What Does Connectedness With Nature Mean in Teaching?

Connectedness with nature, for us, starts with the recognition that a human body is already an ecology. Most of what lives on and in us is other than human, and the indoor spaces we work in are as biodiverse as most places on the planet. That insight makes it hard to think of yourself as a separate "I." On study tours of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, we look closely at a few pieces that show where the nature–human divide appears and where other cultures have no such divide at all. A dinner with Iñupiat collaborators in Northern Alaska made the point for us: in the Western story the only animal that talks is the snake, and in their world the mountain, the river, and the shadows all speak. Students working on ecological questions need to see that their most basic logic is one option among several.

How Does the Spaghetti Game Teach Students to Block Familiar Assumptions?

The spaghetti game teaches by blocking each structure a team falls back on. Teams get five minutes to build the tallest tower from spaghetti, string, tape, and a marshmallow. Almost everyone builds triangles, so we block triangles. Then squares and right angles appear, and we block those, then columns. By the fourth, fifth, and sixth rounds, teams stop working from ideas and start following what the spaghetti does: it bends, twists, crawls, and walks. The game carries no stakes, which makes it a safe way to feel what it is like to disclose a habit, set it aside, and let something new emerge. Later in a course, when students drift back to ideation, we can point to that embodied memory.

Why Does Future-Backwards Planning Fail in Complex Systems?

Future-backwards planning fails because we live in a complex adaptive reality where a ten- or twenty-five-year path cannot be worked out in advance. Most theories of change start with an idea, a solution, or a plan and work back to the steps. In environmental work that often turns into pitching concepts and lining up stakeholders, followed by confusion when nothing happens. We ask students to construct systems with propensities, ones that pull more people and processes in one direction than another, and to accept that they will co-emerge with whatever comes about. The same logic shapes how we meet skeptical or hostile audiences: we open with the tension of what creativity is, refuse to debate, and build a shared experience that shows other ways are possible.

What Is It Like to Be a Student in an Emergent Learning Classroom?

Being a student in an emergent learning classroom means sitting in ambiguity for a long time. One student recently told Jason, "you're really enjoying watching us struggle." What she was seeing was students searching for language for something that did not exist yet, since anything new lacks words by definition. Most people have spent their schooling learning to give the right answer fastest, so a project with no right answer is frustrating at first. Students who take later courses in the sequence often come back and say they now understand that frustration is a sign they are doing something new. We tell them to trust the process.

How Can Business Education Account for What Capitalism Externalizes?

Business education can start by calling its economic assumptions into question, the same way we ask students to question the concept of nature. Jason argues for more ethics and shared outcomes in a curriculum driven by profit. Iain adds that capitalism works by externalizing costs: the mines, factory conditions, and pollution behind a smartphone sit outside the equation. An ecological view treats these as loops that come back, and once every cost is taken into account, much of what passes for profit would not add up. As our Iñupiat friend put it, everything speaks, and an economy that decides some things have no voice cannot be the one we sustain.

What Would Higher Education Look Like Without the Classroom?

Higher education without the classroom would be organized around a shared concern: a group asks where it needs to be, who it should talk to, and what it needs to experience. A high school redesign we worked on ten years ago concluded with a proposal to block the classroom, and it was never adopted. Colorado College's block plan, where students take one course at a time for weeks, points in this direction. Our study abroad exchange with the University of Graz in Austria is our closest version: museums, shared meals, walks through cities, outside voices, and space for students to direct the outcome. We passed two questions to the next guest. If ideation is conservative and rooted in the known, what does your work look like without ideas? And how can the event, the relational occasion we set up, be trusted to be the teacher?

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Hear the full conversation on The Regeneration Lab.