Future Learning Design Podcast

How did Taiwan become one of the world’s most interesting places for educational innovation? In January 2025, Manda Scott interviewed Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s youngest ever Minister of State and its first Digital Minister (2016–2024). I was fascinated to hear Audrey talk about how education in Taiwan has evolved, and ever since I’ve wanted to make an episode about the history of experimental educatio...

It's all too easy to come up with scripted and pre-packaged solutions to educational challenges that are complex, deeply human and relational. My guest this week has been a powerful voice globally for a long time, advocating for a more nuanced and thoughtful view for enhancing spaces for deeper learning. It is my huge pleasure to introduce Professor Jal Mehta of the Harvard Graduate School of...

When was the last time that you achieved something totally on your own with no reliance on others? My guess is not ever, not really. One of the things we humans have always been really good at, despite our relative vulnerabilities individually, is getting hard things done in groups. And part of what education has always been about has been apprenticing our young people into that collective advanta...

We all take lots of different roles in our personal and professional lives, but one of the roles that I find most exciting (and aspire to myself) is being a convener and connector, bringing people together for generative purposes and in ways that don’t always happen in the silos of modern institutions. My guests this week, Professors Sheila L. Macrine and Jennifer M.B. Fugate have been doing just...

This is the last of 4 short episodes exploring Guy Claxton and Emily Poel's take on embodiment science that opens up to much-needed scrutiny our core concepts and deep grammars of schooling and education. Following on from episodes on intelligence, learning and memory, this is a deeper dive into what embodiment science has to say about thinking and reasoning. You can check out more of the back...

Most school reform efforts claim to be "research-based." But fewer are genuinely built with the people who have to live inside them every day. Building on some of the themes that I explored with Iwan Syahril on a recent episode , this week we're diving deeper into community-based design. Rather than starting with an expert’s blueprint, what happens when innovation starts with the com...

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 ta...

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...

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...

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 boo...

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 t...

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 cogn...

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, ‘S...

Cognition is a strange word and not a very commonly used word by practicing educators.  It feels academic and detached from the act of a group of young people learning in the world.  But when you look at the dictionary definition of cognition – the "mental action or process of acquiring, storing, retrieving, and processing knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the sense...

"How do we learn what we already know?" (Carlos Alvarez Pereira). A lot of so-called innovation is old ideas, tried in a different place at a different time, packaged up in new wrapping to seem like a "new" idea. Whether it's from 50 years ago or 10000 years ago, there is a huge amount, if we're open to it, that we can learn from the accumulated wisdom of fellow humans...

What are the questions we should be asking of the radically new and rapidly accelerating technologies that we are all living with now? Where are the possibilities? What are we hungry for? Where are the challenges and dangers? What are our responsibilities as care-givers, parents, educators and policy makers? How are we creating opportunities for our young people to really connect with themselves,...

There are amazing people building innovative and responsive educational alternatives all over the world right now. They are seeing challenges in their communities and not waiting for others to act, or waiting for systems to change, but creating, connecting and building themselves. Today's episode is with one such person who is doing this incredible work in some of the most resource constrained env...

What are we learning about systemic change? There are lots of people talking about why we need it, climate and nature emergencies, exponential tech youth mental health crises etc. but how much is it actually happening? By definition, it’s not something that just happens in the education system, so I was really happy to gather together this week with three amazing podcasters and beautiful people wh...

We often overlook sports as a site of learning, but it’s a massive part of so many people’s lives, whether playing, supporting, watching or teaching. And simultaneously, all of life happens in and around the sports arena. It is humanity in our most beautiful and, sometimes, ugliest manifestations. With all of the global sporting events happening right now, I wanted to bring this into our podcast c...

There is a lot of discussions happening these days about the future of university and higher education in general. How does it keep pace with rapidly changing and disruptive technologies? How does it meet the needs of young people and become responsive and flexible enough to generate much needed transformations in research and development, knowledge creation, and capability building? And how does...

A big part of where I see shifts happening in education systems is encouraging young people to get out into the world, into their communities and make a difference to issues that they care about. There is so much learning that can happen in this process. I have shared a few episodes in the past with fantastic people like Cathrine Berger-Kaye, Daniela Papi-Thornton and Zoe Weil, supporting young pe...

This week is a huge privilege to have my good friends Emily Poel and Guy Claxton returning to the podcast in celebration of the release this week of their fabulous new book, Bodies of Learning: How Embodiment Science Transforms Education. It's a really significant book! that lays out, unlike any other, the deep implications of 4E cognitive science that support and strengthen the case for a mor...

If you think about which verbs dominate formal education you’ll probably come up with a list like learning, thinking, reasoning, remembering, knowing, and maybe behaving. Now think about what images come to mind when you consider those verbs, or do a google image search and see what you get! I’m willing to bet that the most common images coming up are of individual heads, maybe with a visible brai...

There are lots of reasons why well-intentioned work, trying to do things differently and shift the way that systems currently operate, often struggle and fail. But one of the reasons that I find most interesting is to look at the "dark matter" or deep codes that are built into our current ways of working. These might be things like the way we do contracts, the way insurance functions, an...

Collaboration, whether it's between young people in a classroom or between institutions across an educational ecosystem, is often seen as an unquestioned virtue. An assumed aspect of people simply working together on a shared purpose, but without much thought given to how it happens in meaningful and deep ways to generate genuinely expanded possibilities for everyone. Rose A. Dodd and her team...