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TEDx Talks
Published: 2017-08-31
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKei09KkPsQ
for I want you think about a date in your lifetime an important date in your story something that after that date the world wasn't the same anymore and I don't want you to think about the day you were born or the day you were married because those are somewhat predictable what I'm imagining is a date in which the morning walk up scene being ordinary day which
is going to be a boring day but then something happened change things forever and for me that date was June thirteenth two thousand and thirteen then what happened quite unexpectedly he was it ordinary day and I came home a little bit early and I turn on the television news which I don't do very often and for some reason I I listened and there was a new
story that the United Nations had released a report talking about global population two years before in twenty eleven global population hit seven billion people and this new report was projecting where we would be like you're twenty fifty projecting global population beyond nine billion people so what's interesting to me is why that wasn't noise why suddenly became signal in my life but what started as a very
simple fought this concept that by the year twenty fifty the world be different would be bigger but the year twenty fifty that concept stuck with me and it stuck with the news it was amazing even now you see references many references to the year twenty fifty props to symmetry about half way through this century oil companies food companies governments are projecting to the year twenty fifty
for me what made me stop was the recognition that all of the stories associated with your twenty fifty were built pessimism at about fear about how terrible the world would look it was about division the stories were interviews of environmentalists talking to we needed to stop our behavior we needed to reverse things and it was fear and pessimism and division and that's typical for the news
but what paralyze me what stopped me in my tracks with the recognition that people that were children in twenty thirteen would grow up to be middle aged in running the world by the year twenty fifty and in fact my children at the time they were in middle school would be my current age they would be running the world in by the year twenty fifty I would
be elderly and even more arthritic than I am and the man on my left the grandfather in this picture likely wouldn't be there I would reach a point in my life of being reflective and wondering had I done enough and the question was all this negative new stories the pessimism fear the division in thinking is this the way that we should be educating future leaders of
the world sometimes a futuristic stories are focused on time points that are so far off that we think well that's not going to be my problem problem was kids would be running the world response with what the world looks like we're actually in our schools they were born it wasn't some far off future state and we the middle aged crowd now would likely still be around
to bear witness to that and that little thought became this idea that grew in me and eventually developed into a plan and actually took over what became my life's work in my profession and why instead of just being noisy became signal for my life I still don't understand today so that's one reference point and it may be sort of think about our education systems what kind
of messaging are we empowering our youth with when it's talking about division and fear and pessimism and I reflected back being an educator I reflected back on our journeys as human beings in fact when we're very young kids are incredibly creative defying cardboard boxes or in this case a kid on a swing finds a sword and is attacking you know this mystery villain who's up a
burlap sack just hanging next to a tree kids create their own realities they're full of creativity such potential in the world and then what happens we send them to school and what happens in school a school have evolved instead of teaching kids to sort interact in a world where science and humanities and languages and play are all mixed together instead we break up those things into
fifteen minute actions of life and as they get older and once again to high school it's not that every child is actually taking the same Citrix in high school we ask students to start making choices about what courses they want to take if I go on to college university those choices become even more extreme she make one of these choices and the challenge becomes the institutions
of education sort of put up barriers to say well if you're in the program have you know electrical engineering to be very difficult it's very difficult for you to get a secondary degree in languages you have to do more time the team punitive some ways but also the other thing that we do is we take the prospect that although at the at the end of education
we want students who graduate think and tackle the world in this complex environment we take the attitude in education to say before you can think we need to fill you with knowledge so what's happened as education systems have evolved is that knowledge and skills have become king and thinking it's been kicked out of the castle spike that's where education started so those were the two things
the notion that our kids are be tackling the world enter school systems thinking about how we educating them and particularly in a world in which some of the global challenges we face are so inter disciplinary there's cultural components to the climate change their biological components to that all of these things were not educating people in a way to build a tackle that and yet we hope
people graduate having been trained in this way they work together in government or in our communities to make good decisions to be comfortable in that kind of messy world so as an educator shame started to kick in and how many people have talked about this the sort of the crisis in the education %HESITATION where information skills or knowledge and skills have become king we've taken creative
thinking solution oriented and dialogue out of the curriculums and so on were tackle complex problems like climate change that are so complex things are so connected that culture and science are colliding there's a wonderful book written by Mike Shula climate change scientists based on the on the UK who wrote a book called why we disagree about climate change he's a hardcore scientist it what he realized
in trying to convince governments and people pay attention to climate change is that our cultures are beliefs get in the way as he wrote a book that really says that climate change isn't just about nature it's about bringing together of of of culture and nature so there many people that are writing about this challenge and for me as an educator though I wasn't satisfied just to
be you know pulling and and pointing out what the problems were it was bugging me Tom so much I want to try to find solutions related to that and there's this wonderful quote from a philosopher you can Needleman is it like shouldn't just be about rubbing ideas together people want to be able to grasp onto a solution something they can do in their own lives and
this became a motivator for me and so the question was how could we rethink how we're educating engaging students in a way to make the story about the year twenty fifty a positive one instead of being one that was based on fear and pessimism and division was that too too naive notion to even imagine and so I conceived of the idea of wanting to put my
life's work into a different way of of engaging students so that we were nurturing the development of critical thinking creativity and innovation oriented thinking and if that meant having to step away from filling them with knowledge and skills maybe we needed to do that because this was so fundamentally important so the notion of using the processes of discovery creativity and innovation as being the backdrop for
wearing the backbone of learning on which we can tax skills and knowledge but this is being fundamental and that's what's driving my work in interest as we go as we go forward so in fact there's a lot of literature in the education space related to the power of learning in this kind of way the term experience a learning refers to the learning that comes back to
doing something so just sitting in a classroom in hearing about it actually trying so you know it's the notion of you learn to swim but you throw you into the into the pool first so experience learning is is like that but it's not learning just by doing something and potentially failing you've got as an educator you've got a built in time for reflection careful reflection the
learning comes from the reflection I bumped my head and walking under a beam why did I do that I reflect because maybe I need to duck down to make that happen but there's a specialized emerging field of experience learning that I like to call it is called in the in the literature authentic learning so it's experience learning so it's learning by doing things but in a
way which involves real world with real world players and so it's the notion of students being engaged in a project and if there's something that related to work in the poverty space that they're working with an NGO that's working in the poverty space and so authentic learning just raises the stakes partner is very interested in the learning that happens potentially as a future employer a partner
in promoting it in innovation certainly the stakes are raised for the student but they're highly engaged because this is a real this is real world and so the test of that becomes how do we I we operationalize this things that backdrop that I developed this idea and the monks this world pessimism in fear and division I mentioned what if we create a project initially for high
school students was my idea before we start to pigeon hole them we call the twenty fifty project and that with the project was really simple %HESITATION in thinking %HESITATION I'm not involved high school education so it's easy for me to imagine so the idea was well if we want students to be involved in critical thinking creativity let's get them to imagine what the world can look
like a mere twenty fifty so they're gonna have to go learn some history and some science and some language arts related to that and then they're going to identify and innovation and they're gonna work in that within a group because teamwork and collaboration is a critical part of that's will put the lid of a constraint and then what what about if we kid bring students together
they're working in different schools and ideally from different parts of the country perspectives of departs the country so that was my idea and I sheepishly went off and I taught knocked on the front door of the principal's office local independent school any bit into the idea right away and so what happened is we actually titled piloted this last fall twenty fifty project happening in four schools
across Canada one in New Brunswick Montreal one Ontario in one here locally and groups of students working in different ways and how the school fitted into their curriculum or how was extracurricular was different that was part of the experiment to and then the the carrot was of the students when they come together and present their ideas and so we did that in immediate mid April I
had them for a few days in Calgary and then took him up to the Banff center no better place like the Banff center your mind is open up with all these mountains and blue skies around you and some magic happened and so the magic happened when the students actually early in the week they presented their ideas a pitch but the magic was this was never about
being a competition so you picture ideas are lots of things out there you picture idea there's a winner there some losers this is about presenting your ideas early in the week because in addition to the students that were there we had people from the business community artists there from the communications industry that were there some graduate students business people that were there to listen to these
ideas an initial presentations were celebrate Tory that was awesome groups Montreal thinking about urban design things local group here focus on a food computer celebrate Tory congratulations but in the students listening to each other's projects the wheels were turning maybe it was professional jealousy or fear of being embarrassed right and they develop this appetite for continuing to to learn and so but what happened by the
end of the week students were going learning from each other networking with the advisors and mentors that we had a in the crowd they came up with something incredibly special the second project that was involved with is actually at the university it was the idea of creating a course that was actually launched this past January call global challenges the idea is a tad bit naive only
first year students but from any faculty so we had students from engineering political science %HESITATION English literature %HESITATION astrophysics even broad group of students that came together and %HESITATION their task was simple come up then innovation to address this global towns the global challenge of feeding nine billion people by the year twenty fifty so day one we had them for a workshop and then it was
like okay goal commitment innovation and you got three and a half months to sort of figure figure this out there was a structure that was built built into that the vehicle for learning was inquiry everybody came to to to this task with an opinion about food food insecurity food preferences of shape by culture by health or whatever everybody had an opinion that was related that we
take advantage of but they had to understand but the person it's where they had to understand each other's person in that and work together in a team of collaboration to make something happen the real test as to whether they were %HESITATION good at looking at different perspectives came in mid March when we had an event called the feeding nine billion people dinner wasn't nine billion people
but was two hundred people but a third were students and the other two thirds were some faculty and also people in the community if farmers we had chefs NGOs people interested in food waste and the students facilitated discussions or twenty two tables of conversations that were happening and everyone walked away from that event saying I learned more in that one dinner that I did in anything
else that I did in school the it's a big lesson why couldn't we imagine if we had twenty dinners like that students are responsible for hosting five in attending five fifteen maybe that would cause did agree wanna why we stuck to this notion that courses have to be semester long in their quizzes and term papers if there's a cradle mental learning that happen event like this
so this is where we're going with this idea what developed in these two projects was incredible critical thinking creativity %HESITATION the kinds of skills we want to walk away because we work pushing knowledge we were pressing skills students were what got a taste for that because they knew they needed that in order to develop their ideas so what was the magic ingredient that that made this
happen and there I think a few magic increase in this work is going to continue but here's my initial %HESITATION reflections on this first is how you define the theme and it really needs to be a broad theme which is welcoming for different kinds of perspectives that make sure that you've got science clashing with culture with engineering with public policy altogether whether within the context of