back on nostalgia – glorified images of pasts that never existed. But more practically, there was no escaping the realisation that we use our imagination all the time to describe not-yet existing futures. This experience might be opening up fissures or cracks in the instrumentalization of education as a way to succeed or ‘win the future’. Can we see practices that move beyond the goal oriented obsession with success? To what extent are you finding that the challenge to the imagination, the need to engage with the diversity of our anticipatory systems and processes, is inviting us to rethink the role of our imagination? To reconsider the relationship of the future to education? Because I think that, that actually gets at the root issue of learning itself.
Is there an opportunity to reposition the ‘not-knowing’? For the most part the existing education and schooling systems have been about ‘knowing’ and what you're supposed to know if you want to pass the test. Such outcome oriented approaches, as exemplified by the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), really serve the industrial economy, the industrial society.
The goal is to deliver what students need to know to succeed in industrial society. Education is about what you need to already know, it is not about ‘not-knowing’. But learning requires, as John Dewey said long ago, the recognition that you don't know and that ‘not knowing’ is fundamental to learning. The privileging of knowing is one of the reasons that it has been so hard to really achieve the goal of ‘life-long learning’. Already, when I started my career out at the OECD in 1982, people were complaining about how lifelong learning was not catching hold. But why is it that despite been advocating and encouraging and cajoling people to engage in lifelong learning, it just doesn't seem to catch on. To me there is a fundamental obstacle that is related to this fear of not knowing – that ‘not-knowing’ is a sign of failure – you won’t pass the test.
Now, in light of deeper questioning taking place as old systems fall-apart, do you see signs of leadership breaking out of old patterns. Are there examples in the cases that you're working with?
JC Couture: I'll jump in. What in the opening pages, shameless plug for the book in the opening pages we referenced in anticipation in a very direct way by drawing on a.
It's a question that comes up time and time again. Teachers and school principals, when they have the inevitable contact with the parents. And the throughline question keeps going back in, in the conversation from parents is, will my child be okay? And that question, really does haunt us in a way throughout the book, will My child be Okay?
And we see school systems increasingly being overmanaged and under imagined. The role of the school leader in creating and shaping a culture and sustaining a culture where anticipation, as you've, as you've framed it, riel is allowed to open a space where people really can imagine alternatives as opposed to what we have increasingly, and I'm not gonna get on the pulpit about the role of.
International policy actors like the Organization for Economic Cooperation Development, the OECD, and the impact of PISA and the global benchmarking that we see that increasingly, at least in our experience, has really shifted the culture of schools away from that openness and that willingness to take on risk and to do really innovative and creative things.
And again, I go back to and I apologize in advance for repeating the pitch about the, this, the centrality of the school leader. And in the book we, we spend some time talking at length about school culture and how school culture is so very important. And maybe Steven, if you want to comment on that, what that work can look like, particularly as it relates to the the existential crisis, I think the teaching profession is facing around who wants to be a school leader?
Increasing how untenable that job is seen. Steven?
Stephen Murgatroyd: Yeah. We were talking before we came on air about higher education and what kind of leadership do we have there? And the answer is not much and not very sustainable either. But I think in the case of K to 12 and the kind of leaders we've been working with, what's impressive is their willingness to take risks and their willingness to both think ahead, lead across, and manage within.
That's the kind of big frame that we're playing with and it's not particularly ours. It's been around for a long time but I think within those kind of three frames, we encourage school leaders to explore what they can anticipate – what their imaginary can be and become. And it's amazing to me how few school leaders understand simple stuff like the demographics of their community or the demographics of the region in which they're placed, but once they begin to anticipate and explore possible futures, their world and the change possibilities opens up for them.
I'm sitting in Edmonton, which is seeing 50,000 new people a year arrive from around the world, which means that our classrooms here now are larger. More complex, more multicultural. And that implies that we have to, in thinking ahead, anticipate what cultural sensitivities we have in curriculum and in teaching and learning, and how we design from a design justice perspective, what it is we ask students to do and learn.
Our experience is that key leaders in schools where they have developed already a sense of agency, don't worry too much about the noise from above. They are much more engaged with the work across their own network and within their own school and their own community. And when they reach out to the community in which they operate, there's lots of help available to support creative project-based learning, work-based learning, all sorts of community-based learning, indigenous ways of knowing.
All sorts of stuff can happen by stopping thinking of the school as just a collection of a small group of professionals, but a force for good in both fact and in spirit. We're trying: that is the work we've been doing.
I'll give you a really good domain of the work we've been working in where that is exactly the issue. And that is school leaders and teachers looking at artificial intelligence. Now 96% of kids use AI regularly, like daily, weekly and some of it's questionable. I get that. But actually there's a lot of creative work going on with kids.
Many teachers haven't. And many school leaders are very cautious. So what we've been doing is saying, look, forget the academic essay in your graduate course. We're not interested in that. We're interested in you developing a use case for deploying AI in a way that has a powerful impact on a set of learning activities or assessment activities for both you.
In other words, it lowers your workload as a teacher, but it has a bigger impact on learning and maybe increasing what they understand they know and don't know. I would say that at the beginning of every course where we do this, we have students who've never really used AI who end up saying, I've got some lots of examples of the way I can make a difference to my kids.
Whether it's kids with special needs, whether it's kids, whether it's through differentiated instruction, whether it's through much more creative lesson planning project-based learning activities, or completely new assessments that gets away from multiple choice. And the three paragraph essay I've seen many teachers and many school leaders almost getting excited again.
About what the possibilities for teaching are. And that's because we've got them past a particular mindset barrier about what this thing called AI is or was because it's changing all the time. And so that's one example. And I think the other one is when we start to work around indigenous knowledge and indigenous ways of knowing and showing that actually this isn't some mysterious magic in a box somewhere.
This is about all of us. We're all treaty people here in Canada and we all have a duty to live the treaties and to make available and accessible that indigenous ways of knowing and particularly nature's laws and lots of the healing practices of indigenous peoples and the way they look at things like the forest or managed land.
And so that's another area where we've opened up mindsets and in doing so, opening up possibilities. So there are lots of these. I think those two are good examples of where we can apply some of the kind of anticipatory frames to opening up real possibilities, which are transformative for the people engaged in them.
JC Couture: Yeah. And if I may, one of the questions circulating around here is the whole question of resistance to change and however that's manifest going back and I'm probably miss, misquoting here, but I think it was Deborah Britman who talked about the three kinds of knowing. There's knowing, not knowing, and not wanting to know.
It's the not wanting to know that is the space. I think that Steven is referring to that through the discipline of the thinking tools that we've used. And, offers some examples in the book of school leaders and teacher leaders applying tools like a thing from the future scenarios, back casting all the litany of futures work.
What's, what is interesting is from, I think from the point of view, what Steve and I have been noticing in the last few years as more and more folks have signed onto these graduate courses is the emotional space that's opened up. And again, without, risk of stating the obvious the fear of what could the fear of what could go wrong if this innovation doesn't work.
Goes away. And I think what we've been seeing is future thinking as a discipline is opens up that space where it's okay to, for things to fail and how we get, how we punch through this risk aversion. And it doesn't matter if it's a first year teacher all the way to a Wiley veteran school principal who's, on their, on, on their last stages of their career.
The culture of fear and risk aversion is in fact. Very much baked into too many education systems. And again, I don't wanna get too political here about the situation in Alberta, Canada, but I don't think it's dissimilar when you've got, again, coming on the horizon, the promises of artificial intelligence, which Steven and I have been, quote unquote, running toward that fire rather than away from it.
We're seeing all kinds of odd behaviors around knowing, not knowing, and not wanting to know, and in particular the the invitation from ministries of Education to think of AI as a way to ramp up literacy and numeracy scores. The notion of, oh, every kid will have their own tutor and so on and so forth under the guise of personalized learning.
It's going to happen. Unfortunately, and this is something we've been pushing again, where teachers are going to be invited to live the nightmare of AI used to ramp up academic press. Not to say that we don't want accountability not to say that kids, Joel Westheimer, one of our colleagues famously asks teachers.
Put up your hand if you're one of the teachers against literacy. Too often we have this funny binary set up in, in the change discourse in education that the, that some of the profession isn't interested in academic advancement and so on. So the difficulty we have, again, I go back to this, the emotional space that can be opened up where fear and risk aversion can be really taken head on.
And for example, and I won't go on too much. The great promise here in Canada around truth and reconciliation around indigenous peoples. There has been historically an invitation to, let's get on with, let's get on with it. Whatever that imagined future of it reconciliation is. But within school systems where you have these cultures of risk aversion being promulgated through, again, academic press and take risks, but make sure you have no failure.
That paradox cannot live together in a system that's going to become vibrant and productive.
Riel Miller: Let me pick up on a point that I was trying to make earlier. Can we see a useful distinction between general and specific change - or systems versus individual examples of change? To what extent do the different experiences at systems level and specific local levels have implications for efforts to think about change, how to motivate change and how to generate change?
The question that that comes to the forefront for me is to what extent can we distinguish between old systems that are breaking down and local experiments that are giving rise to a multiplicity of new directions – some of which really don’t fit the dominant paradigms. Are we reaching a point where new systems are emergent? This leads me to wonder, in the context of the discussions in the futures community, what happens when only a few people have fax machines? What I mean is what happens when only a few folks are in a position to say we don't want to play by the old rules. We don't want to be confined by the anxieties of governments that want schools to take care of crime and delinquency, of parents who want schools to ensure that children behave properly and get good jobs, et cetera.
What I’m wondering is to what extent local manifestations of extra-systemic experimentation add up to new emergent systems? So, even if we manage in certain circumstances or locations to break out of the old systems, learning together and thinking from a different point of view. It's is still exceedingly difficult to escape from the expectations and the hopes and fears that so powerfully shape the way institutions function and the ways in which the people inside the institution function.
What I’m trying to explore here is the idea that maybe new approaches to anticipation might enable extra-systemic experimentation – practical efforts to overcome the monoculture of using the future to recreate the past. Could it be that the obvious inadequacies of today’s failing institutions open up avenues for overcoming fears and a tunnel vision in which images of the future are only about improving on the past. Are we moving towards escaping the trap of constantly reproducing the past?
Are we beginning to address this missing competency related to imagining beyond what we already know? This competency, which as you know I call futures literacy, can be seen as a fundamental enabler of experimentation and extra-systemic change. And I wonder to what extent are you noticing that anticipation from the perspective of futures literacy is entering into the discussion and the debates in those specific places where you feel you've been able to make some breakthroughs.
Stephen Murgatroyd: So I wrote a paper at the end of last year called Interregnum, which was about the decline of the existing systems and the emergence of new ones. The big idea for this paper was that we're in this in between time where we have no clue what the new systems will look like, but we're pretty certain that the existing systems are dying or in massive rapid decay depending on where you are in the world.
The old systems are remarkably resilient. I was recently at the University of Bologna in Italy - the oldest university in, in, in Europe 1088 -and the vice chancellor was saying that one of the proud things about this place is we don't change very much, and we all laughed, even though (given what is happening), it is more ironic than funny.
It wasn't really funny because they're going to have to change. And this is the home of the Bologna process, which as we know, transformed higher education in Europe to some degree. But the remarkable resistance of old systems and the difficulty of emerging systems create a dynamic tension. (This is why there is a literature on permanently failing organizations, which is well worth reviewing).
Separately from the work with JC. I've just written a book on the future of higher education. I don't see much of a futurefor the existing infrastructure and the existing ways of working. But I equally don't see any evidence (with a few exceptions) of real experiments about where the future might come from.
And so my best guess is that it will be new entrants, new players in the marketplace that will change the dynamics of how we do various things. And having been a new entrant - I created the world's first fully online graduate program in 1993-9494 - an MBA at Athabasca University in Canada. That was the first in of its kind in the world and still is going, and it produces hundreds of graduates a year.
At the time, my colleague said, “oh, we'll visit you in prison. “Have you got another job in mind?” pr “Would you like a whip-round to help you survive?” But when we took 40% of the MBA market in Canada I had different conversations with the same people. The next change in education will be something like that, a big disruptor, most likely from outside the existing systems.
And I think you're looking at opportunities right now where that could take place. And it's not going to be AIdriven. It will be AI plus compassion that will drive something different. And I think the same will be true of K to 12. Nothing much will change until an opportunity arises where people can see very clearly what some aspects of that change will be – a new player showing what is possible. Seeing is the beginning of believing.
And then we'll start to play. And so I, I don't see internal reform and revolution in our K to 12 ecosystem right now. I don't see any real evidence of that. There are these pockets of innovation that we're nurturing, but in terms of system transformation, it's going to come from outside. And I have no idea what that will look like or where it will come from, but it will take a lot of money.
It will also take a lot of vision and the balancing of people, compassion networks, community and technology together will be the dynamic that createsthe new thing that people want to emulate.
Riel Miller: Yeah, so great. I'm with you all the way on that stuff. So Peter it seems to me that, one of the experiments that's taking place, and it's an interesting one that is not alone, is your podcast and your experience with the creation of communities. Networks of relationships that have credibility. We're not talking about people who necessarily have academic status or a title next to their name, like CEO or president or whatever. Rather we're seeing a proliferation of different sources of knowledge creation and sharing. A production and consumption of learning that isn’t always associated with revenue streams or monetary transactions. What's your take on this?
Peter Hayward: The thing about digital and the way digital has blown up the institutions and the channels of information, because the tools have become so democratic and so easy. Who had the power to control music, to control news, to control education, those have all been blown away.
People. Now, to get your point, Riel, people with anticipation can suddenly say, I want to do this. I don't need anyone's permission to do it. I can do it. I can disseminate it. Whatever it is. It can be a piece of music, a piece of art. It could be a commentary on a football team, a political system, whatever.
The community then forms around interest. So I think it's still that form of leadership that the guys are talking about. It's the leader that wants to do something that has enough tools to do it. And then community organizes as community always does, organizers around leaders and ideas. And so to me, podcasts are just another one of these things that I can put together a podcast, talking to weird people, like people who write books on futures and education and goodness knows what, is anyone going?
Is anyone going to listen? I don't know if they will, but I can put it out there. And people can find it. It's the, it is a system organized by input and creation and then letting people follow their interests. And I suspect sitting with some great education researchers that is the core of education, that people have interest and curiosity and ability to find the things as those parents said, that their kids are gonna be okay.
Riel Miller: Yes, I do think that this really shifts the emphasis in learning contexts. Going back to my point about ‘not knowing’, playing, experimenting. You try things, even if you don't know what the outcome might be. You don't need to know in advance – you have the skills and confidence to test and recognize you do not know and can learn. We change our relationship to uncertainty and experience. We are comfortable with the fact that there's no way to know in advance, but that we have to experiment. Then, on the basis of that experimentation and experience, each person finds their own wisdom. Learning that is not about mass and scale, knowledge as a commodity in the industrial economy.
In this context, seen from the perspective of what is happening around the world as old systems fail and people are confused and unsure of the meaning of success, of security, of reproducing the past – can we detect new patterns? Are you finding supporters or people who are in agreement with the idea that knowledge can be fleeting, diversified and not just about duration and diffusion at scale? Are there signs that new frameworks for learning and more confidence in experimentation, ‘not-knowing’ are taking root? Are there things we can do to encourage this kind of extra-systemic change?
Which I guess brings us back to the question of leadership and efforts that make change easier, such as improving signalling systems to encourage greaer transparency and redress for people’s reputations. New systems for easily establishing credible reputations. This is a topic I wrote about a long time ago during the dot.com boom (see: Rules for Radicals: Settling the Cyberfrontier – 1997-1999)
And this is not new stuff at all. It's that if you have a system that is dominated by the people with more money and rifles the community is not a level playing field for everybody to get involved in. And that's really the kind of situation that we have today, unfortunately, where the proposition that human knowledge should be curated for the purposes of the public good rather than to generate advertising reveunue for Google. In the 19th century the idea of public libraries, of a nationa ‘Library of Congress’ was a way to take advantage of the diffusion of the capacity to read and write. This universalisation of a resource – so it does not just serve narrow, elite interests, is a really very basic – reading/writing, libraries, electricity, etc. The importance of this proposition as we transition away from a bias and dependence on the tangible economy towards the intangible is still not widely understood. And so I guess the question is, do you see signs that at the local level people are seeking the kinds of transparency, credibility, ownership, responsibility that allows people to experiment and value the local?
Stephen Murgatroyd: There's an audit of, you mentioned lifelong learning earlier (it's alive and well by the way!)in the city of Calgary which has apopulation of approximately 1.3 million people
In that city there were 32,000 adult learning opportunities, of which just 16% are offered by colleges or universities. The majority are of the learning opportunities are offered by nonprofits, by maker spaces, by the public library, by community groups working together more significantly. 30% of the adult population of the city of Calgary, that's people aged over 21 spend 10 hours a week or more self-directed learning using YouTube or whatever the resource may be. A lot of learning is outside the formal learning system.
Yet the only learning that seems to count is that offered by this monopoly called colleges and universities. What would happen if you were to say, we don't care where you can do, can we certify your knowledge, your understanding, your skills and capabilities independently of the institution?
Riel Miller: I wrote a book of, sorry to interrupt, but I wrote a book for the OECD back in 1996 called Measuring What People Know: Human capital accounting for the knowledge economy. And this idea that we could create systems of recognition that were much more diverse than diplomas and certificates.
Stephen Murgatroyd:
It's alive and well as an idea. And there's a team of 40 of us in Alberta pushing that notion right now. And we all read your book, Riel and we're inspired and now that we have the competency assessment tools 24x7 assessment on demand is right there and capable of recognize and credit knowledge, skills and capabilities no matter where the learner secured these attributes.
Now that we have literally millions of competency frameworks from around the world, all gathered in a single place, we can begin to say we don't really care if you got this knowledge from Cambridge or from a dustbin lid. If you have it and can use that knowledge and share it with us and show as you understand it we'll, that knowledge.
And so I think one of the things that will disrupt the system is that beginning to happen. And I'll give you a concrete case. Wwe had 16 veterinary surgeons arrive in Alberta from different parts of the world, and they went to our professional body and said, we're vets, we've been doing this for 10 years in Afghanistan or Ukraine or wherever..
Can I practice here? And the profession said, No!. Definitely not more than our job's worth letting you to be vets here. You have to start again, get your first degree, and then do your six years. It would take, they said, that's fine. We'll sue you. And they said hang on a minute. Let's just have a conversation.
And so they said we do have this thing called prior learning assessment. We have no idea what it is or how it works, but maybe we could make something happen there. And we worked with them to make that possible. And what that led to is that 72 hours of study time and competency demonstration time these people were fully qualified.
One of the things we learned was never ask university professors to assess competencies because they have no clue how to do it. And so we had to fire the university people that we'd hired to do the assessments using competency-based assessment frames and hire actual practitioners to do it. And which also led to another interesting con consequence, which every one of these vet veterinary surgeons who was certified that way was hired instantly by one of the, or the assessors.
So we created a different ecosystem and we did that in a month. And so it doesn't, as Ronald Reagan would say, “it's not rocket surgery!” We can change systems quickly when there is a will to act and a willingness to take risks.
JC Couture: What's rolling around in my wee brain as I listen is the question around. The efficacy of future thinking is a interdisciplinary space. And how once individuals take up the work, either through graduate studies or podcasts, which are like this one, the question then becomes for me, how can we create critical mass of people who are willing to do the work and to embrace?
And then there, there's the usual suspects. We can go through a long list of folks who have done incredible work around reimagining the future of school and schooling. We've worked, read had conversations with folks like Kurt bta for example. Why don't we sit down, slow down and ask the question, why do we have school?
And we just don't even have the time to answer that question. We're too busy and go ask someone else. The question for me though goes back to in terms of the future space and future thinking, is to help develop a sense of hope and agency and I'll go back to the old tried and true futures cone, for example, to think back to incredible innovations that were quietly smothered.
Steven has alluded to those already. We had, for example, here in Alberta and Ontario as well, government funded projects around local innovation. And we're talking about pocket change here in, in terms of the scale of the entire education budgets. But time and time again, these innovative action research kinds of networking opportunities, they, their shelf life tends to be rather short.
And it goes back again to the question around. That we started earlier, why doesn't the system change? There may or may not really be a system logics anyway, and particularly systems are built to smother and squelch innovation. And I'm only talking about the education space here. And so the question becomes, for me, time and time again around giving school leaders and teacher leaders an opportunity to understand incredible opportunities that we turned our backs on in the past.
And this personally drives me a little nutty when I hear ministers of education talk about how education and schools don't want to innovate and they don't wanna embrace change. The classic example now is of course, ai, we need to embrace it, whatever it is. And teachers have to figure out what this is all going to mean.
But to get to my point here, if we look back there were incredible moments we had in our province where there was a council future. Some of us are old enough to remember the Delore pillars from 19 96, that the treasure within our teacher organization brought to the Minister of Education a proposal to reorient and recalibrate the entire K to 12 system around the four pillars.
Learning to know learning to do, learning to live together. And the last one, which got us into trouble learning to be, and as one of the members of the legislative assembly told us in the education meeting, we don't do existentialism here in Alberta. I always go back and I hope he was half joking, but I think he was talking a bit of real politic in terms of what is possible in the system.
Yeah. And to get to the point where we can understand that futures thinking is not some esoteric discipline that, works on the side of folks desk. It's really a disciplined approach that can really open possibilities. And by looking back, the old hindsight insight, foresight conversation, looking back to the incredible opportunities that we chose to shut down.
And again I find the possibilities, and again, we talk about this in the book. Another shameless plug for the book, apologies that I am I'm always surprised when we encounter school leaders who are in their second or third decade of school leadership, how little they're aware of the incredible innovations that were, and then were shut down.
Riel Miller: Yeah, I guess that was the motivation in a way for this whole conversation. Time wrap it up now. So allow me to highlight an aspect of this conversation that is really interesting for me, and is something profound in my own experience, that is the implications of that the fact that the entire world experienced the COVID pandemic at the same time. Everyone, in different ways, in different circumstances, still needed to change what they were imagining tomorrow would be like. This is an amazing event. There was no way I could have imagined such a situation happening. From the point of view of people experiencing the nature and role of their imagined futures it was such an absolutely phenomenal opportunity. It, it was like, we'd been living in a drought and all of a sudden it rained. All of sudden plants, in this case imaginaries, started sprouting up all over the place. And I guess, for me what this conversation addresses to a certain extent is the sense that with the decay of the old being so evident now, as post-war geo-politics breaks apart and knowledge ecosystems are disrupted by fake news, everyone can see that the trustworthiness, efficiency, and effectiveness of old systems is falling-apart.
Which brings to the forefront the experiments that are taking place inside and outside yesterday’s institutions, habits, relationships. Although the zombies of the past don’t want to die I get the impression that where local experiments are taking off people are not waiting for permission. They're not dependent on approval or ‘safety’ from the ‘establishment’. Things are just happening. The term interregnum is probably a good way of putting it, Stephen. This is a period when we need to be exuberant and courageous. Holding off on our judgments and letting things happen.
Stephen Murgatroyd: Yeah, my family motto is “forgiveness is easy to get them permission!”. We encourage our students to act responsibly within their professional ethical guidelines. Act. Do stuff, make a difference and do it now. You can't wait forever to get permissions from the 27 layers above you – you are a professional, act like one.
You just get on and do stuff. When I worked at the Open University in the UK during its very early days (1972-1985)I was a member of the budget and planning committee and we just did stuff - including some wild stuff and took risks and did all sorts of things, some of which worked, some of which didn't.
But if you, everything you ever do as a risk taker works every time, then you're not really taking risks. The other thing is we have to get better at learning from failure. And my colleague, that's my mentor, Don Simpson, says we have to have more glorious failures. We have to try bigger and fail.
That's fine, as long as we learn and move. And I think that's very much the spirit of the way in which we teach our grad students to apply. The ideas in the book is, look, these are tools and resources that will help you, but the big thing you have to do is move, do something now. So that's the kind of spirit behind the whole writing exercise that we're involved with.
Riel Miller: Peter, I wonder if the next podcast might be on stories of glorious failures.
Peter Hayward: Yeah, there is a film called Inglorious Bastards,
I think we go with inglorious bastards. Look, thanks for the conversation, Riel. Thanks for the provocation to have the conversation. To the two authors, Steven and jc. Thank you for coming on to Future Pod participating in, I think what's been a fascinating conversation and ending, so hopefully it must be a terrible thing to defend the status quo of institutionalized systems that are failing. The dinosaurs are dying and the marsupials are scampering. And the evolution is happening, and I'm delighted that you've identified leadership in those moments is is central and there is signs for hope. And possibly necessarily looking for system change is a waste of time as as JC reported.
But thanks to all of you for taking some time out to come on to the poll. Yeah.
JC Couture: Thanks for this, Peter. And to share our motto when I was working at the teacher's association in our strategic planning group, which came to be onward, we lurch. So let's continue the conversation.
Thank you so much Peter.
Peter Hayward: This was a big, meaty conversation. Change is possible, but school leadership from the bottom up rather than policy passed down. I hope you enjoyed it, and if you are interested in finding out more, check out the book and follow our guests. Future Pod is a not-for-profit venture. We exist through the generosity of our supporters. If you would like to support the pod. Then please check out the Patreon link on our website. I'm Peter Hayward. Thanks for joining me today. Till next time.