Designing purposeful education to meet 21st century challenges
A study tour to Helsinki, Finland and the Schumacher Institute, Bristol, UK: part 1
Civilisation is the race between education and catastrophe — HG Wells
In a rapidly transforming world, how might we design educational experiences that enable young people to attain human agency, take on responsibility and develop a passion for learning? This question recently drove me on a quest: a learning journey to Finland to research how human-centred design might facilitate learning in the face of 21st century challenges.
Why do I care? Because instability and change is not easy; I know from experience. Growing up, I went to seven public primary schools and four public high schools. Since graduating, I have had eight different employment arrangements in just six years (many more if you include jobs during school and University) — including a lawyer, project manager, freelance consultant and strategic designer. In this time, my emotional relationship with uncertainty has changed from stress to excitement.
The change happened when I left legal practice and became a designer: adopting a designer mindset meant that rather than being victim to change, I started to see change as opportunity to redesign something better.
Change is accelerating. Our society is undergoing transformation, drive by driven by technology, demographic shifts and climate crises.
Right now, Australia burns. Fires across the country have incinerated community halls, schools and homes. I have childhood friends whose parents have lost their family home. Many others have died, millions of animals are gone and habitats lost. Governments are declaring a state of emergency.
In the midst of such great change, I hope young people can learn useful capabilities and develop moral responsibilities to redesign systems for a positive future. I am dedicating my research and practice to this aspiration.
In 2018 I was offered a Teach for Australia Associateship. However, I made the hard decision to instead take an alternative path into education: through human-centred design. For the past year, I have been studying a Master of Design Futures (“MDF”) at RMIT and working as a strategic designer on a service reform project for the Children’s Court of Victoria, deepening my design practice and learning about restorative justice, strengths based practice and systemic disadvantage. I’ve been working with Huddle, a design studio in Melbourne, and RMIT (Graduate College of Business and Law, and Centre for Innovative Justice), while continuing to study in my spare time.
It is in this context that my questions arise and I went on a self-directed study tour to Helsinki, Finland, and the Schumacher Institute, UK. This article is the first two parts.
Strategic design and purposeful education
I chose to travel to Finland because its a global leader in education models and outcomes, has a policy of carbon neutrality by 2035 and a strong history of design. My first stop was at Sitra — a “societal change agent” established by the Parliament in 1967 on the 50th anniversary of Finnish independence. Sitra’s current role is to support the next era of sustainable wellbeing of Finnish society. This means shaping the Nordic model of society — with its high levels of high wellbeing, education and economic development — towards a society that operates within planetary boundaries.
Speaking to Jenna Lähdemäki-Pekkinen, an author of a recent book published by Sitra’s called Sustainability, Human Wellbeing & the Future of Education (Cook, ed., 2018), she says Sitra refers to itself as a “Think, Connect and Do Tank.” True to this title, the book launch was used to convene educators and innovators to engage in dialogue around ideas in the book and take projects forward.
Jenna took me through the the current focus areas of Sitra, which includes Societal Training, Foresight & Strategy, Capacity for Renewal, Carbon Neutral & Circular Economy, and A New Working Life & Sustainable Economy. These areas work together so citizens and institutions have the capacity to renew and transition towards a new era of sustainable wellbeing.
I first learnt about Sitra while studying Strategic Design as part of the MDF and reading about the Helsinki Design Lab (HDL), a former strategic change agency of Sitra. When I asked Riina Pulkkinen, a Director at Sitra, about HDL, I learnt that it had good ideas but no longer exists. Today, Sitra Lab is the strategic innovation agency, which uses various methods and theories to run 6 month long experiments on challenges for societal innovation.
Not only does Sitra build societal capacity to renew, Sitra is renewing itself all the time. Like a living tree that sheds its bark, renewing is part of life, part of a healthy, living and regenerative organisation.
What’s behind the Nordic model and its holistic life-affirming culture?
Well, Lene Anderson and Tomas Bjorkman (2018) wrote a book about it: the Nordic Secret: which tells a story of how a German concept called Bildung that grew in the late 1700s, along with thinkers such as Shaftsbury, Shiller and Rousseau. Key political leaders in 1700s Europe are also poets, scientists and philosophers who produce literature and poetry that expand the epistemology of the day.
Bildung is a fusion of enlightenment and culture: it speaks to the inner growth and development of a person and of the outer worlds of ideas, culture and reason. Bildung means intellectual and spiritual development; freedom and responsibility; consciousness and conscience.
In the 19th century, Bildung travels to the Nordic countries and moves beyond an intellectual notion, to a social change project. Bildung inspires a movement of Bildung folk-schools (schools for free folk/ordinary people), or in other words, a liberal education revolution, aimed at emancipation from poverty. Education reforms have a societal purpose and foster growth of culture, inner freedom and societal trust at a time when nations are just being established, preparing people for societal transformation. What soon follows is Denmark and other Nordic countries having some of the most advanced education systems in the world by the mid 1800s (Finland was relatively delayed due to occupation by Russian till 1917 and civil war after independence, but caught up quickly).
To this day, purpose is core to the Finnish education system. Tirri (2012), writing about school pedagogy in Finland, says that the goals of education are clearly stated in the national curriculum. Yes, content is important, but not more important than self-realisation and living a meaningful life. The purpose of education in this perspective is not only about transmission of domain knowledge but rather “the use of knowledge as a transformative tool of unfolding the learner’s individuality and sociability” (p. 60).
The Finish curriculum was recently renewed (it’s renewed every ten years). And in response to the current driving forces of societal transformation: digitisation and globalisation, its core purpose has been updated to deliver core transversal competencies within the overall aim of developing the learner as a human being and a citizen. One core competency is enabling participation and influence towards building a sustainable future. In this context, one challenge for educators is to design human (learner) centric education while also building citizens who value planetary responsibility (Lähdemäki-Pekkinen, 2019). To support this goal, Sitra has a project updating the Bildung concept for greater relevance to human development that includes sustainable wellbeing.
Our economic and social foundations rest on a healthy global environment; and our enlightened long term interest is based on our collective wellbeing and planetary sustainability. So human-centric does not mean self-interested; but rather means a design that understands human flourishing is dependent on a healthy planet and society (Salonen & Konkka, 2015).
And how is design relevant to purposeful education?
Human-centred design can be used to strategically design pedagogical and experiential elements of education and learning.
The Australian curriculum also includes goals to develop young Australians as learners, confidence and creative individuals and to become active and informed citizens via delivering transversal competencies and learning areas (ACARA, 2018). To translate goals to learning, schools and teachers deliver pedagogical approaches. In this context, human-centred design can help build school and teacher capacity to re-invent pedagogies and learning design. Not for profit consultancies in Australia and innovative schools are bright lights in our system, but there remains a deep well of potential to transform our school pedagogies to effectively deliver purposeful education and ready our young for societal transformation.
Firstly, the related practice of participatory design has roots in the emancipation of people by partnering with users to give non-designers a voice in decisions and solutions in which they have a stake (Sanders & Stappers, 2008). The goals of participatory design and progressive education overlap in that both support emancipation. In the context of education design: learners and teachers are not customers but citizens with rights and existential needs who can play a role in designing future learning.
Secondly, design is a creative and deliberate discipline well placed to imagine, deliberate and facilitate a strategic re-design process.
Design works in complex, adaptive systems; and education is a complex problem area: large number of stakeholders, human will as an integral influence, and many interacting parts, all interacting in their local context and environment to create something more than the sum of its parts. When dealing with complex problems, analysis (or deductive reasoning) is not the most appropriate modus operandi. Design abduction, using empathy, synthesis and creative problem solving, is more suited to shape solutions.
In Frame Innovation, Kees Dorst (2015) contrasts deductive reasoning with abductive reasoning using the following formula:
Deduction: what + how = ???
Design abduction: ??? + ??? = Outcome
Design abduction starts with the outcome in mind and then moves between problem analysis and solution design/testing/experiment to move towards making an appropriate solution, such as pedagogy or school environment.
Mission orientated schools, for example, with clear purpose about why their school exists, are well placed to start with the outcome in mind. Schools that stand against the endless testing, competition and reporting, and dedicate their efforts to the higher purpose of education, is what need.
For school leaders, a responsible design practitioner with a rigorous process can work with educators to ask the question: what is the final outcome we want to achieve in designing education? If the industrial model of education is no longer serving our learners’ needs, how might we transform learning and education models? How do we prepare young people for the current societal transformation, now and in the future?
A design process can help people articulate a clear intention and then move towards co-creating learning models that build capability and enliven responsibility to people and the planet.
I thanks the research participants who took part in research interviews and RMIT School of Design for supporting this self-directed research trip.
The author is a practicing strategic designer, learning designer and facilitator in Melbourne. Email: me@kimshore.com.au
Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority. (2018). International Comparative Study: the Australian Curriculum and the Finnish National Core Curriculum. Retrieved from: https://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/media/3922/ac-fncc-international-comparative-study-final.pdf
Dorst, K. (2015). Frame Innovation: Creating New Thinking by Design. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Lähdemäki-Pekkinen, J. (2019). Case Study: The Finnish National Curriculum 2016 — A Co-created National Education Policy. In Cook, J, W (Eds.), Sustainability, Human Well-being and The Future of Education (pp. 397–422). Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.
Sanders, Elizabeth., and Stappers, Peter. (2008). “Co-creation and the new landscapes of design.” Co-Design, 4(1), 5–18. DOI: 10.1080/15710880701875068.
Salonen, A, O., & Konkka, J. (2015). An Ecosocial Approach to Well-being: A Solution to the Wicked Problems in the Era of Anthropocene. Foro de Education, 13(19), 19–34.
Tirri, K. (2012). The Core of School Pedagogy. In Niemi, H., Toom, A., Kallioniemi, A (Eds.), Miracle of Education. The Principles and Practices of Teaching and Learning in Finnish Schools (pp. 55–65). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.
