The controversial statue of Cecil Rhodes is finally (slowly) falling at the University of Oxford, and Black Lives Matter protests have started or accelerated similar discussions in many other institutions. However, UK universities are still steeped in a legacy of colonialism and White privilege. In this podcast, I discuss with Mia Liyanage who recently published a high-profile report into the matter what decolonisation means, why it matters, and what the barriers are. The conversation...

In this episode, I interview Robin Goldberg, the Chief Experience Officer of Minerva Schools at KGI. Minerva started as a project to rethink undergraduate education in the US, and move it beyond the current stage when students spend a huge amount of money for what often amounts to poorly designed education. They have designed a whole new curriculum and pedagogical approach, that runs almost entirely online - an inspiration not just in the age of Covid. Apart from the state of undergraduate...

In this episode, I interview Chris Edwards, the CEO of Green School Taranaki in New Zealand. Before starting this school in early 2020, Chris was head of the United World College of South East Asia (UWCSEA), one of the largest international schools in the world; now he is building a much smaller school that is all about building a learning community in which much learning takes place outdoors and across subject boundaries. In the interview, Chris recommends Planet of the Humans - a film that...

Sandra Ricker (on LinkedIn) is the Edu Tech Lead for Quinoa Education (webpage in German), a private school in Berlin that caters for disadvantaged children in an inner-city setting. In this conversation, we talk about how they dealt with lock-down, and Sandra shares many practical strategies for using edu tech during the crisis and beyond. The main tool they used is padlet.com which looks like a great platform for any kind of online collaboration. As always, if you have any comments,...

In this episode, I am speaking to Lord Jim Knight (@LordJimKnight), the Chief Education Officer at Tes Global. He was Minister of State for Schools and Learning under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, and has since kept on working to improve education, both as a member of the House of Lords, and in various other roles. In this conversation, we explore the challenges students and their teachers face during the Covid-19 lockdowns that have kept millions at home around the world. We discuss what...

James Tooley is Professor of Educational Entrepreneurship and Policy at the University of Buckinghamshire. His research work and other activities mostly focus on low-cost private schools, which he has come to see as one of the most powerful contributors to making high-quality education accessible to the poor in developing countries. In this conversation, we discuss how such schools work, why they are often overlooked in the development discourse, and how they can make a contribution. We also...

About this conversation Catalyst is an international programme for young people and their teachers that addresses the War on Drugs in the Americas. It combines several months of online collaboration with an intense summer camp and thereby tries to really enable the participants to return to their communities, make a difference and develop their own voice in shaping drug policy. In this conversation, I speak with Theo di Castri, Catalyst's co-founder and with Diana Rodriguez Gomez, their...

Gwyn Wansbrough is the Executive Director of Partners for Youth Empowerment who work to bring more arts and creativity into all kinds of educational settings. Here, we talk about her work, her personal journey, and a range of inspiring organisations and approaches. If the conversation inspires you to bring some more creativity into your own education work, PYE runs excellent facilitator trainings, partners with schools to make classrooms more creative and shares a range of free training...

Ross Hall is a co-founder of the Weaving Lab where he works to enable communities to create local educational ecosystems that bring all the different players together. With that, he wants to transform education into a force for universal wellbeing. Before starting the Weaving Lab, Ross directed Ashoka's global educational strategy and spent a few years researching wellbeing - so he has a wealth of experience to draw on for this conversation that focuses on collective impact, system change,...

In this episode, I am speaking to Greg Jouriles who teaches at Hillsdale High in California. We speak about some of their inspiring simulations, which engage students with difficult materials across traditional subject divides, for example through a Trial of Human Nature. We also talk about how to include the spirit of such peak experiences into day to day teaching. I initially learned about Greg's work in the book The Power of Moments by Chip and Dan Heath, which is worth reading for...

In this episode, I am speaking to Giovanni Ciarlo (on Linkedin) from Gaia Education. He has developed their online Design for Sustainability programme, an intense year-long project that manages to engage, retain and transform learners ... so I was very curious to hear how they achieve that. We also talk about Gaia's face-to-face programmes, about possibilities for collaborations between providers of such experiential education and established universities and much more. We didn't speak...

Mia Eskelund (@miaeskelund on Twitter) is the co-founder and CEO of SkySchool. They have offered a unique model of blended learning to make secondary education available to refugees online. In this interview, we speak about Mia's experience of starting this educational social enterprise, about advice for others who want to get going, and about their educational model that emphasizes lifeworthy learning. If you want to read a mini-summary of that concept as it applies to teaching in schools,...

Prof Wolfgang Dietrich holds the UNESCO Chair of Peace Studies at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. There he runs the MA in Peace Studies, a programme that combines academic rigour with personal reflection and tough and transformative experiential learning. In this interview, we speak about his experiences in Central America as an evaluator of NGO programmes, and how this led him to believe that the trainer of peace workers needed to be changed fundamentally. We speak about the design...

Laurence Nodder is the Rektor of UWC Robert Bosch College in Freiburg, Germany. That school, as well as Waterford Kamhlaba in eSwatini, where he worked before and where I was his student, are part of the UWC movement. We also speak about his experiences of working in education under apartheid, the racist system of segregation in place in South Africa from 1948 to the early 1990s. If you want to get an impression of education for Black students under apartheid, alongside the inspiring...