How does Embodiment Science shift how we think about Learning? (with Guy Claxton & Emily Poel)

I got the chance this week to talk to two amazing young people who have created a friendship, and a space of possibility for learning and peacebuilding that, in other worlds, might have seen them fighting against each other on opposite sides of a battlefield. Amir Bergen and Kanstantsin Tsiarokhin have created Svet Peace Project, that builds on a dialogic approach to learning, as a way to build understanding, empathy and, ultimately, peace across young people of different backgrounds. I got to know them through the United World Colleges (UWC) Short Courses and was very interested to find out more because of the Socratic Seminar approach at the heart of their project. Many educational innovation conversations now for me are orienting around how to reconnect with the very human dimension of what it means to be a learner in the world. And the Socratic Seminar approach is simultaneously ancient, classical and very much alive today in innovative education models. I’ll let Amir and Kanstantsin tell their own stories, but you can find loads of links to their fantastic work in the show notes.Kanstantsin Tsiarokhin grew up between Minsk, Belarus and Kyiv, Ukraine, absorbing the post-Soviet region's cultural complexity and political tension firsthand. His path in education started early, when he founded conversational English courses in Minsk that brought together students from different backgrounds. That work shaped his belief that people learn best through dialogue. After moving to Berlin in 2022, he learned German and immersed himself in European intellectual traditions before finishing his undergraduate degree at St. John's College. Kanstantsin is now pursuing a master's degree in Classical Leadership, continuing to explore philosophy and pedagogy through the Svet Peace Project, drawing on his cross-cultural background and his belief in dialogue as a way to bring people together.Amir Bergen is an entrepreneur and a graduate of St. John's College. Born in Russia, he began his education at an Orthodox Classical Gymnasium, which sparked his lifelong interest in tradition and dialogue. His background spans Eastern Europe, with roots and family ties across several countries in the region. Before coming to St. John's, Amir studied at UWC Dilijan in Armenia, where he found a global approach to learning grounded in reflection and shared inquiry. Outside of academia, he founded and built one of Russia's largest vintage clothing stores, growing it into a community around creativity and sustainable fashion. Through his time at St. John's, he came to believe that education should cultivate independence of thought, not just transmit knowledge.Links:https://svetpeace.org/https://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/education/st-johns-college-grads-use-russia-ukraine-ties-to-teach-local-students/article_a621d8b0-6030-40d0-b4f7-42bbfcf9e840.htmlhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/amir-bergen-ba10463a7/https://www.linkedin.com/in/kanstantsin-tsiarokhin-1ba1b3147/https://www.instagram.com/svetpeaceorg/

How did Taiwan become one of the world’s most interesting places for educational and societal 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 education that led to these developments.My wonderful guest this week is Mr Tang Guang-Hua. Mr Tang and his wife, Li Yaqing, have been instrumental in Taiwan’s education reform movement for the last 40 years, including homeschooling their own children, Audrey and Tsung-hao.Mr Tang spent twenty-five years as a journalist and editor at the China Times during Taiwan’s transition to democracy. Since the 1990s, he has been closely involved in Taiwan’s experimental education movement. He helped establish its first community college and supported the founding of democratic schools. In 2010, he founded Optimism Academy, which teaches philosophy to teenagers through Socratic dialogue.His family has contributed in many significant ways to building a democratic Taiwan, and it was an absolute privilege to hear what he has learned from this experience.In this conversation, we discuss:Growing up by the sea, and how a happy childhood shaped his educational idealsThe community college movement and deepening civil societySelf-directed learning and raising children who didn’t fit the school systemMultiple pathways for young people, and the “inverted pyramid” of learningTeaching Plato and Confucius to teenagers through Socratic dialogueHow experimental ideas reached mainstream schools through the 2014 Experimental Education Acts and the 108 Curriculum GuidelinesWhat AI means for educationWhy optimism is essential for anyone working in educationMr Tang speaks in Mandarin Chinese, with English subtitles throughout.You can find the full episode here on our YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/PupEeq_PeVgI would also highly recommend the brilliant documentary about the Tang family, Good Enough Ancestor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idudNrLy8ek

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 Education who joined me this week to talk about his new book, A Chance to Solve Their Own Problems: Inside the New Methods Seeking to Remake Public Schools written with a group of other fantastic co-authors (Maxwell Yurkofsky, Kim Frumin, Amelia Peterson, Rebecca Horwitz-Willis, James Jack) and based on extensive empirical research across the US and Canada. Jal Mehta is the Gregory R. Anrig Professor of Educational Leadership at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. A sociologist by training, his work focuses on how to remake the industrial-era school system into a modern learning organization that creates passion and purpose for both students and adults.He is the author, most recently, with Sarah Fine, of In Search of Deeper Learning: Inside the Effort to Remake the American High School, which won the Grawemeyer Award for excellent public writing on education. Mehta is also a leading scholar on the need to professionalize education, explored most thoroughly in his 2013 book The Allure of Order. Mehta is the faculty director of the Deeper Learning Institute, which works with schools, districts, states and provinces across the United States and around the world to transform schools and remake systems in support of deep and powerful learning. He is also the proud recipient of the Morningstar Teaching Award. Linkshttps://www.gse.harvard.edu/directory/faculty/jal-mehta https://www.linkedin.com/in/jal-mehta-6b14a321/The Free Range Humans podcast (with Rod Allen): https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/free-range-humans/id1571981852 The Professor and the Point Guard podcast: https://the-professor-and-the-point-guard.simplecast.com/

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 advantage. And yet, as industrial and technical specialisations have increased, we've set up a modern formal education system that optimises primarily for individual knowledge and skills. Developing the capabilities to work really well together on complex challenges is at best a secondary consideration in our schooling system.  My guest this week, Rich Watkins has taken on this exact problem and is supporting organisations around the world to build their collaborative abilities. He has developed the 'Let's Go' model which he and a community of practitioners are using to facilitate catalytic conversations and critical reflections that help teams grow and improve and get unstuck. I met Rich a few years ago when he shared a brilliant video that went viral about John Vervaeke's 4Ps of knowing and a more grounded way to grow (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gyx5tyFttfA) and I was keen to explore with him about how all of this really thoughtful and deep work might connect with our current educational challenges. A lifelong collaborator as a scientist, strategist and craftsman of how we work together. Rich spent 20 years at the sharp end of global innovation and org change projects for multinational companies, where he worked in 25 countries and saw impact on five continents. In 2016, he created the Let’s Go Model® and with his team works reinvigorating organisations for these complex times. His clients include Warner Bros. Discovery, Ghirardelli Chocolate Company, Bank of China and Lloyds Banking Group. Having trained well over 30K corporate leaders in the craft of collaboration - getting things done in project teams and partnerships - he is looking to take what he has learned into the wider culture at scale.​Rich is a TEDx speaker and an executive educator alumni at Duke CE and Emeritus. At Let’s Go he leads a 40 strong global community of practice.Let’s Go Model is a finalist for Business Enabler of the Year award this year.Links:https://www.richwatkins.com/letsgomodelhttps://www.letsgo.so/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/richarddavidwatkins/

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 that in the emerging field of diverse intelligences. They are gathering some of the most leading-edge and brilliant researchers working today on the problems of how to understand agency, cognition and learning in the diverse ways that they are showing up in all kinds of bodyminds — natural, artificial, hybrid and everything in between! It’s an incredibly exciting area of research that is challenging us all, but particularly the legacy systems to loosen the grip on outdated and limiting ideas like IQ.The two particular places where they have brought these researchers and ideas together are in their two co-edited volumes both with MIT press and both open access. Movement Matters: How Embodied Cognition Informs Teaching and Learning (https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-edited-volume/5306/Movement-MattersHow-Embodied-Cognition-Informs ) (MIT Press, 2020), achieved considerable success, including award nominations and recognition as one of the top ten downloaded books through MIT Press’ Direct2Open. And in June this year they released their second volume entitled, Embodied Intelligence: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Natural, Artificial, and Hybrid Systems (https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262053495/embodied-intelligence/ )Professor Sheila Landers Macrine (https://www.umassd.edu/directory/smacrine/ ) is a cognitive psychologist and Professor at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, where she directs the Special Education Program. Holding two PhDs from Temple University, her research in embodied cognition, cognitive development, and alternative assessment has significantly influenced traditional educational paradigms. Dr. Macrine's innovative work includes developing culturally sensitive IQ assessments and pioneering methods for evaluating students with intellectual disabilities. Her recent publications on embodied cognition appear in the International Journal of School and Educational Psychology and the Oxford Research Encyclopedias-Education at Oxford University Press, among others. Dr. Jennifer M. B. Fugate (https://www.kansascity.edu/research/faculty-research/faculty-research-kc/jennifer-fugate) studies emotion perception and is trained in the cognitive underpinnings of how people construct emotion through their language (Ph.D., Emory University, 2008).  Dr. Fugate directs the ABLE (affective, behavior, learning and embodiment) lab for able mind and body: https://fugatejennifer.wordpress.com/.She has three major lines of research: The Effect of Emotion Words on Varying Levels of Cognitive Processing; Increasing Emotion Word Knowledge and Granularity; Embodied Cognition in the Classroom and Teaching Research Skills: https://embodiedcognitionandlearning.com/ .

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 background to this work in Chapters 5, 6, 7 and 8 in Guy and Emily's book 'Bodies of Learning' here: https://www.bodiesoflearning.org/

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 community's own convictions about what its children deserve, and why that starting point often determines whether an idea actually takes root, or just gets installed and then quietly left to atrophy. As a fantastic example of that process working really well, we also discuss the Whole Child Model (https://www.wholechildmodel.org/), born exactly that way and now reaching thousands of students across the US and beyond.Cynthia Robinson-Rivers is a managing partner at Transcend (⁠https://transcendeducation.org/⁠ ) where she supports schools as they adopt the Whole Child Model that she developed while serving as head of school at Van Ness Elementary (DC Public Schools).  Before her return to school leadership, Cynthia worked in the DCPS central office as the Director of Teacher Retention and Recognition.  In that role, she developed projects to improve retention of highly effective teachers, including LIFT: Leadership Initiative for Teachers, a career ladder system for teachers.  Prior to her work on teacher retention, Cynthia directed the DCPS master educator program during the inaugural year of IMPACT, the district’s teacher evaluation system.  She holds a B.A. in Communication and Art from Stanford University, M.A. in Education from George Washington University, and EML from the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University. She is a fellow with the first class of the Aspen-Pahara Teacher Leaders Fellowship, a recipient of the Rubenstein Award for highly effective leadership, and a 2020 Boulder Fund grantee. Cynthia and her husband live in Washington, DC with their three children who all attend(ed) DC Public Schools.Dr. Jeff Wetzler is co-founder of Transcend, former Chief Learning Officer of Teach For America, and a two-time author. Jeff’s career is dedicated to unlocking human potential by helping people learn more deeply and transform their mindsets to realize bold new possibilities for themselves, their organizations, and their communities.In 2015 Jeff co-founded Transcend, a leading organization for driving innovation in the education sector. Since its founding, Transcend has been one of the fastest growing and most diverse organizations in the field of education innovation, working with hundreds of cutting-edge schools and districts in over thirty U.S. states and a vibrant network of 10,000+ innovators. Under Jeff’s leadership as co-CEO until 2024, Transcend raised over $80M of investment. Its resources have been translated in multiple languages and have reached communities worldwide, from Estonia to India to New Zealand. Jeff currently serves as Head of Transcend Labs and is a Board member at Transcend.Prior to Transcend, Jeff served as Chief Learning Officer of Teach for America, one of the nation’s largest and most respected social impact organizations. Jeff is a Fellow in the Aspen Global Leadership Network and an Edmund Hillary Fellow.Jeff is the co-author of Extraordinary Learning for All: How Communities Design Schools Where Everyone Thrives, with Aylon Samouha and Jenee Henry Wood, and author of Ask: Tap Into the Hidden Wisdom of People Around You for Unexpected Breakthroughs In Leadership and Life. It has been widely endorsed by experts and leaders such as Jim Collins, Adam Grant, Kim Scott, Seth Godin, Bill George, and Amy Edmondson, who wrote the book’s foreword.More links:Transcend's conditions framework (last updated 2024)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CM0Ajp5f49Mhttps://vimeo.com/1171159869/fffdc226a8?fl=tl&fe=echttps://vimeo.com/1157422544/2eb1dcf782?fl=pl&fe=sh

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 talk about memory in education is actually a metaphor. And a bad one at that, that the science is now telling us needs to be replaced with something biologically plausible.

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 that pulls people away from their community as they travel to nearby towns or cities to attend schools, and universities and pursue other careers. My guest this week, Sonia Bautista León is working in and with communities, across the Sierra Mixe in Oaxaca, Mexico co-creating educational responses to the challenges and opportunities being lived there. Sonia is Senior Coordinator at Radix Education (https://www.radixeducation.org/) and since 2020, she has been working on the Nuevo Maestro Project (https://www.proyectonuevomaestro.org/) in the state of Oaxaca, an organisation that trains teachers in primary and upper secondary education. She has worked as an educational consultant in various educational institutions and civil society organisations and has taught at university level at the National Pedagogical University 201, Oaxaca. She is a member of the Mexican Assembly of Former US Embassy Scholars and has also served as a mentor for the Indigenous Leaders Programme at the University of the Americas Puebla (UDLAP). Originally from the Sierra Juárez region of Oaxaca and a speaker of the Zapotec language, she firmly believes that education is the most powerful means of transforming the lives of children and young people, as well as their communities. Her professional development has focused primarily on the education of women and youth in indigenous and rural communities in the state of Oaxaca. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Educational Intervention from the National Pedagogical University 201, a Master’s degree in Educational Administration from La Salle University in Oaxaca, and a Master’s degree in Teaching at the Benito Juárez Autonomous University of Oaxaca. https://www.linkedin.com/in/sonia-bautista-le%C3%B3n-377a281a7/

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.