 Welcome everybody. Welcome to the Future Trends Forum. I'm delighted to see you here today. We have a terrific guest with a wonderful project and I'm really looking forward to our conversation. Ever since the forum launched in 2016 we've been thinking and rethinking how to redesign higher education. We've had guests after guests who have been here to show us their ideas, their plans, their aspirations for how to redo universities around the world. This week's guest has a very, very exciting idea and it's one that doesn't come out from the usual directions at all. Professor Anke Schwitte has a book on creative universities which, if I read it correctly, wants us to rethink universities by starting with by radically rethinking teaching and the teaching and learning experience to empower students and to give them a lot of creativity and so doing unleash a powerful critique of the university and to start transforming them as a whole. If you'd like to get a copy of the book, look at the bottom left hand corner of the screen where it says creative universities. Click that up you go to the publishers page, but before that let me bring Professor Schwitte on stage. There's always this dramatic moment. I need a drumroll or maybe the Star Trek transporter noise, but either way here we are. Greetings. Hello. Good afternoon and good evening I should say. It's very good to see you, Professor Schwitte. Thank you. Thank you. How are you doing this evening? I'm good. I'm good. Thank you so much for having me and you all here. I'm getting some feedback. Is that me or can you hear me well? I can hear you just fine. Brilliant. Good. Good. Well, I'm really glad you can join us this evening and as I mentioned to you beforehand, while it may be very dark where you are, I think your book is a brilliant ray of sunshine. It has so much going on. But before I get into that, let me ask you to introduce yourself in the peculiar way we do here, which just ask what are you working on for the next year? What are the big projects and ideas that are top of mind for you? Yes. Yes. Thank you so much. So what am I working on? I'm based in Brighton in the UK in case you're wondering why we're talking about it being nine time over here. It's just gone seven o'clock and it's very dark. I teach at the University of Sussex, which is on the South Coast. So at the moment, we are teaching and I'm teaching one of the modules. I talk about a lot in the book and I'm also kind of getting ready in the next term to teach my activism module and I'm sure I'll talk about both of them later. But the other exciting thing is that I've actually just launched a spin-off project from the book, which is researching student housing cooperatives in the UK. And it came out from some of the students I interviewed for my book, who were involved in setting up the Sussex University Student Housing Cooperative. About three years ago, it's the first one in the southeast in the UK. And since then, I've learned there's a few others up in the north of the country. And the interesting thing for you all is that the UK movement is very much inspired by student housing cooperatives in North America. And there's an organization called NASCO that some of you might be aware of. So I'm learning a lot about student housing cooperatives in the UK and incidentally, Berkeley, where I did my PhD, has the largest student housing cooperative in the US, which is really interesting. So I'm working on this research project, which is really, really inspiring and fascinating. That sounds fascinating. It really does. There's a lot to dig up there. A lot of radical history. And I know you're very interested in alternatives to modern or to mainstream economy economic models. So that's definitely a counter for that. Oh, good. I'd love to see how that goes. What I'd like to do is to ask you a few questions about creative universities. And then I want to get out of the way and let the audience really have at it. Because this is an exhilarating book with so much energy that I just can't say enough about it. My first question to ask you is, again, if I understand this correctly, your focus here is on the teaching and learning experience, especially in empowering students to be as creative as possible. What are some of the most exciting ways of doing that that you've been seeing lately? Would it be the kind of the physical hands-on maker space work that you're talking about? Is it breaking students into small groups? What are some of the most exciting dimensions of that? Okay, that's a great question to start us off. Yeah, I would definitely say for me, creativity and making our teaching more creative definitely has a strong connection to the use of arts and design methods. I'm very interested in the use of design for teaching and for international development, which is my field in general. I think allowing students to work with their hands, think with their hands through playing with material, through creating a right atmosphere is a really good way to open up their creativity. So when I do design workshops, I make sure that before the students come in, tables are set up with lots of materials, anything from, you know, Play-Doh to pipe cleaners to Lego to blocks. So students, when they come into room, they immediately realize they're being invited for a different kind of teaching session. And what's quite interesting is students' reactions because I hear so often when they open up a kind of Play-Doh, it's like, Oh my God, so that reminds me of my childhood. And immediately, it's kind of this, you know, this, this time in their lives when they were very playful and allowed to be playful. And it kind of just sets the stage for a more playful and fun experience. For me, fun is definitely a big part of that. Another element is allowing students to bring in their own experiences. That's a really big part for my kind of teaching where I definitely believe students hold great knowledge in their own experience, kind of on and off campus. So making space where I ask students continuously, you know, what does this mean to you? How does this resonate with your own, with kind of learning and life experiences is, is another way in which you can allow them to bring kind of more of themselves into the classroom. And I think then finally, the imagination, I talk a lot about using the imagination and imagining or reimagining how things could be in my classes and always say, I want to create spaces where students can still be critical and will probably talk about that, you know, being critical and doing critical teaching is really important. But I try and complement that with this kind of creativity and emphasis on reimagining things. So that's kind of three strategies that I use. Fantastic. And these are each so powerful. I was really impressed by how, you know, among other things, the celebration of students differences and what they could do, but also the return to childhood in that sense of playfulness, creativity, openness, beginner's mind. I think this was very exciting. We have a question that came up in the chat. I just want to run this past you before I get to ask you another question, which is, how do you do all this online? If you don't have the physical stuff to play with, how do you do that online? That's, oh, that's a great question. And maybe I can just really quickly say something about, I did the research for this book before COVID and I'm a big believer in in class teaching, in person teaching. That's my favorite way of teaching. And then I went on sabbatical in early 2020. Great timing. Great timing. Great timing. Ready to write this book. And going, so I didn't have to teach, but, you know, seeing what my colleagues and the students were going through, going into lockdown. And I really kind of questioned a lot of my book and my publisher was really, my editor was really helpful working me through what this all meant. But then coming back into teaching, I found ways, I think most obviously, and I still do this, I use a lot of padlets and gem boards in my teaching. I actually think those tools, gem boards are really easy to use, kind of Google gem boards, padlets. And I've, in some cases, realized that it's, it's easier to use them. So I've actually kept them in in person teaching. We know we did all our teaching on Zoom and small group discussions, kind of well facilitated. And I was actually, I've always been skeptical of, of using technologies, but I was quite positively surprised by online teaching, hyper teaching, I think is a whole different kettle of fish and it's never worked very well for me. But doing pure online teaching as we had to do for a while, it actually went rather better than I had expected it to go. Well, I'm glad, I'm glad. I can second the vote for padlet and gem boards, which are really, really easy. The questioner, Lisa Durf says that you are a woman after her own heart. Then let me ask a second question, which is, how do you, how do you translate all of that work? I mean, the hands on play, the sense of imagination, the critical imagination, bringing their experiences in? And then how does that lead to, first, a critique of the university and the world? And then secondly, how do you, how can we turn that into an energy to redesign universities as a whole? Yeah, a little question there, little question. Not bad. So I think in order to answer that, maybe I would like to bring in kind of the second part of my subtitle, which is looking for alternatives. And in the book, I talk a lot about how can we kind of move away from mainstream ideas, for example, about sustainable development teaching or about, you know, employability agendas. And again, this is the UK context. So I don't know to what extent it is as relevant in the US. But for me, asking students to reimagine economic systems or ecologies or even their own kind of academic subjectivities is always very much tied to think about radical alternatives. So alternatives very much in the sense of non mainstream or heterodox. And I make sure that in my teaching in my reading lists, I introduce students to kind of writings in this area to provide them with the knowledge. But then when we do our creative exercises, I always kind of try and push them and ask them, you know, how can we move into that direction of, of thinking about alternatives. I see it as a critique of, of the neoliberal university, the marketized university system. So I have one of my chapters really engages quite critically with the employability agenda. And with this idea of that students are coming to university, you know, to, you know, kind of be more successful on the job market. And I'm saying it's really important. We are, we are, of course, preparing our students for life after university, we have to do that. But if it just becomes very instrumentally about kind of core skills and core competencies and employability skills, that's not what the larger purpose of the university is about. And I teach at Sussex, which is a very, has a very kind of radical history. It was one of the first kind of post World War Two universities in the US, has a very kind of activist history. And we can talk about to what extent that is still alive. But within that context also reminding students of this history and continuously talking about social justice, equality, some of those those primary values, they run through kind of my teaching and the teaching of my colleagues very much and being engaged and critical and responsible and ethical citizens in that sense is kind of another premise that runs through teaching. I love that having the history, the identity of your university, which is a relatively young one, right, if it's from 1970 or so. Yeah, just to celebrate it our 60th anniversary. What's the, the name the Play Class University, right? Played the first, yeah, one of the first Play Class universities, which is in contrast to, you know, the Oxford State kind of the very much the Red Brake University. So they used big glass windows in their construction. And I think there were about six of them that all opened around the same time. No, it's very interesting to have that kind of to be able to turn the history and identity of your university into part of the class. Friends, I want to stop asking on good questions and leave yield the floor to you all for your questions and your comments, because she's obviously has a whole bunch of great things to talk about. And all kinds of ideas that we want to share. But just just to remind you again, the bottom of the screen, you should have the raised hand button. If you want to join us on stage, use a question mark to type in a question if you already have. And also I didn't mention them before, but we have Wesson Radomsky here to help you with any technology needs. So if you have any problems with audio or video, Wesson is there to to assist. So we have one quick question that came up from John Hollendick, who is coming to us from Wisconsin, miraculously not buried under snow and ice. And John has a word choice question that is a very deep one. He asks, whoop, hang on a second, let me press the correct button. Why do we still use the term pedagogy, child study to educate, tell people what to learn? And I don't see evaluation addressed in the table of contents of your book. How does it play with your creative university? I guess those are those are two different questions, the term pedagogy and the question of evaluation and assessment. Yes. Maybe I can start by saying, I don't have an education background. I'm an anthropologist by training. I teach do most of my teaching on international development. So while I obviously engage with some education theory in the book, I don't have a deep kind of grounding in that field. And I didn't write it from that perspective. So pedagogy for me, I talk about pedagogy and I talk about us as educators, but pedagogy for me, probably came from the use of critical pedagogy to think about to think about kind of the, I guess, at the heart of my book is a proposal for a critical creative pedagogy and the critical element of that comes from the critical pedagogy tradition of Polo Freire, Sarah Almslow over here and other people. So I think my use of the word pedagogy comes from there. I did not associate it with child studies, even though I do talk about people like Maria Montessori, Rudolf Steiner, Mr. Lotzie, in terms of kind of some of the forerunners, but I wasn't aware of kind of that connotation necessarily. So for me, it was, yeah, I used it because of kind of this critical pedagogy tradition that I'm drawing on. Then the question of evaluation, is that assessments? Yes. Yeah. That's a really, that's a really good one. And I actually have a, I think it's, it's in a footnote or something. So maybe I can just say that the book is very much written from my own teaching practice. I've been teaching for about 20 years in the US in New Zealand and now in the UK. And the book is really a reflection on my own kind of pedagogical journey. And that's why I talk a lot about what I'm doing, because this is really the ground I'm standing on, because this is the only ground I was able to write from, even though I interviewed a lot of students and my colleagues and I went into my colleagues' classrooms to do observations. But a lot of the activities that I'm writing about are from my own classes, and they are mostly non-assessed because I felt it easier for students to be more comfortable, to be creative, to be imaginative as soon as you introduce an element of assessment. There is a certain worry that that comes with that. Having said that, there is a couple of larger projects I'm writing about. And one is my colleague who does, who uses serious games, who asks students to design serious games in a class on kind of disasters and development. And then my own class on activism for social justice, where students design activism campaigns, and that's actually quite significant elements of the assessment. So in each case, it's 30% it's a group mark for 30%. And I explain how it's really important to be really, really clear and supportive for how these different kind of forms of assessment will be evaluated. And of bringing students or my colleague with the serious games, he brings students into the class and each year they are doing kind of a collective design of assessment criteria. Also, just we decide my urban futures module to bring in an assessed imaginative element. So I'm going to do next term and I'm not quite sure how it's going to go. But I felt, yeah, I felt it important to kind of, you know, walk my talk a bit more and actually put more value on these through assessments. So it's an experiment. But I know if it's assessed, I know students need lots and lots of support and reassurance because this is not where they're used to. They're used to writing essays. First and foremost, maybe, you know, few related, but asking them to do kind of creative exercises, they need to be very well structured and very well explained and supported for them to be assessed. That would be my comment on that. I really appreciate the candor and richness of your answer because that's a deep subject to pull apart, especially within an institutional context. And John, as always, thank you for the excellent question. Friends, if you're new to the forum, that's an example of the text question. Again, just on the bottom of the screen, that's that little question mark. Now I want to give you an example of a video question with our friend Peter Wallace. We're going to bring him up on stage. Let's make sure this works. Hitting the button and hello, Peter. Can't hear you. Your mic is off. Now I'm on now. Now you're perfect. Okay, great. Sorry about that. We've got the technical challenges. Well, thank you very much for talking with us today and for the for the provocations and for rooting this in your own practice. I think that's like always really meaningful. I work, or at least my my academic work is in open education, open educational efforts, that involves students in co creating a creative activity of co creating materials that other students can learn from is kind of at the core. And my my core question for you is how do you see critical creative pedagogy as you practice it breaking down or challenging or interfacing with the the powered dynamics that are inherent in classrooms. And there's an ongoing discussion in the chat about workplace too. And I was just reflecting on how success in the workplace also requires navigating power dynamics, expectations for work, things that play into assessment in the way that we think about it. Because you are being assessed by your teachers and peers in the classroom or your your peers and your and your supervisors or whatever your structure is within within the workplace. And I think about this from a design lens, because that's what I do for work. And often the worst designs are produced in highly power loaded hierarchical environments. So anything you'd like to to share on that, particularly in the classroom, because I'm I know you're you're thinking about it mostly in that way, but community too is a really interesting space for that. Yeah, yeah, no, that's, it's a really good question. Power relations, you know, do exist. And I think as much as co creation, you mentioned co creation, it's a really, really important concept at Sussex. There's lots of co creation initiatives. There's money available for students to become co creators. So it's definitely something that's that's on the agenda. And I think co creation, if it's done in a meaningful rather than in a just a tokenistic way, if students really have the possibility to shape the curriculum, the reading list, including assessments, although in the UK, this is very highly formalized. And you have to go through lots of hoops to change assessments and stuff. I think it's a bit more open ended in the US if it's still like when I taught that depends on the school and my experience. But yeah, okay. Yeah. But but co creation. And I think it comes back to what I said earlier about making space for students to bring in their experiences and really say, I you know, the experience you have, you know, coming here to university, the experience you have outside the classroom, but also in the classroom are really valid sources of of knowledge. And I want you to bring them in creating a space obviously that's safe enough for students to do so. So presentations, you know, that might be quite conventional, but I think there are a good way for students, especially if students can maybe put together their own presentation groups, choose their own topic. I often recommend students for presentations and also essay choices, pick something that you that you love. So for example, in my urban futures class, they have to write a research essay on the city of their choice. And I often say, you know, either choose a city that you know a lot about or that you really want to that's meaningful to you in some way because it will make for for a better essay. So really, in a genuine way, saying your knowledge counts in the classroom and then making spaces. So I have a co-creation week where I just give it over to the students and say this is your week, you pick the topic, you pick the you pick the format and it's always amazing what students come up with. But I'm under no illusion that this gets rid of power relations because, you know, I do put together the curriculum, I do the assessment, but also kind of, you know, I talked about creating a safe classroom space. So one of the elements of my critical creative pedagogy is this whole person learning where I talk about, you know, students, you know, they bring their brains, their intellects into the classroom. But what about their bodies, their emotions, their senses, their experiences? And yeah, I can maybe, can I can I bring an example? Can I do you have a bit of time? Absolutely. Well, I mean, this is the one in my urban futures class, as I said, Sussex is very closely located to Brighton and in their third year when the students take this module, they all live in Brighton. So we start off by the very first week, I say over next week, I want you to keep a Brighton diary and I want you to become really aware of your life as Brighton residents, you know, where do you live, what's your neighborhood like, where do you go, who do you interact with, where do you do your shopping, what are the places you avoid, how do you feel about your city and they, and they create an artifact. And that's a good example with the padlet because before COVID, I would ask students to build an artifact and bring it into the class. And I have to say, I think it's the beginning of class and students are really like, so that wasn't very successful. But then during COVID, I just created a padlet and say, take a picture of your artifact and put it on, on, put it on padlet and write a small story around it. And it was amazing. And I actually have a blog post on my website, because I have a writing blog there. And I've kept the padlet, I've kept it on the padlet because it works so much better. But from that kind of really, you know, students as Brighton residents, we then we write a collective Brighton manifesto, we do a Brighton 2050 scenario exercise. And now they also have to reimagine a particular neighborhood and we're going to go on a field trip. So for me, that's an example of again, handing it over to students, putting it on their crown saying you're telling me how you live in the city. So again, that's one way in which I want you to open up the space, which goes maybe some way to, you know, addressing power relations debate. My very first chapter is actually about kind of we making academic subjectivities because I think it very much starts with how do we think about ourselves as educators and about our students and our positions. And I'm very aware that I'm writing from a normative point of view by saying, you know, we should make our teaching a little bit more creative. So also being really explicit about the agendas we have. You know, I don't know if that answers your questions, or I have a few ways in which I, you know, kind of try and bring in students more as knowledge creators, but the power relations are there. Yeah, as you said, by the simple fact that I'm going to assess them. And that's assigning what they're going to do. And at least in the US more so, they're paying to be there and you're paid to be there. Like that's a very real power relationship, right? But there's a lot of interesting things in what you said, they're still very, at least for me, very interesting threats too. Because it starts, it starts me thinking about citizenship and locality. It starts me thinking about, like you said, embodiment, because power relations often demand, at least in traditional school contexts that are divorcing from body. And I think that's a, yeah, that's a really meaningful thread to pull on. So thank you for your answer. Thanks very much. I'm sure that there are many other questions like I could keep asking, but thank you. You're welcome. Well, I'm really glad. Thank you, Peter. Thank you very much. And again, if you're new to the forum, that's an example of a video question. And no, you don't have to have a beard in order to come up on stage. You know, although Peter's is coming along very nicely. We have more questions on coming in from a whole bunch of directions. And we just put some of these up on stage. Here is one from Tom Hames, who asks, should we still think of universities as a physical place? Or as a continuum between virtual and physical places? Or is it time to stop thinking about reading at the university? Yeah, this is reading at a this is and when you say that in the context of the UK, it's always kind of the oxbridge where students are reading at or reading a particular course. We don't we don't use that language at Sussex. I think I think, as I said, you know, in person teaching is still my favorite mode. And I think the physical infrastructures of students are actually really important. And I've out of another project that came out of this book is a small group of faculty at Sussex across all different schools, who are thinking of how to use Sussex campus as a more explicit space of pedagogical possibilities. And I have to say, so we have this really interesting architecture, you know, basal spence. A lot of the buildings on campus are, how do you say, listed because of innovative architecture, which is brutal modernism. So, you know, have it or hate it. There is your split opinions on that. But we are also located in the middle of a national park, the only university in the UK to be that. So we have an amazing natural ecosystem. And we have, you know, food forest gardens around us. And we have an earthship house. So I think there is a lot of value in thinking of that physical and the natural environment and the history that goes along with it and the relationships also as spaces of possibility. So for me, I think the physical university is quite important. For example, in my chapter on design, designing futures, I talk about resource politics. And it became very clear to me, as I said, I did my PhD at Berkeley. And during the time spent quite a bit of time down at Stanford, when they set up the D school, some of you might be familiar with, you know, the House of Partners School of Design at Stanford. So I was there very early on when it started. And then when I wrote the book, I went back there for a visit. And it's an amazing creative space. It's the spaces amazing, the materials are amazing. The, yeah. And then, you know, coming back to Sussex, we don't have those kind of resources. We don't have spaces like this, we don't have, you know, the facilities. And also I did some research in Bolivia as part of this book. I'm a Latin Americanist by training. And in order for me to think about alternatives, it was important for me to go outside of kind of the UK context. And looking at some of the, especially the public universities in Bolivia, the lack of resources is even more stark. So I think physical infrastructures and spaces and materials also remind us of the inequalities that exist in the resourcing, you know, especially amongst kind of different universities. I guess they come back to kind of Oxbridge, Oxford and Cambridge here in the, in the UK, which have massive endowments versus Sussex relatively young and nothing to speak of. And I know in the, in the states it's, it's similar. So it it's really interesting questions to think about when we think about the material aspects of, of universities. You know, having said that, as I said, I do see much more value in online teaching before COVID than I thought I would. I know that's a question, but Oh, it's a great question. And thank you, Uncle, for the answer. We have another question, which fits right into that. And let me bring this one up so you can see this. Or right between those two polls. This is from Phil Blingard. Please, can Uncle share with us her experience, which caused her to be uncomfortable with hybrid viewing it as inferior to pure remote? I think the main reason is, and that comes back to resources, the technologies at Sussex was, is, is very poor. So we have a standard, you know, kind of, kind of screen up on the wall. And we, we were using Zoom, but it was a very one way, because with hybrid teaching, the students on Zoom could never see the classroom. So we can see the students. And I found it personally really difficult to facilitate people, physical people in the classroom and people online at the same time. I just, I had a couple of classes where I had ATs. And that was much better because they could monitor the, the chats. And, and when I didn't have ATs, which are kind of teaching assistants, I would always assign a student and say, you monitored the chat to make sure that that, you know, when students are asking questions and invite students to, you know, kind of, to unmute themselves and talk if they want to. But it's never really worked for me. And that maybe says more about kind of my teaching village, although I know from my colleagues, there is a sense. And the steer at Sussex is at the moment, I don't know what the, what it's like in the US, but we are in person only. We do not do hybrid teaching anymore at all. We are not allowed to basically for all kinds of reasons. We still record our lectures like we used to before. But I think the general sense was it was a quite a poor learning experience. And it's really interesting because the students are now asking for hybrid learning. They want to have, you know, an open Zoom session running. And they said, you know, what if I can't come to uni because I'm ill or I have, you know, maybe a lift too far or whatever it might be. So now this comes from the students. And again, I think it raises really interesting questions about accessibility and inclusivity. And we are very much kind of grappling with that at the moment. But whenever I've tried it, it wasn't very, I think satisfactory either for people in the classroom or on Zoom. I think that's my experience. Well, Philip, thank you for the really good question. I appreciate that. And Anka, thank you for, again, sharing so much of your experience with that. In the US, it's all over the map. We have a growing number of entirely online teaching. We have a big return to face to face, but also some un-yet-documented bubbling up of hybrid and high-flex in different ways. We have more questions that come up based on different points. And here's some pushback from Kiel Doomsch, who was asking this. Again, this is in many ways a question from the US. I take huge issue with Dr. Schwitte is minimizing the importance of job training in college. Most students need to get into the working world quickly. And college is too expensive and time-consuming. Yeah, no, I mean, absolutely. Thank you for putting back on that. And I think I hopefully I did preface my saying, of course, we have to prepare our students for getting out into the work of world after after university. You know, student fees are massive. My oldest one just went off to college and took out his first loan and is paying interest rates right from right from day one. So I'm absolutely aware of that. I think the way the whole employability discourse and practices have shaped up over here in the UK. It's it's really instrumental. It's all very much about kind of workforce readiness. And I do believe that that universities have a larger mission around kind of, you know, educating critical and ethical citizens and to think about kind of a wider project of social justice. In my case, and coming coming at employability kind of purely from a these are the employability skills, you know, kind of teamwork, communication skills. I think they're all really important. And of course, I'm building them into my into my teaching and make sure that students have the opportunities to develop those skills. But I think kind of just focusing on that becomes very instrumental. And then it becomes kind of, you know, workplace factories. And there's there's a massive debate around that in the literature right to what is the larger purpose of universities. And I think the economic reality of of many students and their parents, a lot of our students are working to sometimes even three part time jobs to make ends meet. You know, we have a massive student housing crisis which partly informs my project and the maintenance loans that students are getting, in many cases, doesn't even cover their rent for the month. So I'm absolutely aware of the economic constraints and on the need to go and find a job. And I'm not at all saying that's not our responsibility. But I think at the moment, it seems this employability focus seems to eclipse other more emancipatory and more transformative ways of teaching. And I think that's what I'm I'm questioning if it becomes too, too dominant. Thank you. That's a pushback further. I'm I think those questions are really important. Thank you. And you'll see some of the forum folks like he'll have a gift for deep questions that really that really go very, very far. And Anka, you definitely have a gift in answering them very, very well. Thank you, friends. We have about 15 minutes left. So I want to make sure that you have your chances to ask questions. We have a few more in the queue and I've got one more for myself, but I want to make sure that everyone remembers to to raise their hand as they have as they have a thought. This is one from our friend Giselle. And she asked a question about your own background, your own past, which is your LinkedIn profile mentioned your research on crowd sourcing platforms. Can you share more about that? Yes, yes. I just give you a really quick biography, because I think it's important to understand where I'm coming from. So I actually grew up in former East Germany, so being exposed to kind of ideas around socialism, which wasn't working, then went to Canada for 10 years, studied anthropology, and during that time actually traveled to Latin America and worked with Indigenous people in Latin America and kind of land movements. And then I got accepted into the PhD in anthropology at Berkeley and arrived in the year 2000, and it was the height of the dot com bubble, and I was all prepared to go back to Argentina and do more research, and I was just so amazed by what was happening around me trying to understand this, so I changed my entire PhD project and ended up doing a corporate research. I was a global citizenship program, so kind of inclusion, you know, at the time it was about bringing telecenters and connecting remote locations. So that got me really interested in the role of technologies in development. And then part of that was an organization called Kiva.org, which some of you might know definitely your students will know because it's very, very popular. It's a crowdfunding platform around kind of microfinance where people can give small amounts of money that gets channeled to Kiva entrepreneurs, and that got me interested in crowd sourcing. So I had a project and also moving to the UK then DFID which was the development organization at the time, they had just launched a massive crowd sourcing platform with IDEO, the big design company again back in Silicon Valley, so it's all interconnected. And I studied that because I was quite interested in technology in the role of design in terms of development because by then I had pretty much shifted into development. And that was an interesting project kind of doing a lot of online research again doing research with IDEO and then I was able to visit some of the projects that this crowd sourcing platform supported. It was crowd sourcing in terms of the funding all came from DFID and the crowd sourcing in that case wasn't money it was people contributing ideas and developing, presenting different projects which were done with the help of IDEO designers were being developed, were being kind of awarded that design support. And again I was then able to visit a number of these projects underground. I'm always quite interested in the interface between technology and what's actually happening on the crowd. So that was my crowd sourcing crowd sourcing project. I've done research in lots of different areas as you can tell but yeah, that's what that was. And all over the world I knew about Berkeley in Latin America I didn't know about Canada. In New Zealand, five years in New Zealand two people were all over Thank you, Giselle for the really good question. Giselle runs excellent website foundation and has really good thoughts about webinars. We have another question that is coming in from Charles Findlay at Northeastern University and he asked the question again this is about how to do this creative work within an institution. We still have admissions deans lists and scholarships etc based on grade rankings. Is non-grading grades a part of reimagining the university? Can I just ask what non-grading grades are? Is that kind of a pass-fail? Charles, if you want to answer either in the chat or if you want to turn your camera on if you can and just I'll beam you up on stage or if you can type in another question to clarify while Charles is doing that I'm going to try and ventriloquize him which is always risky but this is thinking about, oh sorry he says no grades, just evaluations that's one option so instead of giving somebody a 90% or a B+, instead you give them a written evaluation which describes how well they did. I've never thought about that what it would mean to completely get rid of grades so I need to take that question away I can't actually it's not in my book so it's not part of creative universities at the moment but I need to think about that thank you for that question It's quite an option Steven Ehrman mentions narrative transcripts as at Evergreen State College and I think Hampshire College has this as well which is also a 1970s institution oh good question very good question and then I have a question myself which is the prerogative of the moderator which is to say if we take a university maybe Sussex, maybe anything and we unleash your idea on the faculty and the students so that all the pedagogy start transforming and we start following your lessons that you derived from Paulo Freire we have the future imagining that you've drawn from David Staley and others and you have the radical critique the post-colonial approach the what's the right word? Pluriversity approach with all this going on what does that institution look like in about 10 years but it's still be recognizable as university or would it be something completely no and different that's a good question that's a bit of future thinking I think I'm not saying to do away with universities I think I'm talking about opening up universities in quite radical ways and my conclusion is actually it's very short and it's a series of capstone projects where I really take my ideas onto a larger scale I think it would be a much more kind of equitable university so I talk about the thought experiment what if we made education free again how would that actually change accessibility to the university what we introduced some universal basic income scheme for the university to address some of those economic challenges so I think I would hope most of the ideas in the book are purposely quite small scale because I really want people to read this book and say oh I could maybe see myself experimenting with that in my own classroom it's really written as an invitation to experiment and to try these things out but thinking of it on a larger scale as you're asking me to do I think it would reaffirm that the public function of universities to educate kind of citizens ethical citizens adhering to certain basic values but I I think they would still be recognizable as universities I mean talking about student housing co-ops I've learned quite a bit about cooperative universities like Mondragon university there might be different models or there are people talking about the ecological university a university that is much more embedded within the community and has these much stronger connections to community organizations and even industry kind of in the area so I think it's it's a there are definitely more radical ways to rethinking universities but I think I would like to hold on to this idea of university because I think there is there is a lot there that we can take forward and we can reimagine yes I don't know if I answered that really well but you have and thank you that's a fun way to think about this I'm just my mind is starting to go off sideways in the idea of an ecological university and I have to put my mind back I can't do that yet it sounds terrific like an example in these capstones I said what if we design campuses around allotments a garden as a space of learning as a space of coming together as a community of producing food, of learning about ecosystems and biodiversity and what if that became the heart of a campus and we build around this so that's kind of one idea that I you know check out there at the very conclusion of my book well if Sussex is if your forest is partly edible then you could really kind of hidden university there secret garden college which would be very nice we have people working on that as we speak we have to keep up with you but before I can't let you go yet because we have still more questions Kiel connects his earlier point with your grading point and wants to know what you think about smaller credentials like certificates or micro credentials yes I know I know that some unis are thinking about it I haven't really I haven't really thought about that but maybe if it allowed you know a group of students that can't do the whole kind of three or four years maybe that's a way of making universities more accessible I think at the moment micro credentials from what I can tell are actually just a way for universities to make more money because they come up with short courses and certificates and that allows them to charge a lot of money to certain groups of professionals which is probably not the gist of the question so if we think of it as a way of breaking larger degrees up into maybe bring it more into kind of this idea of continuous learning or kind of you know adult learning I think there are real possibilities of reimagining that but I haven't kind of put enough thought into it to kind of you know have a coherent answer but I think it's certainly if they were to be again developed as alternatives rather than as additional sources of income for universities then I think there's potential there very good Gil another really good question and Anka thank you again I appreciate your honesty and thinking through this with all of us together we have friends I think that's all for your questions I have one for myself and I wanted to this is actually about something that comes up in your book that we haven't talked about yet and my Spanish is so bad I'm going to wrangle this you're talking about an approach called Buen Vivir did I get that right? Yes Buen Vivir in your description that sounds like on one hand a very practical very political way of organizing a classroom discussion on the other hand it sounds like it's plugged immediately into a decolonizing pedagogy do I have that right can you say a bit more about that? It's more of the second so Buen Vivir I introduce it into my chapter on repairing ecologies where I do start off with a critique of sustainable development education and then talk about alternatives such as deep ecology and ecocentrism and then introduce Buen Vivir as an epistemology and an approach to think about kind of the ecological system of which humans are part alongside other species from a decolonial perspective because it's a concept that was developed by indigenous people from South America in the Andean region and that's kind of where my Bolivian research comes in it has quite complicated politics around it especially because it now has become part of the global development discourse so any of you are Latin Americanists and are familiar it's very complex but I present it as a concrete example to introduce students to do kind of epistemologies from the global south I use kind of Boa Vitura Susa Santos's idea here but also to show them how these ideas can develop in a particular place amongst indigenous people and then can then be appropriated by the global development machinery as it's kind of happening but also and that's where the classroom comes in and I also said we can think of some quite creative exercises so for example when we think of and Boa Vitura was championed by Evo Morales who was president of Bolivia and he had a big people's congress around that which is at the heart of this concept and I said if we think of this event and the document that came out of that and we could read it against documents produced by the UN around development and then we are students to role play and to think of designing a space in which these could be debated alongside each other or read against each other and think of the performance that goes along with that so again it's quite specific to my field of international development so it plays both of these roles but it's very much about this idea of decolonizing some of our thinking around kind of education for environmental education for sustainable development but I also say that we need to introduce our students to the basics of complex systems thinking because that's obviously very important but yeah so that's when we were in a nutshell well thank you that helps it really stood out to me and I wanted to learn more and you just helped me learn more right away unfortunately I have questions about your approach to gaming and everything else but we're out of time we've had a dynamic hour and I'm afraid we have to wrap things up Uncle what's the best way to keep up with you and your work are you an active Twitter user or newsletter? I am on Twitter semi-active so creativeuniversities.com I have a blog which I set up actually as a writing blog while I wrote the book where I talk about kind of new projects and upcoming things there's also a resource section where I kind of provide worksheets and resources for some of the exercises I have interviews with fellow educators so I think the website is probably a good place to engage and Twitter is where I mostly announce talks and things can I ask you how can is this chat being saved somewhere since I haven't had any time to read I can save it right now I can save it right now just with good old control all in copy and paste I can do that right now for you brilliant thank you this has just been a delight for your book, for your thinking for your generosity of time and energy with us I'm really looking forward to seeing what you do next especially on student housing and thank you so much for having me it's been really really enjoyable nice to meet you all I'm so glad, thank you but don't go away yet friends I do want to second Anka's praise of you because you all ask such great questions and if you want to keep talking about this we just mentioned Twitter use the hashtag or tweet at me or ping my block or we have more discussions about this if you'd like to look into our previous sessions on pedagogy, redesigning classes on gaming, on Paolo Freire just go to our archive tinyurl.com and you'll see a whole bunch of videos there looking ahead we have a whole bunch of topics coming up just go to forum.futureofeducation.us to learn more and if you want to share with me any of your work or ideas just send me a note by email and I'd be glad to talk with you and to share it with the community above all thank you all friends for thinking together I really appreciate this conversation I really appreciate all of you and I hope your fall semesters are going well please drop a line if you just want to chat in the meantime keep working and above all take care and be safe we'll see you next time online bye bye