The Future of Smart

Today’s episode is an invitation to consider how mainstream western definitions of learning and education are really just relics. When we use these terms, and when we design – or redesign - schools and curricula, we’re often using templates that were invented back in the 1500s in Europe. Before this period most societies viewed the world as a living system; humans thought of themselves as part of...

Today’s episode invites us to explore the conceptions of our brains that dominate so much of our thinking about learning and education. In her research, Annie has found that western culture is extremely brain bound, which means that we overvalue the role of thinking in our own experience. We think of the brain as a computer, a tool. As we’ll learn in later episodes of this podcast, this bias has d...

Disruption is difficult, but it is also an opportunity to move forward in new ways. The Future of Smart podcast is an opportunity for us to think in new ways about the challenges that we've been attempting to address in education. To go forward, we need to start by going back. Our education system is the way it is as the result of specific historical conditions that harnessed certain tendencies in...

Ulcca Joshi Hansen hosts The Future of Smart, a project of Grantmakers for Education, that explores ideas at the intersection of education, equity, and philanthropy that point us towards a radical re-envisioning of our education system. We’ll hear from those working at the edge of what’s possible and explore what it means to support transformative change for young people and their communities. If...