Embracing Creativity— Co-designing a national talent programme, Mission Impact v0.2 & podcasting
I always enjoy my research and feel privileged for being allowed to earn enough money to live my life while exploring concepts that I am absolutely passionate about. Like learning and educational design for a more regenerative future. Few things give people more joy than being creative (I refuse to say creating as I believe we are always creating possible worlds). The last few weeks have been an absolute blessing in the regard that the focus has been on being and enjoying creativeness. My first submission to an academic conference without one of my PhD supervisors was accepted. I started recording, editing, and preparing The (Re)generative Education Podcast which will launch in September and made massive strides towards Mission Impact v2.0. Last but definitely not least, together with a few other universities and NGOs (such as Het Groene Brein) we presented a plan to lead in the development of nationwide leadership for transitions programme available for all university students in the Netherlands. We presented this plan to the ministry of infrastructure and water management in the Netherlands and I am quite hopeful that we will be able to pull this off. If we can, to my knowledge, it would be the first programme of its kind on a national scale. A humanistic, positive and relational approach to human development in the service of life.
As always, this piece represents working-out-loud as I chronicle my adventure of working towards a PhD at Wageningen University & Research in The Netherlands and my unfolding as the educational director for the Mission Zero centre of expertise at The Hague University of Applied Sciences. This piece chronicles my doings, beings, and thinkings in this journey from March till about the midway point of April 2021. I am happy to share that my administrative workload is being exchanged for creative practices, with the changing of the seasons and the warming of the weather. As our research centre is a new one, there were a lot of hoops that we had to go through this last year, which I am happy to say we are hooping through. Those that know me, or have been following this journey for a while, will probably know nothing makes me learn more or be happier than engaging in creativeness. And that I not so secretly hate doing administrative tasks (while realizing that there is value in it).
The (Re)generative Education Podcast
There is a saying in Dutch ‘ik heb het nog nooit gedaan dus ik denk dat ik het kan’ which roughly translates to ‘I have never done this so I think I can’ that really captures what the experience of podcasting has been like so far. But before I got into that let me paint the context. The second chapter of my dissertation focuses on mapping out and identifying systemic innovations, barriers and opportunities for the more regenerative and relational types of education that connect to and co-create sustainable futures to emerge. Initially, I was planning on doing this through a series of arts-based workshops (see for example the work by Helen Kara) as most of my research design is based on creative methods and because these are quite good at identifying the more subjective parts of these systems (such as teacher’s feelings) this was a natural fit. However, as you can imagine, the COVID-19 pandemic has forced me to adapt. Would it still have been possible to do arts-based methods online? Yes absolutely. Hell, I’ve done it in my own education. But it did not feel right for what I was looking for. As my research is activist in nature (I clearly believe the (higher) educational system needs to be transformed to be a catalyst for a regenerative, safe and just world. And I am quite critical of the current culture of academia which is still by and large separated from practice I was looking for ways that would allow me to do rigorous research but that could also play a part in systemic change. We landed on a podcasting-as-method as a way of contributing to knowledge in more practical ways. I don’t know yet if it will be a success because the series will be launched in September (2021). What I can say is that the response to play a part in this research podcast has been really good (30 out of 51 or 59% of people who were asked are recording an episode).
My experience so far
The first few episodes have been recorded and rough cuts have been edited. First of all, holy S*** this is way more difficult than I expected. Most interview podcasts only really serve one purpose — to educate or entertain (sometimes to edutain). Most regular interviews conducted for research also only really serve one purpose — to dig, to mine, to gather information/data. Their difference seems small until you try to combine them. As a researcher, you are now constantly balancing the edutainment value with the data quality. Sometimes this means not being able to ask certain follow-up questions because it doesn’t make the nicest experience for the listener. It is a lot of fun, don’t get me wrong. But this duality of roles is definitely something that I underestimated as a cognitive challenge. It is also something that is quite nerve-wracking. I wrote my master’s thesis based on (14) interviews as but I don’t remember being as nervous as I have been for these recordings, perhaps because they also feel more performative and in a way vulnerable than the more traditional form of interviewing.
On the flip side, going from the raw audio (usually 70–90 minutes) to an acceptable level of polish (40–50 minutes) feels a lot like conducting a form of analysis. I would argue that this is akin to (auto)ethnographic forms of research where you translate raw inputs into a coherent narrative. Especially if you also use the episode description/show notes to start answering the research questions you have. As I am looking for systemic barriers for the enactment of this type of education which is precisely what listeners also need to know that creates a nice win-win situation.
The realization that this feels very much akin to ethnographic forms of research also pushes me further away from the dominance of papers as the hallmark of intellectual and academic achievement. I have always been critical of the way of academia in this regard. Frankly, it was why for a long time I didn’t want to get a PhD (in the Netherlands). Not because I don’t love research but because the structures to prove you are a capable researcher are so caught up in neo-capitalism. The publish or perish culture has seeped into the system so strongly that what is now being measured is almost exclusively just your ability to pump out articles, regardless of the questions worth answering, and the answers we can find are best captured in the form of an academic paper. My goal is to change practice through research-based activities, most of my ‘target audience’ (namely educators in higher education) does not read academic papers about education and learning sciences. I intend to attempt at least to transgress these unspoken standards by inviting my supervisors (after they have listened to the episodes) to a final episode that is based on us discussing the interviews and trying to see if I can push that collection of podcasts into the dissertation as a chapter.
What have I learned so far
It’s bloody hard but energizing. It’s invigorating to be working on something that you are passionate about and that can hopefully make a change (even if it’s just one educator that gets inspired to adapt their practice). It is also a very confronting method I would say. In the literal sense, you get to hear your own speech idiosyncrasies but also because you put a lot more time into each episode than you would put into a regular interview for purely research purposes and you hope that people will like it. As a result I have been both loving and hating the editing process. It is weirdly meditative and get’s me in a state of flow, which is great. But the minutiae of removing those last filler words or matching it for milliseconds is something that I am probably getting carried away with. I have a tendency to go all out on things, which is both a strength and a weakness.
Mission Impact v0.2
Recruitment & pivoting
We just completed the first registration round and the good news is we got more registrations than last year, the bad news is we only got 7. But there is a second round coming in May and my colleagues are confident that we will have enough students to run next year (15–20). Because we are making massive strides to improve the quality and with that hopefully the impact of the event. It is especially frustrating, and the irony is not lost on me, to not know whether or not we will be able to start. The uncertainty that comes with this unknowingness being one of the key elements of regenerative leadership that we are trying to develop in the course itself. As a learner who remains involved with the course throughout the process (including these in between times when we don’t have an active cohort of students) I face this now. It’s not great. But I try to live into it as much as I can. It is also at these times that I am envious of colleagues who are engaging in this work within transdisciplinary programmes so that they are not reliable (as much) on yearly choices made by incoming students.
Assessment
I have a difficult relationship with assessment in educational contexts. On the one hand, I get that they can be useful to facilitate learning, primarily by providing structure and a bit of pressure to prepare for a specific moment in time. On the other hand, I am worried they are usually representative of a deep seated mistrust that has seeped in through neocapitalism. The issue I have is that the system that I am now a part of seems to have replaced a focus on facilitating learning with a focus on facilitation of testmakers. I don’t know yet how we can fix this, or if it is even possible to do so without fundamentally rethinking the concept of assessment in its entirety.
For the next iteration of the Mission Impact course, there will be assessments at multiple levels. The teams of learners will be assessed based on a predefined set of subcompetencies (that we are currently co-creating) that are part of regenerative leadership. In total the students will be asked to showhow they reached twenty subcompentencies spread over four phases of five-weeks. Four of these twenty are open for students to further develop their (latent) talents. How they proof the attainment of these levels however, will be largely up to the individual (teams) to allow for as much agency in this process of learning as possible. Even the subcompetencies themselves will not be set in stone. If through dialogue changes, alterations or additions emerge these will be adapted as much as possible. These subcompetencies will be shown through two types of engagements — the individual consisting of personalized learning journals that are created using a Notion template that is currently being developed by students and the collective — team-based assignments co-designed in the process with the teams of students, the wicked problem they are tackling and the regions with which they work. Both will be graded with pass/fails and the teams as well as the individuals will be asked to peer review the collective components of the work in open sessions to facilitate cooperation and mutual learning. I don’t know if this will be the final solution to the tricky challenge of assessing regenerative education and navigating the uncertainty that comes with it. But I hope we take a small step towards balancing the need for educational structure and openness moving forward. So that our students can feel safe when they sail the seas of complexity and expand their relational selves.
Integration
A big change for this next iteration is the degree of integration that we are designing into the course. As we now have a bit more time to prepare and engage external guests we have preprared design briefs for workshops and guest contributions. These are not made for the purpose of straightjacketing our guests but to ensure that there is an integrated whole to the semester and that we can align as much as possible throughout the experience. The Notion template as well as order of the workshops is carefully designed but we stay true to the life principle of adaptation to survive. If in the process changes are proposed, that emerge, or that are needed for the community to thrive we will not hesitate to take them. For more information about the course materials, week-to-week sessions and such please check out the previous post and the next article.
A national talent programme: Leadership for Transitions
We organized and co-hosted the first national hackathon circular economy earlier this year in The Netherlands. This was done in collaboration with more than ten organizations of higher learning all over the country and included more than 60 students working on about a dozen circular economy transition challenges in teams. Since then, we have been working on developing this one week event further into a half-year long national talent programme available for all students in the Netherlands to develop their leadership capacity for guiding collective learning around sustainability transition challenges. This programma, which is co-designed, hosted and financed with a broad consortia of NGOs, public institutions and higher education, is build on an ecological perspective that connects these students across the borders of their own programmes and institutions in transdisciplinary teams with regional sustainability challenges. So that they can develop the required knowledge as well as their ability to do — leading in transitions. I am super hopeful that we will be able to pull this off and will keep you updated as this develops.
As always, If you want to reach out, chat, talk, call, feel free to reach out.
