 Awesome. Welcome. What would be great is to just take a couple of minutes and go around and tell us a little bit about your journey here and some of the ways that you've been involved in the education space and what excites you about the future of education. Okay. Well, in terms of my journey here today to here, Kiwi Connect, my partner works at Kiwi Connect, so that was sort of the beginning of the introductions. I've spent the week here really listening in to what's different in each group each day. There seems to be a slightly different crowd. So my journey here to Education Day today at Kiwi Connect has kind of been like a buildup of sort of checking out each day and seeing how they vary in the crowds as much as anything has been interesting. In terms of my journey with education and my passion, I've come from having second chance learning and community empowerment and education as things that are intertwined. I come from a family of ex-high school teachers who really got frustrated with seeing systematic failure happening in low socioeconomic communities, especially with Pacific communities. And so I was born into a family that had a very strong social justice bent and on the role of education to create change and equality of opportunities. So my education background is very much in working with at risk and low literacy learners, adults and youth. Maori and Pacific communities. And being very employment and employability focused, there are many other reasons to talk about education, but the employment and employability economic empowerment opportunities is where my passion really lies with education. Thank you. Kia ora, my name's Sylvia. And I was thinking, I guess it's always in these introducing ways, there's so many different hats and lenses that you can bring to a conversation. So I thought I'd just touch on a couple ones. The very first one is I'm a Wellingtonian, and so I thought I'd just sort of touch to Wellington and welcome all of you who have come from overseas and from outside of Wellington. I grew up in Wellington. And I guess though then the other one that I want to introduce myself as on the stage is as a daughter. And it's really nice to be on the stage with my mother. And it's also really nice to be sitting next to Brian and Matthew's mum. So it's really nice to think of family as an introduction here as well because I think when we're talking about education, I think you get your first education from your family. I think the next lens that I want to bring is I'm very actively engaged with the Inspiral Network. And I think that's a core lens that I currently bring to a lot of my work. I think one of the questions we're asking at Inspiral is how does Inspiral do education? What are the core principles that we hold to that? And what is the core sort of impulse behind the education system that we're trying to create through the Inspiral lens? And I guess the fourth sort of primary one that I would bring is through the lens of Chalkal. Chalkal is the startup that I'm working with with the crew out of Inspiral. And Chalkal on a very base level is really looking at the foundational infrastructure on how we can rewire the adult education system. So what we're looking at there is going let's move the education system from an industrialised, batched, productised system into a human-centric and powered system. And I can talk further on what that actually means on a real practical level with Chalkal, but that's my core work at the moment. But I guess fundamentally what I really want to introduce myself as is someone who sees education as the acupuncture point that I can use to make real systemic social change. If there's so many problems out there and I'm drawn to so many of them, food, tech, you know, politics, there's so many things I want to do but there's a limited number of hours I have. And I kind of made the assessment that actually if I'm going to focus all of my energy, where do I want it to focus and I've decided on the education system because it's empowering human beings and enabling them to realise that the discovery of finding their own real potential is actually going to then mean that people can go out and change those systems themselves. So that's where I focus my work at the moment. Hi everybody, I'm Denise and as she mentioned I'm mother of Matthew and Brian. So that's where my journey began. I think that's why I got a spot up here too. I'm coming more from a background as just your traditional public school teacher. I taught for a long time in Illinois. I taught middle school, language arts and history. I grew up in Chicago and everyone in my family, my mother, grandmother, all her brothers and sisters were all Chicago public school teachers. So they were on strike. This was the days of allowing people who had individuals with disability acts, all those fundamental changes that happened to the 60s around public education. So that's the perspective I come from and now that I've moved from Illinois to California I'm seeing a totally different side of public education and all the cool innovative projects that are happening in places like California and it's exciting and inspiring although I still kind of look at issues of inequity and neighbourhood, the way that we fund public education and things like that who really is getting access to some of the really good stuff with the high tuition costs. But there is room for me to be excited even in the public schools. I've been working the last year in a school that's located in Silicon Valley but it's a lower SES school. So they do get the benefits of lots of resources, grants from Facebook, things like that. So it's not resources. It's what are we going to do with the resources in the most effective way. So, thank you. Thank you. My name is Doris and I've landed on this spot through my connection with Sylvia. She gets me into all these exciting spaces. Thank you for inviting me, Josef. I've grown up in Switzerland and had my formal education there until I was 22, coming to New Zealand. My qualification is science but my profession has been in education. I've been involved with Waldorf Education, having founded a school 25 years ago and watched its development. Focused on young children from kindergarten to 13. Focusing on the actual unfolding of the child in a balanced way, in an unhurried balanced way, drawing out not so much popping in and watching for the balance of academic, artistic and practical. Truly experiential learning. I'm now witnessing all our pioneer children in their 20s and I've witnessed my three daughters going through their schooling in their 20s. My key interest and passion now is watching the questions of young people leaving school. I hear questions, what do I need to learn to get prepared for this fast changing world? I watch and observe them with a sense of receiving a sense of pressure. Young people are asked who you want to be, what are you going to do, what are you going to study? They're experiencing this pressure while they're feeling a sense of disconnect and actually are dealing with the question, who am I? Where do I belong to? How can I serve in this world? What is my contribution? The core human question. I'm interested of how do we deal with these softer values of education? The hard, the technical knowledge aspect of information is so well taken care of. Technology made it accessible online, it's marvellous. We can now focus on the complementary aspect of education. Responding to those key questions. And I'm excited with my involvement, with Orientation Aotearoa which I feel responds to those questions. Providing a space for young people, with eventually one year to explore that very core human question. Who am I and what do I need to learn to contribute meaningfully? My first question to all of you is, we brought up human centric learning. And this is constantly playing around with community oriented learning and education. I'm curious to hear, what does that really mean? How should we start to understand such a way of approaching education? I guess the way that I understand it is going, every single individual is unique. We say that right. But what I'm interested in then, why do we then create infrastructure, educational infrastructure that doesn't allow people to actually uniquely find the path that they want to follow? So on a real practical level you can think about this in primary school and you group kids by their age and if you're nine, you're nine and you go there. But where are all the different talents and unique elements of a child? I think though, what might be really important as a frame setting for this panel is to recognise that primary education and adult education are quite different. So creating a primary education that's human centric will be looking at who is this individuality in front of me as a growing child that's finding their own personality. Whereas in an adult you're actually perhaps more trying to empower them and figure out how they want to find their task in the world. So I guess then for my personal lens, where I'm looking at it with chalk or what we're asking the question is going, okay, yes there's all of this information out there. Yes there's all these people but how actually do you discover and learn the real practical skills that I need right now? And why is it that so often the educational institutions are batch teaching, media marketing managing something which is really important but at the same time when things are changing so fast what you learn at the beginning of your degree may no longer be relevant when you come out after three years. So what we're trying to do with Chalkal is find the people in your community that actually have the skills that you need right now and how do we connect them on a human to human level. Part of the difficulty I think is Katelyn brought up, it would be nice if somebody had a product at the end of the year. I do see a lot of classrooms moving to a portfolio type basis for grading or assessing but it's really hard to measure a large number of students and their soft skills so we just do testing and more testing. We're greatly challenged at the moment with our initiative. Every funding application asks you for outcomes and we feel we're creating a platform that's beyond measurable outcomes and to me it's like I love what you said the difference of the child and the adult. In the adult you really want to go... you want to nurture the curiosity for learning just like the child but you actually want to instill the capacities. It's no longer just knowledge, it's the capacities of problem solving and creativity that makes you able to respond to this incredible fast changing world. The knowledge is yes, the skill that you will need then but the resilience, the creativity and the imagination do forever imagine something new because the present is not necessarily at times working. This doesn't answer your question so much as where it has gone to. So I'm doing another hat. I'm doing a PhD right now and looking at evaluating what different programmes work to support youth transitions from education to employment and how to develop employability and soft skills has been coming up every single day this week and I was just talking at Morning Tea about soft skills and that word, that term triggers so many different interpretations. I think one thing that we really need to do in education and not just in education, in our society is get a clearer set of terms so that we're not talking past each other about what it is that we're trying to achieve for outcomes because on the day focused on entrepreneurs there was lots of demand for soft skills and how important it is to have soft skills and in employer circles you talk about soft skills and employer surveys say that's one of the top things they value above qualifications a lot of the time. Then you go into the education sector and people have again multiple different definitions of what that does and doesn't mean and whether it's a cabbage subject and it's only for people who aren't academics. So we need a clearer definition so that we can all agree what it is that we want to achieve is outcomes from education and especially around that area of soft skills. Personally, and it's something I'm arguing in my thesis soft skills are very hard to measure, not impossible. Our formal education systems are focused on standardised ways of measuring things. They need to standardise things because it's public money and the expectation is that you can say you produced it, you know, that can do this, X, Y and Z in a standardised assessment way. But if you think about a CV as representing the different things that are not just employer's value but other people in the community like a CV for a volunteer role. Qualifications is one section on the CV and qualifications is a standardised way of signalling to employers and different people because they've got often technical or hard skills. And it might imply some other things too. But soft skills, if you think about referees and how much weight people place on referees or seeing what else you've done where you might have demonstrated your soft skills, I think it is possible for us to talk about ways that we can develop validation signalling so that we're actually creating validation systems as you kind of do on something like LinkedIn when you endorse people. Maybe we could talk more about that between both education groups and employer groups as well. Sorry, that's not your question, it's where they were going. It's actually this very relevant and when we think about many of the soft skills like about last year there was a research that was done across technology employers around New Zealand and what are some of the most important things that they're all looking for? And they say this is soft skills, leadership, communication, ability to work with one another as the most important even beyond academic qualifications. So I'm actually curious to hear if anyone in this group has had any experience with ways of measuring and tracking the development and work of soft skills rather than just transfer of information through classroom activities. There is an intersection I saw recently called the classroom dojo and it's this online platform where teachers have like everyone in the classes names listed and it's sort of a behavioral response sheet so people can be sort of given feedback and easily a teacher can go in and in 15 minutes give some feedback to everyone's behavior from throughout the day or I saw you being very helpful with this or I saw this and sort of just this reinforcement so that the parents can know what was going on behaviorally throughout the day and also reward that or provide feedback. So this is very easy way that tech is kind of trying to bring some more attention to that area so I thought that was relevant to share. So at Dev Academy we focus a lot on soft skills and training it and so there's lots of curriculum and things you can do but the question about how to measure it and how to track it the only solution we've got so far is really high touch and sort of teacher time so that we sort of have like a 1 to 5 teacher ratio so that when people progress through there isn't a formal test or anything but there is a big amount of the teacher's judgment and a recommendation about what do you need to work on where do you need to go so that's based off spending lots of time with the students and having a very non-standardized recommendation or assessment at the end of it would be how we're doing it. Can I jump straight to that because I think that links to a really interesting question about the online offline education and you know with all the different online education things at the moment like Coursera and Udacity and all of these different ones what they're making education more accessible, granted but if you look at the drop off rates it's incredible, you know you start with 20,000 people and the people that actually finish it you might end up with 500 so I think that's an interesting stat but I guess I would ask this just as an open question if soft skills are so important can you measure soft skills online and I really like what Josh is saying because I would perhaps use that as an argument to say no you can't and therefore is that the value of face-to-face education and perhaps to then ask the next you know provocative question of do we need face-to-face education you know why should we all be in a room together what is the actual value when actually you can you know teach 5,000 people online and I definitely think you have to be face-to-face but I can see that's what you all say things I think face-to-face responds to core human character we have, we are social beings we're not just curious, we are social and so it's not just who am I it's a curiosity who are you and there's a limit of how I can figure that one out online but I'd love to ask another question around the soft skill before we get into measuring them can we explore a little bit more you know how do we develop soft skills and maybe we're not quite answer that question may I ask that question may I answer it in our fast world my belief is that some of the key soft skills you can't just pop in overnight they take space and time and experience and and to counter with each other and my actions and the response from the world my action but that poor spot, that poor button of reflection sometimes slow can really create the soft skill and I just want to challenge our fast world we are fighting for this a year of space giving young people space take the pressure off and give time to truly explore and I believe that is what develops the soft skill such as compassion a sense of morality and all the other skills that we are after as employers and we have to remember that the majority of that does not come during the school day I remember in a teacher education program class it said you can get the kid and I'm mostly in you know 32 to 1 ratios you can get the kid if you have at least 3 to 5 minutes of eye contact throughout the day with that individual so trying to keep track of like did I look at Johnny yet you know or recognize him for his inherent worth in the room so it does not we can't rely only on the schools to do that the soft skills have to be developed in the home the community and the extracurricular programs I just want to point that out and that's my next question is when we talk about a holistic model of education what is the role of formal education what is the role that parents play and what is the role that communities around us play and providing a more holistic educational experience for our children perhaps I'll just jump in there on a real personal note is it's been really interesting with an inspiring how many people say they're still recovering from their primary school and you know I know and I think Rich will let me share that but Rich from Lumio described how he's he went through you know 15 years of primary and high school education and it's taken him 15 years to recover from that you know in terms of the bullying in terms of the you know the structure and me personally I never had that experience I loved my education and I thrived in it and I think that was part of that feeling of actually what's going on in there why are these people not not yeah thriving in their education system and how can I try and help people have more of the experiences that I had but I guess that's just from a personal response I guess in terms of holistic education or and that sort of overlaps with the student centered learning discussion I find that often you've got community groups who naturally do learn holistically and as communities together and maybe we could tap into that a bit more because especially with this advantage communities in the New Zealand context so we ran some really awesome community learning hubs in Samoan churches around the Hutt Valley and they came in and they talked about themselves being a learning village and they were just natural at holistic learning we didn't have to you know introduce them to this new thing called holistic learning it was just they just it was holistic in what they thought was worth learning so we did some digital literacy introduction to the computer and then we did some cooking together and we integrated numeracy and literacy into that we talked about goal setting and life goals and how to be able to plan goals that are baby steps into plan and review your progress and actively learn how to do that in a holistic way not just get my qualification but also I want to get my driver's license or I want to learn to cook three new recipes through these community group learning sessions but anyway I think holistic learning and community learning often go together very naturally as a combination and maybe we could actually look at some of those informal learning setups that happen naturally in tight-knit communities often it is around a church group or something like that observe what is working and why that way and then see if we can somehow replicate that in our more formal systems rather than go the other way because actually they've got a lot of answers there already I wonder I'm just going to I'm in the middle so I'm going to grab the mic I just want to ask the quick question of I heard both of you say families school structures and communities I'm really interested in what's the role of business and how do we get if we're talking about real-world education why is it that you spend 20 years not interacting with business and then suddenly the next 20 years whether starting a business or working in a business and why isn't there that connection and what are the different with Chalkal right now we're trying to see if we can partner with one of the biggest tech companies in Wellington to create alternative forms of professional development where we connect their staff with young people and their impulses around youth employment and they're saying we're a tech company and there's no young people to be able to hire and they're not seeing tech as an alternative career option so what we're saying is Chalkal is saying well actually you have all the skills you have some of the best IT professionals in your company how do we help you connect them to the young people so that then it becomes you're starting to reduce the barriers that way so when I would be talking about holistic societal education I'd be interested in the role of family community institutions and businesses one other point I want to make about community schools is also the need to be careful not to have the schools segregated then because community in a big city usually the way they're arranged is ethnically so like for example in a Hispanic neighborhood you come out and all the smells all the food carts and colorful murals and they walk to school and it's beautiful expression of community so but we also have to make sure that they also get included in the global connection my view in holistic education is it's all of the above all what you've listed and you've forever looked for the balance so when we say you've got a prodigy child in front of you that's a genius in math you celebrate that but a holistic approach should be to also look oh what else is missing you know you don't want an hyperactive or an antisocial math genius you want an all rounded math genius that's also good at growing your own potatoes you just forever look for the balance and for me that's holistic education it's really balancing all aspect online, formal, experiential hands-on education all have got its place and I guess just sometimes where we feel we've gone out of balance that it's formal online and the face-to-face experiential is a little bit at risk we touched upon this in the conversation so far the topic of inequality how do we overcome inequality in education what are some thoughts that you have around that and also any models that you've seen that we can learn from just real briefly one of the main ways we could reduce inequality is to help minority groups become teachers you walk into schools and it's still all white females you know other than like the secretaries and stuff so if children see more role models of their own kind and also a total restructure of the whole way we finance public education so could you take care of that Joseph any time I spent some time in Benin, West Africa teaching in a small school there and it was interesting because I came in having gone through a Steiner Waldorf school and going I'm going to bring you know holistic education to these children and I'm going to teach them how to knit and I realised within the first two days that actually it was the foundational structure that we needed to try and support the teachers with these were classrooms with 50 kids they had a whip on the table so any time I went near the whip all of the kids cowered and that was when I realised that actually no not knitting but actually how do you empower the teachers that were standing at the front they needed a whip because they had 50 unruly kids because the parents sent them there and they'd never had really proper any interaction in the past so I guess I bring that as a story of going there's so many different layers to education but in inequality I can go in as a white well-educated woman into West Africa and try and teach kids to knit but actually when I leave they don't have knitting needles and wool so it's useless but therefore I can go in and I can have conversations with the teachers and go actually how can I help you as an individual and start with the individual teachers and through that way then be able to create this systemic change and I guess that was just my illustration at the inequality that I was experiencing there I actually have and I'm saying this as currently an academic you know focused on qualifications in the formal systems I have in some ways more confidence and hope in the private sector and in groups like those gathering together at Kiwi Connect to entrepreneurs I have more confidence that there will be groundbreaking relationships that can happen between entrepreneur communities and the business community to do more things like supporting Michelle's OMG type setups to really tap into disadvantaged communities and give them access to education that is holistic focused but I've got my employability hat on is also employment focused and self employment focused is part of it right I have more confidence that that can happen faster with greater impact than relying on the public sector and public education systems to be able to do the same thing as fast because there's more restrictions on the public sector than there is on these communities that have been gathering here to directly go in and have partnerships with schools and communities it's a much faster and more likely thing to happen so as a member of that community yo where you go I love to open it up to questions from the audience or any reflections that you might have thank you all for being here look at all the women on the stage um so one thing I just wanted to add into the space as a reflection in addition to the it ties into the soft skills it ties into the community driven approach is one way to kind of break down a format of experiential education is by things that students care about so the work that I've done is a lot around I call it like a social change boot camp for teens but you take issues that affect them and you let them throw that out there on the board of like so it could be environmental issues it could be sexual abuse sexual assault can be bullying all these things that have affected them since they were young and then you can do this in a whole school you can do this in a community group you can do this really anywhere with young people um and then what it does is it inherently creates a safe space for students to be vulnerable because they're aligned based on certain things that they care about that have affected them so it has them be more engaged and then from that space you have their attention their attention span grows so much more and then there's so much of you can use a multidisciplinary or multiple intelligences approach to be able to teach them multiple different things because you have them aligned in a group in a community of people that care about addressing the same things and you also start teaching them problem solving and help shift them from a place of feeling powerless which may not be so applicable when they're in elementary school but as they get older they start to feel like who am I in the world what do I have to offer and you start to help them shift into a place of feeling powerful like I don't have to be 18 to vote to be more compassionate and kind to the kids in my class so it's just kind of an interesting way to section out learning in an experiential way that helps them be rallying because a certain thing is something that is something that's affected them deeply in their heart so it's very like behavioral heart to heart human to human which gives them more space to receive other types of skills. I just had a quick thought about something here as a question earlier about how to recognize soft skills and that's something that I tried to figure out for myself and for a long time I was listening to what other people were telling me I was getting at but I wasn't thinking about what am I really spending my time on and what are my skills deeply and so I eventually started to think about what do I always do when I don't have to do anything else like when I'm bored and I started to list those things out and there were patterns to that and I found out that actually the things that I really enjoy doing deeply and I'm actually better at are the things that I do when I'm bored and it's important for kids to be bored at certain times and I think for their learning it should be structured but also unstructured. They need unstructured time and that's something that a lot of kids don't get these days so I just wanted to add that I'd like to really just support Doris's insights which to me are absolutely crucial I've been involved for quite some time now with US based tertiary students doing experiential education in parts of the planet and some pretty wild places up in the Himalayas and Native American communities and Dappatistic communities and the focus of that particular program apart from an underlying theme of how do we shift perception shift awareness is to follow curiosity and establish learning communities look at all these gifts and how they can be challenged and more and more we have to grade to a certain extent to satisfy host communities back in the States but outcomes I think are totally overstressed grading is totally overstressed how do these kids ask better questions how do they see the connections what is their shift in awareness how do they cope with silence the power of ritual where you can actually open your heart to see and feel more clearly those can be expressed in all sorts of ways we get our kids to do some stunning academic work but we also get them to be incredibly creative and of course you can't grade creativity you've got to give them 10 out of 10 but the all roundedness I think is what really is the key element and I think our ultimate test would be that if they haven't shifted their perception and awareness and to see connections we've failed there's a wonderful phrase that says we grow in the direction of the questions we ask and I would put on top of that how do we create an education system as far as our young kids to ask non-googlable questions because so much is around I am just someone that I'm constantly asking questions and often I will ask a hypothetical question that I'm living into and the very first response is oh hang on I'll just go check that let's just explore it and live into it and through that see if we can collectively discover it so those are just two two directions that I really hear what you're saying I really like that hook sorry to just jump in there but you know throughout this discussion I've been thinking you know around what Doris was saying around if we are going to have holistic education we need the families the formal education the communities all surrounding this child and young person or adult in their journey and I'm thinking whose responsibility is it to look at all of these gaps and how are we going to ensure that that happens for every person that is part of the education system and maybe what you're saying Sylvie as far as encouraging people to ask the right questions might cover some of that I don't know what your thoughts are on that I so strongly echo with all these responses I got two reflections yes the curiosity that's one thing but I strongly echo was it Adam? yeah the boredom yes it's creating again that gap and it's the opposite of over filling if we feel the task of education is lighting the fire really finding your passion your interest it needs a moment for that to come out if you keep over filling if you keep the children forever you know one program after the next structured there is no space for something to grow that's truly your own unique passion and that needs to happen again as an adult you know find yourself give yourself the space of exploring what's next and that's what I feel a 21 year old needs but it's actually all of us deserve that at some stage in our lives I had the privilege of finishing my job two years ago everyone asked me what are you gonna do next I felt like a 21 year old and I took a year just to wonder the world my answer was just give me a moment and that moment I want to give to a 21 year old to that the true fire comes out and then that fire can get trained and formally educated and if you're on fire you are employable a quick comment to make on that when we talk about curiosity one of the best gifts that I've received was the way my parents taught me as I grew up is when I ask a question they respond back with a question and that really actually allowed me to ask and I wonder and explore and when we think about education often times we think about teachers being the sources of information and you're withdrawing information from them I don't know if you've heard of philosopher Paolo Ferre from Brazil he coined the term of a banking system of education which is throughout the year the teacher is the student is withdrawing information from the teacher you're basically depositing it and then the teacher then withdraws that during an exam so it's just transfer information and one of the things that has come up over the last few days is just the exponential rate of change in everything that we're doing we're creating so much information where everything is just becoming obsolete and evolving over time and so moving education from an information based economy to a knowledge based economy knowledge being something that's co-created and it's actively evolving and that's a very much a pedagogical approach to learning where we have discourse and discussions and conversations rather than working towards a very specific outcome we're in the space of creativity using all the resources that are available to us two quotes that I love and one is I can't remember who said it but Google it that we are now we're drowning in information and starving for knowledge and that's true and it ties into what Darius has been talking about and the other thing is that paralyzing question we keep asking school leavers and teenagers what do you want to be when you grow up it's paralyzing to realize I've got to make a decision and commit forever can we please at least change that to what do you want to be next because it will be many things you're even asking a soft scale question like what do you want to be like I just want to respond to the un-Google question does it take away the wonder and do we celebrate the sacred you know everything is Google and is it healthy to sometimes live and wonder and not being able to explain everything and be quite comfortable in that question and just follow the quest of questions and be comfortable in it because I think I want to jump off to that and bring it practical in terms of what for example some of us are trying to do with Inspiral you know if we're taking it and I think many of us are here right now because of the paradigm of society there's many things that we might all personally believe is wrong but how we're trying to shift that into the future none of us know and if we want to wonder about the future and recreate it in the imagination of what it could be we can't Google what the future is going to look like so if we're creating an education system and I guess this was always what frustrated me the most about of my university time was writing papers coming up with crazy ideas and I lecture is saying where's the reference and I tell I don't know because I made it up and I know you can't have that in your research paper because it needs to be a reference of the past but if you're trying to create a new future you know if with Chalkal we're trying to create a new education system with Inspiral we're trying to create new businesses there is no reference to the past of how you create a decentralized organization or whatever it is that you're trying to do so where do we create that wonder which then so tangibly comes out in my work and in many of our works is we're trying to create organizations and businesses that are trying to feed the future one last question yes I just wanted to kind of tie in a few things that we've kind of been discussing throughout our time here over the last five days and this idea of creating wonder is something that I've been thinking a lot about and research group out of Berkeley University is doing a study right now on awe and so I had an opportunity to hear them speak about this on Facebook's campus actually they pulled all these leaders together and this was for the Wisdom 2.0 event last year and they're talking about how awe the response of awe in the body actually decreases inflammation response so in that space where the body is not in an inflamed position you actually are able to learn you're actually able to take in information and so thinking about that in terms of how do we create awe with the natural world and allow people the space to explore and then this connection through food another member of our conversation said that the entry point into caring about the natural world is so often through food and so we have all of these conversations we've been talking about for the whole week and we bring this food and this awe and this wonder and this spaciousness and all of a sudden there's there's nutrients in the body the epigenetics are in alignment to actually taking the information so I think just pulling all of those together and just so happy that this conversation is here on a farm surrounded by food where we get to taste the food in a few minutes for lunch so we're just about to go we're a bit late for lunch but we'd love to thank you all for the time that you've made and really appreciate the conversations on holistic and community oriented education thank you very much