A few weeks ago we organised and ran an anti-conference on Regenerative Design Education. But that wasn’t the only thing of significance that happened for me that week, the day before I was the Keynote speaker at BILTs very own conference on “Education for a Changing World”. It was my first every Keynote (if we exclude the Keynote I did for The International Glassfibre Reinforced Concrete Association, where I was a last-minute sub) and I was really looking forward to it. Building on my Blog post “University Education in 2050”[1] I tried to present a positive way forward for education which drew on the idea of academagogy (which I unpacked recently in my post on writing a new unit[2]), systems change and the skills students need in the future, which were brilliantly summarised in the conference overview[3].
When planning my Keynote I hadn’t really thought about how it would relate to the unfolding of the following day, but, in the after party to the anti-conference I overheard a throw away comment which made me wonder. Apparently one of the attendees at the anti-conference had mentioned that the event was similar to how education worked at the school they were linked to (I don’t know the individual and didn’t hear the conversation, the point is not whether this is factually correct but instead the question that follows…).
Could the regenerative design education anti-conference hold something of the possibility of higher education in the future? Was this a snapshot of where things might be going. Was the day, in-fact, an artefact of the future?
I obviously don’t know the answer to that. But at the end of my Keynote I asked a series of what if questions[4]:
What if education outcomes were holistic?
What if we enabled academagogy?
What if education went far beyond degrees?
What if education improved mental health?
What if education was free to the student?
What if education was truly inclusive?
What if education was genuinely collaborative?
What if education had a positive impact on the community?
Looking at those questions again I feel that, in the time and place that it existed the anti-conference provided answers to these what if questions. It almost shouted “YES, and it looks like this”. Now I am not suggesting every day at University should be an anti-conference day, I would be exhausted after a week, let alone a term, but what if there were elements that we brought forward, or what if we brought forward the whole thing as a moment of connection and deep learning a few times a year? What if the line up for the day was curated by the students?
The anti-conference is done. It may not be repeated in its current form, but in me (and others) it has opened up a deep question about what the future of education might look like.
Finally, if you were hoping to discover what the answer was to the question of Regenerative Design Education well I’m not sure I am best placed to answer that, but following the event there were two fantastic posts on exactly that topic which you can read on LinkedIn. As outputs of the day I think they make a wonderful summary:
Regenerative Design: What we should be teaching, and how we should be teaching it. – Nick Francis, University of Sheffield
To be regenerative we need to be nature connected – Alastair Mant, freelance consultant
[1] https://bilt.online/university-education-2050/
[2] https://bilt.online/week-5-all-the-gogys/
[3] https://bilt.online/conference-review-education-for-a-changing-world/
[4] I’ve removed a few that would need significant unpacking and may be part of a future blog post
