Future Learning Design Podcast

This week on the podcast we’re time travelling with the fabulous Professor Keri Facer. How we think about the future or futures makes a difference to the decisions we make in schools today, and Keri has been asking critically important questions about educational futures, pasts and presents for the last 20 years, that are still as important today as they were when she published her brilliant 2011 book ‘Learning Futures: Education, Technology and Social Change’.
Prof. Keri Facer is Professor of Educational and Social Futures at the University of Bristol, UK where she leads the British Academy ‘Times of a Just Transition’ Programme, which brings together scholars from 6 continents and 14 disciplines, to explore how temporal assumptions, frames and processes structure the possibility of just transitions. She is also Co-investigator on the ESRC Centre for Sociodigital Futures, where she works on the implications of mixed reality tools for collective imagination. Keri is also Professor of Public Education at Black Mountains College, led by recent podcast guest, Ben Rawlence: https://www.goodimpactlabs.com/podcast/ben-rawlence.
Keri was previously Zennström Professor in Climate Change Leadership at Uppsala University, expert advisory group member of UNESCO’s Futures of Education Commission and Research Director at Futurelab. Keri is collaborating with the poverty charity, the Joseph Rowntree foundation, on their ‘imagination infrastructure’ programme and is Editor-in-Chief of the journal Futures. Keri is also a co-Investigator of Transforming Education for Sustainable Futures: https://tesf.network/ 
In 2026, she is consolidating this work in three landmark publications: 
Chronoberg: a handbook of creative methods for temporal imagination (with Johannes Stripple); 

‘Time & Possibility: A Field Guide’ (with Harriet Hand); and 

Temporal Justice, a Special Issue for the Journal of Global Social Challenges. 

Keri’s books include ‘Learning Futures: Education, Technology and Social Change’ and ‘Working with Time in Qualitative Research’. She is joint Editor-in-Chief of the Journal ‘Futures’ and she edits the Routledge Book Series on ‘Futures and Anticipation’ with Prof Johan Siebers.
Keri’s personal website: https://kerifacer.wordpress.com/ 
https://www.linkedin.com/in/keri-facer-2a11b62/
https://www.temporalimagination.org/
https://www.conversationsociety.org/home
https://www.jrf.org.uk/imagination-infrastructures/educating-the-ecological-imagination-the-work-of-black-mountains
https://www.routledge.com/Learning-Futures-Education-Technology-and-Social-Change/Facer/p/book/9780415581431

I've always been fascinated by questions of religion and spirituality and what they have to offer the educational conversation. Clearly on the big questions of life generally, transformation, meaning, values and purpose they have a lot to say, but educationally we can very quickly find ourselves in the territory of indoctrination. And surely indoctrination is the opposite of good education
This week I was so happy to chat with Shoukei Matsumoto, a secular Buddhist Monk who is doing amazing work bringing insights from Japanese Buddhist teachings and practices into leadership, economy and organisational development. And in particular his approach integrates a "post-religious" spirituality with practical methodologies for "becoming good ancestors," often mentoring corporate leaders worldwide to create emotionally intelligent and sustainable workplaces.
Shoukei is a Buddhist monk, author, and Director of the Living Dharma Centre in Vancouver, Canada, where he is spearheading the revitalization of the organisation as a hub for secular spirituality. He simultaneously serves as a Professor of Practice in the Faculty of Well-being at Musashino University (Tokyo), bridging ancient wisdom and modern society to architect "Ambient Buddhism" – an environmental operating system for a post-religious age.
Operating at the intersection of spirituality, technology, and ethics, Shoukei is a member of the World Economic Forum's Global Future Council on Leadership (2025-2026) and an alumnus of the Young Global Leaders (2013). In 2025, he was appointed as a Mercator Visiting Professor at the University of Bonn (Germany) to research AI in the human context, and joined the Vatican’s Aurora initiative to shape global frameworks for moral innovation in artificial intelligence.
With a unique background holding a BA in Philosophy from The University of Tokyo and an MBA from the Indian School of Business, Matsumoto applies innovative management approaches to traditional Buddhist practices. He is the founder of Interbeing Inc. and has launched initiatives such as the Institute for Temple Management. 
He is the author of the international bestseller 'A Monk’s Guide to a Clean House and Mind' (translated into over 20 languages). His latest book, 'Work Like a Monk: How to Connect, Lead and Grow in a Noisy World' (2025) https://www.simonandschuster.co.uk/books/Work-Like-A-Monk/Shoukei-Matsumoto/9781398551749, offers practical guidance on integrating Buddhist principles – such as mindful listening and interconnectedness – into modern life and work.
Shoukei’s work touches on very relevant topics that we explore on this channel:
From "Software" to "An-Yo": How we can stop treating young people as machines to be optimized and instead cultivate "habitats" that allow for their natural flourishing.

The Grace of Being Wrong (Kuyo): In a world obsessed with "Known" mastery, how the Buddhist practice of Kuyo can liberate us to embrace the unknown.

The "True Person" (Shin-nin) in Dialogue: How mindful listening can unfreeze our words and allow our authentic selves to emerge, especially within the rigid structures of formal education.

Useful Links
Shoukei’s substack: https://www.living-dharma.com/ 
The Living Dharma Center, Vancouver: https://www.bcc.ca/ldc.html 
Shoukei’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shoukeim

One of the best things about this job is that I get to find out about and share some of the most exciting new developments in education all over the world, sometimes in the most unexpected places. My guest this week, the writer, human rights activist, turned educational entrepreneur Ben Rawlence and his amazing team are building just that in a small market town called Talgarth in mid-Wales. Black Mountains College is an incredible institution working with young people locally in mid-Wales and from across the UK, set up as an alive and direct response to the climate and ecological emergency to help create a future in which nature and human societies thrive. As you’ll hear Ben describe, the college is part of a tradition of land-based alternative education organisations such as Dartington College in the UK (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartington_College_of_Arts) and Rabindrath Tagore's Visva-Bharati University in India (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visva-Bharati_University) and is continuing and updating this tradition to become one of the most inspiring examples globally of what is possible and needed in these times. Ben is an award-winning writer, activist, and former speech writer to Sir Menzies Campbell and Charles Kennedy. He was a researcher for Human Rights Watch’s Africa division, worked for the Social Science Research Council in the USA, the Liberal Democrats in the UK and the Civic United Front in Tanzania.
His books include The Treeline: The Last Forest and the Future of Life on Earth and his forthcoming book Think Like a Forest: Letters to my Children from a Changing Planet.BMC website: https://blackmountainscollege.uk/
Beth Nawr Festival: https://blackmountainscollege.uk/events/beth-nawr-festival-2026/
Ben's Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Rawlence
Ben's previous books: https://uk.bookshop.org/beta-search?keywords=Ben+Rawlence

There aren't many things that prompt widespread agreement from people on all sides of the various educational debates. But whatever your educational stripes, young people becoming better critical thinkers usually gets unanimous support. And, arguably, it's being recognised as increasingly important in a world full of AI-generated content and chatbots pretending to be your friend! So I was completely fascinated when I discovered the work of my guests this week, who, as professors of Philosophy, are exploring the often overlooked embodied process of what it feels like to engage in critical thinking and how that process gets shaped by our experiences and inspirations. 
The fact that thinking comes from somewhere, is very often forgotten in the encouragement of our students to develop their "analytical", "rational" and "logical" skills in pursuit of objectivity. This applies as much in sciences and maths as it does in other humanities subjects like philosophy. And it has major implications for how we teach critical thinking in sophisticated ways aligned with the latest cognitive science, rather than perpetuating the narrow idea that it is simply a dispassionate logical set of computations (which we're clearly seeing the LLMs are much better at than us squishy humans who care about stuff!).
Donata Schoeller - https://www.donataschoeller.com/ - is Research Professor, Philosophy, at the University of Iceland, Iceland and Associate Professor at the University of Koblenz. She is a Principal Investigator, and Conceptual Director of “Freedom to make sense: Embodied, experiential Inquiry and Research,” and the Academic Director of the European Erasmus programmes Training Embodied Critical Thinking and Understanding. She has researched and published extensively on embodied thinking, while developing international and interdisciplinary research and training cooperations on the topic. Recent publications: “Thinking at the edge in the context of embodied critical thinking: Finding words for the felt dimension of thinking within research,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 2022, Close Talking: Erleben zu Sprache bringen, 2019, Saying What We Mean, with Ed Casey, 2017, Thinking Thinking, with Vera Saller, 2016.
Sigríður (Sigga) Þorgeirsdóttir - https://english.hi.is/staff/sigrthor - is a professor of philosophy at the University of Iceland. She is Principal Investigator of the “Freedom to make sense: Embodied, experiential Inquiry and Research” project, and one of the leaders of the “Training Embodied Critical Thinking and Understanding” training programme. She specialises in the philosophy of the body, the philosophy of the environment, the philosophy of Nietzsche, feminist philosophy, and women in the history of philosophy. She is Chair of the Committee on gender issues of International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP) that sponsors the World Congress of Philosophy.
Useful Links:
Training Embodied Critical Thinking and Understanding (TECTU) 2024-2026: https://www.trainingect.com/
Freedom to Make Sense - Center of embodied, experiential and mindful research and education: https://makesense.hi.is/
Practicing Embodied Thinking in Research and Learning
Edited By Donata Schoeller, Sigridur Thorgeirsdottir, Greg Walkerden: 
https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-edit/10.4324/9781003397939/practicing-embodied-thinking-research-learning-donata-schoeller-sigridur-thorgeirsdottir-greg-walkerden

The following conversation is definitely a wild ride*! It's not an argument often made, but I believe that one of the effects of our industrialised education systems is to create the illusion that the world is full of somewhat fixed and ordered things, that don't move or change much. Of course, we teach our children about orbiting planets, the water cycle or change in historical periods. But, for example, in episode 208, Vanessa Andreotti gave a great example of how we name objects in the world, such as trees, in order to teach about them. In doing so, we draw a boundary around a tree that separates it from all non-trees. This sounds kind of philosophical and abstract, but I think the effects of it are very real. Most young people then learn to read the world as a collection of more or less fixed objects, rather than as patterns of relations. 
My guest this week has been exploring the depths of these questions for a long time through the lens of movement. As you will hear, Professor Thomas Nail started this line of inquiry researching human migration, and went on to develop an entirely new discipline of the philosophy of movement by pulling at the threads of how far our collective obsession with order and stasis goes! And it definitely goes back at least a couple of thousand years!
Thomas Nail is a Distinguished Scholar and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Denver and author of numerous books, including The Figure of the Migrant, Theory of the Border, Marx in Motion, Theory of the Image, Theory of the Object, Theory of the Earth, Lucretius I, II, III, Returning to Revolution, and Being and Motion.
Some useful links:
https://liberalarts.du.edu/about/people/thomas-andrew-nail
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Nail 
The Philosophy of Movement website: https://philosophy-of-movement.com/
'The Birth of Chaos Before Physis': https://youtu.be/c3S4w7C2dGg?si=H-1RlmaK7p3x7C4a 
The Philosophy of Movement: https://www.youtube.com/live/YQUtX64uqNc?si=EeP3mP4Z-6_4-DK1
What is New Materialism paper: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337351875_WHAT_IS_NEW_MATERIALISM
'The Random Walk of the Brain' (article in Salon): https://www.salon.com/2021/08/28/walking-and-spontaneous-fluctuations-brain/ 
*In the conversation, Thomas uses the word 'cosmogony' which in hindsight I wished I had asked him to define. Simply put it is a theory about how the cosmos or universe originated.