Transcript
Speaker: Hello and welcome to episode 91 of our podcast at Human Restoration Project.
Speaker: My name is Chris McNutt and I'm a high school digital media instructor from Ohio.
Speaker: Before we get started, I wanted to let you know that this is brought to you by our supporters, three of whom are Brandon Peters, Aaron Dowd, and Tegan Morton.
Speaker: Thank you for your ongoing support.
Speaker: You can learn more about the Human Restoration Project on our website, humanrestorationproject.org, or find us on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook.
Speaker: Today, we're speaking with Emi Takemura.
Speaker: Emi is the co-founder and representative director of Future EDU Tokyo, which seeks to reimagine education in Japan based on project-based learning and experiential education inspired by Hitek High.
Speaker: She is also the representative director of Learn by Creation, which provides professional development, conferencing, and networking for inspiring hands-on learning in Japan.
Speaker: Emmy is a veteran entrepreneur who co-founded Piatix, a mobile event platform, and engages in many events on social entrepreneurship and startup funding.
Speaker: She's worked at a senior level in various financial firms and has been an advocate for female leadership, ethical investing, and reimagining education.
Speaker: Our conversation dives into what it means to develop a hands-on learning curriculum, how Japan and the U.S. relate and differ, and how all of this should or shouldn't relate to the job market.
Speaker: Hi, my name is Emi Takemura.
Speaker: I am representative director of FutureEDU and Learn by Creation.
Speaker: They are kind of similar to nonprofit organizations in the US system, but essentially we're in with both organizations, we're trying to advance the
Speaker: dialogue about the future of education by involving multiple stakeholders from schools to teachers to administrators to governments to parents and people in the community.
Speaker: But prior to starting or embarking on my education journey, I was actually
Speaker: entrepreneur and in the tech space for quite a many years.
Speaker: I started out my own startup event platform in 2010.
Speaker: And prior to that, I used to work for a large corporations like Amazon and Disney and McKinsey working on the internet and technology space.
Speaker: So I'm a little unusual for somebody who's trying to really focus 100% of energy and
Speaker: restoring or advancing our education, but with our kind of Asian technology where you can't really ignore how to look at our future by embracing technology, I feel like I have something to contribute at this juncture in our society.
Speaker: Of course, and your backstory is fascinating.
Speaker: I was reading all these different Q&As about you before we get started.
Speaker: I want to talk about your experience in entrepreneurship, because I know that you specifically focus on social entrepreneurship and how that led you to thinking differently about education.
Speaker: I started out my own company with other co-founders in 2010.
Speaker: And as you might know, in 2011,
Speaker: we had a really major earthquake that hit Japan, which caused even today, you know, 40,000 people to be displaced and living outside of their own hometowns and things like that.
Speaker: So the earthquake sort of really kind of changed
Speaker: everything in a way, like the way a lot of people look at the future of our society, that it's not as stable as we thought it could be like.
Speaker: So at that time, there's a lot of people who wanted to do something to help change our society.
Speaker: Even today also, but there's a lot of great social good projects happening around Japan.
Speaker: So I felt that maybe Japan was coming to the turning point where, you know, more people wanted to not just think and imagine, but actually do and create impact.
Speaker: And it certainly happened to a large degree compared to like pre-earthquake.
Speaker: But I used to run a social entrepreneurship program.
Speaker: for young people who wanted to actually make these ideas into more scalable concepts and adventures.
Speaker: And it was a really great program and partnership with a U.S. organization called, at that time, Unreasonable Labs.
Speaker: And we had this five-day intensive bootcamp courses where,
Speaker: Anybody with a great idea with a prototype or with some working prototypes could come in and work with the mentors and with our program staff to really polish and hone their product and service concepts and make them into a scalable idea and be able to pitch to investors and so forth.
Speaker: And I felt that, you know, I wish I was part of that program before I was starting my own company.
Speaker: It was really a good program, but I had such a hard time attracting talent.
Speaker: we ran two cohorts.
Speaker: And the first cohort, we did okay attracting talent with a word of mouth.
Speaker: So we actually got, ended up getting like cream of the crops of social entrepreneurs in Japan, and many of them doing wonderfully, receiving rewards and investments and so forth.
Speaker: But when it came to the second cohort,
Speaker: We actually ramped up our marketing effort and I went around seven cities around Japan to recruit and talk about the benefit of social entrepreneurship.
Speaker: And quite a few people came and listened to our conversation, but very few people applied.
Speaker: And that was kind of like my wake up call in terms of, okay, there are people who are, you know,
Speaker: acting on their issues in hand, but so many people are just sitting on the ideas and not being able to realize what they think should be changed into their own realities.
Speaker: And that's when it hit to me really hard that our education system is really creating a smart people, but not be able to act on their beliefs.
Speaker: It seems very likely that although our students are being very well trained in, I guess, like liberal arts, they understand the basis of English, math, etc., they don't necessarily have the proper tools to navigate what is often referred to as the real world or the connection to the community or learning through hands-on understanding.
Speaker: Yes, because I think it's really the iterative cycle of doing something with your idea, right?
Speaker: Either creating something or talking to someone and persuade and do something together or, you know, showcasing your work to the public.
Speaker: Whatever it is, I think our education sort of neglected the last mile of delivering whatever students have created to the real audience.
Speaker: So we kind of grew up without knowing the joy and also kind of scary part of doing that, right?
Speaker: Like you're sort of, when you're showing, casing your work to public, it's a little scary, but it's rewarding at the same time.
Speaker: But if you never experienced that, it's incredibly hard to kind of
Speaker: jump over the hurdle and actually do things for many Japanese people, especially the society itself is relatively compliant compared to probably that of the US.
Speaker: So our sort of system reinforces this concept of
Speaker: you know, people just be more compliant rather than acting on something on their own beliefs.
Speaker: That's so interesting, because like a common critique of the American education system is that it makes everyone hyper compliant.
Speaker: So it's interesting that you say that.
Speaker: And I think too, there's something to be said about when you make learning more meaningful, and you make it more
Speaker: engaging with the community, you're also going to pull in the students who hypothetically never really wanted to learn those, I guess, traditional academics to begin with, people that just weren't engaged with school.
Speaker: When you bring in meaningful problems and then have students create meaningful solutions, that's going to engage way more people because it actually makes sense.
Speaker: I mean, the most common question people ask is, why do I have to learn this?
Speaker: Why does it matter?
Speaker: Who cares?
Speaker: Some will do it anyway, but some will just decide, hey, this doesn't matter to me, so I'm just
Speaker: not going to participate.
Speaker: You know, you're doing this work with Learn by Creation, with Future EDU.
Speaker: What are the goals that you have to build schools that are more unique and more hands-on that fit the needs of the moment?
Speaker: So in Japan, this may be quite unique to Japanese society, but as a background information, we do have increasing number of students who are
Speaker: not emotionally capable to go to school.
Speaker: Like we have about 180, almost close to 180,000 kids in primary school and middle school for many reasons.
Speaker: And part of it is bullying, part of it is psychological, part of it is family issues.
Speaker: But for many reasons, they're pushed to the point where they don't feel capable
Speaker: or they don't feel confident to attend school.
Speaker: So that's one evidence where our education has sort of like marginalized certain types of kids not to be able to exercise their right to be educated, right?
Speaker: So that's one big problem.
Speaker: But another side of the problem is we also don't support kids who have their own interests.
Speaker: because our education program is very much standards-based.
Speaker: It's probably much more strict than Common Core in the US that every unit or every subject in every unit has sort of very rigid sequence that you're supposed to be kind of following.
Speaker: And technically the teachers can actually opt out and be more free
Speaker: And, you know, if you they want to introduce hands on learning and make it more meaningful for students, they can do so.
Speaker: But because they've never done it, or that the school culture never really allowed that to happen.
Speaker: And they're afraid that maybe parents and other teachers might criticize of them doing something different from what they had done in the past.
Speaker: It's very difficult to come out of the mold for an individual teacher to introduce hands-on learning.
Speaker: So although there is a need from multiple sides of the students that they want to have more engaging and meaningful learning experiences at the school, and some teachers want to make it happen, our sort of system or the culture of the school makes it very difficult to kind of
Speaker: bridge over to the next phase of the learning pedagogy.
Speaker: So that's where I feel that people like us who are, you know, neutral, nonprofit oriented organizations to come into play and really kind of, you know, let multiple stakeholders to discuss what we want to really see happen.
Speaker: including hands-on and project-based learning or more safe environment for kids to feel that the school, they belong to the schools.
Speaker: And all these important ideas, I think a lot of people have them individually, but they were afraid to kind of surface these ideas.
Speaker: So we're trying to kind of create more common
Speaker: platform or an avenue for people to gather and exchange these ideas and think about how to move forward collectively.
Speaker: What you're describing sounds exactly like the same exact problems that we have here.
Speaker: Like the common core is very malleable and pretty open-ended, but states have their own individual standards, which tend to be a little bit more exact.
Speaker: However, the vast majority of teachers are in situations where they could
Speaker: deviate from the norm and do something different.
Speaker: It's just not either the culture of the building or something like something is making them feel like they can't accomplish the tasks that are at hand.
Speaker: And usually the number one thing that comes up is standardized testing.
Speaker: Now, the perception I have of Japan, this could be entirely wrong, is that standardized testing is a pretty big deal, more so than in the United States.
Speaker: What is the current situation?
Speaker: Yeah, so Japanese schools are actually seat time based grading system.
Speaker: So they do have tests, but also like attendance and other factors matter for grading.
Speaker: So high stakes test is not so much for the school grades itself.
Speaker: Of course, the effects, but that's not 100%.
Speaker: But where it plays a big role is the school admission to higher institutions, like from junior high to high school and high school to college.
Speaker: And because in our generation, you know, I'm a parent and, you know, in our sort of current parent of
Speaker: K-12 school kids generation, because we are sort of like ingrained to think that the better high school, the better college, better junior high, better high school.
Speaker: And we have this sort of like normalized curve of scores, like scoring each year.
Speaker: school, even when it's public school for a high school.
Speaker: So if you're living in a small town, and there's only two high school, everybody knows which high school is a better school.
Speaker: So parents who are interested in education of their children, they go
Speaker: they go out of their ways to make sure kids are focused on these memory skills, cognitive ability, and not so much on other stuff.
Speaker: And that's where I see a lot of big problems throughout Japan, because the parents mean well, but the result doesn't really necessarily show the success of the students, because
Speaker: that focuses overly on cognitive ability at the expense of developing a child as a whole person.
Speaker: It reminds me of, I went on a tour of Chicago schools a couple of years ago, and I toured all of these quote unquote elite schools, and they were aimed to be progressives like Montessori's hands-on learning environments.
Speaker: And K through five was hyper-progressive, but I mean, traditionally it always has been pretty progressive play-based learning.
Speaker: But what was interesting is in Chicago, it sounds kind of the same.
Speaker: High schools typically had admissions policies and you needed to take a pretty
Speaker: intense test to get into the most elite high schools.
Speaker: So as soon as students got into seventh and eighth grade, right before they were shifting to high school, it was no longer a progressive school.
Speaker: They might've said that they were Montessori, but they were just doing worksheets and prepping for that test the entire time.
Speaker: Because again, there's that faux perception that in order to be elite, this is the way you have to learn.
Speaker: So how do we then utilize these conversations, protocols, ideas to shift the framing of learning
Speaker: away from traditional test-based rote learning into something that's hands-on and experiential and community-centric?
Speaker: It's a very difficult question, but I think in Japan, the biggest issue is really the college admission.
Speaker: And the positive sign is that there's still a long way to go, but there is a growing number of students who are
Speaker: take a non-traditional admission route to get into college.
Speaker: So these kind of non-traditional routes allows them to showcase what they have done in terms of like research projects or more kind of hands-on or experiential learning as part of the application as opposed to just taking the test.
Speaker: So I think we just need to really kind of
Speaker: shift the portfolio of college admission options and hopefully we transition like a bulk of a bigger chunk of the students body into these kind of more portfolio based assessments or alternative assessments.
Speaker: I would imagine too that as we build more portfolio-based assessment, the issue we're running into is that students are getting to college, they're going for two, four, six, eight years, and then they're graduating, but they're not doing much with the degrees that they're earning to begin with because they spent the entire time basically prepping for the next test.
Speaker: So they graduate and then it feels purposeless.
Speaker: That's an acute problem in Japan because, like I said, every school or every faculty at every college has this number against... It's a very arbitrary number and it's not really necessarily accurate, but because it's so easy to digest, a lot of people look at those numbers and say, oh, for this college, this department has score 60 versus...
Speaker: 47.
Speaker: Therefore, if I'm accepted to two departments, one is 47 and one is 60, although I'm more interested in literature, which has 47 score, I would still have to go to this other one with a family pressure because it's supposed to be the better score.
Speaker: So a lot of the people's decisions are
Speaker: not true to what kids or students really want to do because the numbers seem to overtake and dictate a lot of the important decision makings for the families and children.
Speaker: That sounds incredibly similar to the U.S. News and World Report, which is probably one of the most corrupt things when it comes to higher education.
Speaker: I see that all the time, like with students that are applying to college and they go entirely based off of like this school's ranked number one in anesthesiology or something really random.
Speaker: Without understanding that like that whole number is generated by how many people that you deny or some like really bizarre algorithm that has nothing to do with the quality of instruction or the type of instruction.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So it really calls for critical thinking on the part of students and teachers and family to really understand.
Speaker: kind of question those numbers, right?
Speaker: And it also implies, too, that perhaps high school should be shifting toward, if we're building community-centric project-based learning, that students might not need to go to college at all, that they can learn the skills that they need without or very little post-secondary options.
Speaker: Yeah, sure.
Speaker: I mean, I think probably the U.S. colleges are ahead than Japanese colleges, but I think the whole notion of
Speaker: going to college for four consecutive years to complete a degree that they can't deviate from what they had originally thought at the age of 17 or 18, that I think needs to be kind of transitioned to a newer concept because the world is so rapidly moving.
Speaker: And especially when kids' exposure to real world during high school years is so limited,
Speaker: I think it's quite natural for kids to change what they want to do with lives after first year of college or maybe during a gap year and I think we need to kind of
Speaker: give students more options to design their own higher education as opposed to entrenching them into this two-year or four-year package program that they can't get out of at a very high price tag.
Speaker: So let's then kind of shift into imagining what that process looks like using your organizations as kind of the example.
Speaker: And I think first it might be useful to just get the perspective of what's going on in Japan in terms of what students are experiencing day to day.
Speaker: I know that the hours are longer than U.S. schools.
Speaker: It looks a little bit different.
Speaker: Could you briefly describe just like a traditional Japanese school day?
Speaker: Yeah, so Japanese school typically has six to seven period a day and five days a week, plus some public schools have Saturday twice a month, usually in the morning.
Speaker: And after those six or seven periods, which is usually from 8.30 or so to 3.30,
Speaker: And after middle school, starting middle school, a lot of kids get become engaged into what we call club activities.
Speaker: And that is one of the positives and
Speaker: disadvantages of Japanese education is that the school takes a lot more responsibilities than just academics.
Speaker: So I guess the original purpose is really the human whole child development, but kids are allowed to choose, you know, whatever club that they want to belong to, you know, which running or basketball, theater, whatever.
Speaker: And they're supposed to pursue that, oftentimes for three years during middle school and three years during high school.
Speaker: And during that time, they cannot change, even if there's interest shift.
Speaker: And so it takes up...
Speaker: their days become very monotonous very quickly because the curriculum is completely fixed.
Speaker: For the most part, there are some selections, but for the most part it's fixed.
Speaker: And then, and the club is fixed.
Speaker: Once you choose, you can't get out of it.
Speaker: So kids
Speaker: have very little time to think for themselves or why they're learning what they're learning, why they're doing this homework.
Speaker: They have very little time to questions about their lives.
Speaker: And do they run into the same issue?
Speaker: Because that's relatively similar to what happens here.
Speaker: There's not the locking in of clubs, but there is an issue of students over scheduling themselves to get ahead all the time.
Speaker: The students that are quote unquote A students, the ones that want to get in the top rank universities will schedule themselves till nine or 10 p.m.
Speaker: at night every single day because they want to build up their resume.
Speaker: Is that the same there?
Speaker: Yes, it's very similar.
Speaker: So I don't know, maybe that's a positive of high-stake tests, but because the club activities, things like that, don't count for the most traditional type of college testing.
Speaker: But instead, kids go to cram schools, which is a school of
Speaker: purely the whole purpose is to test prep kids for SAT type of things.
Speaker: So although you don't have to do service learning and volunteer and all these things to beef up your resume, the kids are still busy because they're focused on academics.
Speaker: And these club activities can be quite difficult.
Speaker: harmful to some kids because they do take up so much of their time regardless of their interests.
Speaker: So with that being said, let's talk about future EDU.
Speaker: Let's talk about the work that's being done to counteract that narrative and what we can do to do things better.
Speaker: Because there are a lot of really, really, really cool things going on.
Speaker: A brief side note, no matter who I talk to, no matter where they're at in the world,
Speaker: Everyone kind of has the exact same thing going on.
Speaker: There's these systems that are in place that are hyper-traditional.
Speaker: There are a few pockets that are working to change those things, and there's change on the horizon.
Speaker: Some have succeeded, some have failed, but there is movement over time.
Speaker: What is FutureEDU doing?
Speaker: So we started out more as a volunteer organization five years ago to really start up a conversation dialogue among multiple stakeholders that they used to never talk before.
Speaker: So we use, I should say we use, but we started out by screening film called Most Likely to Succeed in Japan,
Speaker: in 2016.
Speaker: And the first time we started, there's only English subtitle, which is a really high hurdle in Japan.
Speaker: But without much promotion, we still got like 60, 70 people to show up from all walks of life.
Speaker: Some are school teachers, some are corporate executives, some are parents.
Speaker: And we had a really inspiring conversation about what's going well at our schools and
Speaker: what can be better and so forth.
Speaker: So I was really inspired to take this kind of conversation more broadly across Japan.
Speaker: So I sort of became ambassador of the film in Japan and
Speaker: I work with Ted Dentersmith and others to bring the Japanese subtitle version to Japan.
Speaker: And to a big credit to Ted, he was so kind to make that happen.
Speaker: And so since then, I've been really promoting or encouraging any
Speaker: any changemakers in Japan who wants to see change in education to use the film as a tool to kind of start up conversation.
Speaker: And fortunately, I don't have exact number, but 46 out of 47 prefectures in Japan has now hosted a screening plus the conversation or workshop dialogue about future education.
Speaker: And increasingly, more and more schools are trying to use that type of media as a way to train teachers.
Speaker: So initially, like at the beginning, it was community based film screening and increasingly it's becoming now more.
Speaker: schools, K-12 schools and colleges.
Speaker: So I was really inspired by that sort of progression, as well as, you know, all these voices I was collecting because we do survey with all the changemakers who host screenings.
Speaker: And that sort of like evolved into the conversation about what else we can do to kind of help everyone
Speaker: make a small first steps.
Speaker: And that's why we started this event series called Learn by Creation and creation meaning like create any new learning.
Speaker: So we try to gather people again from all walks of life to come together.
Speaker: And we do have some seminars and panel discussions, but we also have workshops and we have hackathon and multiple activities.
Speaker: So anybody at a different level of mindset, whether you're still really skeptical and you just want to find out the evidence about hands-on learning, experiential learning,
Speaker: they can come and learn about it from, you know, people who are practicing or if they are, you know, ready, but they don't know how they can join the workshop.
Speaker: Uh, if they really want to hone their craft, they can join a teacher training program.
Speaker: So we kind of created different options for anybody who can participate, um, and have a meaningful conversation and like a fun and safe environment.
Speaker: And, um, it's, it's being quite, um,
Speaker: Remarkable how people are feeling empowered to find other people to work with.
Speaker: Because my whole interest is to create innovators around Japan who can kind of act and be in charge or facilitate conversation around progressing or advancing our education.
Speaker: Because central control model, it doesn't work for education, I don't think.
Speaker: So we need to just empower everybody at a different regions in Japan who live in different circumstances and different culture.
Speaker: They think their own feet and they feel empowered with their colleagues across Japan to work together and do something to improve and take our first steps.
Speaker: Yeah, empowering communities is such a huge step.
Speaker: And most likely The Succeed is a very effective film that's showcasing what hands-on learning could do.
Speaker: We've interviewed Ted Dinnersmith.
Speaker: I've personally been to High Tech High now four times, I think, in the last five years.
Speaker: Yeah, I keep heading out there.
Speaker: And it's really cool to go when classes are in session, you see students working.
Speaker: But I'm always taken aback by kind of a more natural look at what's going on in the film.
Speaker: makes the implication that like all they do every single day is all this crazy stuff and it's always so wild but it feels a lot different on the ground and I actually found that very calming like kids still goof off they still talk to each other they still run around and be weird and there's there's a natural flow to learning that does not look like kids sitting in rows and just listening to someone talk
Speaker: The vast majority of it is very natural human behavior of kids.
Speaker: Some kids are working on some stuff.
Speaker: Some of them are talking to each other.
Speaker: Some of them are watching some random television show.
Speaker: But over time, the teacher is guiding them and helping them to get there.
Speaker: As you're working with these different school leaders, these different innovators, et cetera, what, if any, changes have you seen in the classroom as a result of showcasing this film and speaking with them?
Speaker: Sure, yeah, so some schools have kind of created this like innovation team and for a lower,
Speaker: I see more happening at private school than public school, unfortunately, at this moment.
Speaker: For example, for like a seventh grade curriculum, the teachers work together to create these cross-curricular or interdisciplinary project-based learning.
Speaker: And...
Speaker: they were able to use their existing unit by working collectively to do a somewhat long-term project and able to do an exhibition which received a really good feedback.
Speaker: So now they're even more empowered to do it for the grade eight and things like that.
Speaker: So that's kind of more successful organized examples, but yeah,
Speaker: There are also other schools where teachers, like public school teachers, have found their units to be kind of combined, like, for example, English and social studies and things like that.
Speaker: And just for one class, they experimented with hands-on learning with a theme of convenience store, which is very common in Japan.
Speaker: And a lot of kids are really interested in going there.
Speaker: So they try to
Speaker: have a project around like convenience store and and the world and and i went to see their exhibitions and it was quite quite fascinating or another science teacher uh created a project to create instrument and it was a unit on the sound um but kids kind of
Speaker: came up with their own materials to create their own instrument.
Speaker: And the teacher weaved in the concept of the sound in that instrument.
Speaker: And in the end, they had a concert.
Speaker: And it was great because the teacher himself is a former musician or, you know, amateur musician.
Speaker: So it was his interest as well.
Speaker: So he was really excited to make that project happen.
Speaker: And, you know, it was interesting for students as well.
Speaker: And it
Speaker: I think when those two could be combined, I think it can become really a powerful project.
Speaker: And there's, there's two things that you bring up that, that instantly come to mind on the power of this.
Speaker: One is.
Speaker: When you display this work publicly and invite in the community, not only is it more authentic and meaningful, but it proves to the community why this style of education works.
Speaker: Typically throughout the school year, there's some skeptical voices of like, well, why are they not reading this book or whatever it might be?
Speaker: And then when they see the final part, they're like, wow, this is really cool.
Speaker: And I haven't seen anything like this before.
Speaker: It's incredibly powerful.
Speaker: The second thing is that, speaking of monotony, it's less monotonous for the teacher.
Speaker: I couldn't imagine teaching a class where every single year I do the exact same thing.
Speaker: That would be so boring.
Speaker: Whereas if you do these projects, it's very much driven by what the current learners want to do and what their interests are.
Speaker: So as a result, you can pull in your own interests, their interests, and every year looks a lot different than the previous year.
Speaker: So it's like you're always teaching different classes.
Speaker: And it's exciting and fun, which is what learning should be at the end of the day.
Speaker: I think Japanese teachers are so dedicated and they think about kids and sometimes they forget about their own learning.
Speaker: And I think it's very important that they feel growth and they feel that they're learning from teaching experiences as opposed to, you know,
Speaker: like you said, like teaching the same material year over year.
Speaker: It allows you to center the student voice so that you're learning from the students.
Speaker: I've done like video game projects.
Speaker: I've done like theatrical performances, like all sorts of random stuff that I have some experience and I learned a lot from the project.
Speaker: But honestly, the kids are the ones that taught me a lot of the stuff that was going on.
Speaker: And that feels good to have that intertwining of ideas.
Speaker: The challenge is for teachers to really let go of the fear of not knowing everything, especially in the Japanese cultural context that, you know, elderly is supposed to be respected, but they're supposed to know everything in this kind of traditional Japanese culture.
Speaker: So I think there is a very high expectation that the teacher put on themselves that they have to know all the answers.
Speaker: Therefore,
Speaker: it's a little too scary to kind of step out of that sort of guidelines and do the projects that they are passionate about, but they may not have all the answers.
Speaker: For teachers that are listening into this that maybe feel intimidated to try out more hands-on experiential learning or reaching out to the community, what suggestions would you have for them to initiate or start that process?
Speaker: I think one of the
Speaker: more empowering things that you can start is to have a really kind of candid, meaningful dialogue with people who are not in your profession.
Speaker: So if it's the parents with the teachers or if it's teachers with administrator or teachers in other subject areas, because oftentimes, at least in Japan, at high school, teachers in English departments don't seem to talk a lot with teachers in the science department or, you know, social studies and
Speaker: I've seen times and times again when people's kind of eyes light up and they get so excited about all the great ideas that they have when they start having this candid meaningful conversation, but oftentimes they feel they're not allowed to have these kind of talks.
Speaker: And I think, I mean, film is one way, but it doesn't have to be the film.
Speaker: But I think if you can organize
Speaker: a casual gathering hopefully on a routine basis just to kind of imagine and talk about you know
Speaker: what is it like to have this or that?
Speaker: Or what kind of kids would you like to develop it?
Speaker: How would you like to see kids be succeeded in 10, 20, 30 years from now?
Speaker: If we gather in a really serious manner, I think from the beginning, there is always a tension.
Speaker: But if we can somehow organize a casual conversation in a relatively safe environment for people to really
Speaker: talk their ideas out and find a commonality and find like maybe a low hanging fruit projects that they can maybe start out and try.
Speaker: It could be something very simple, like, you know, having a circle time conversation at the beginning of each day for students to express their interest.
Speaker: And maybe over time, those interests can become a seed for project ideas.
Speaker: Because I'm a big proponent of social emotional learning.
Speaker: And I think unless kids feel safe and free to speak their own interests to teachers and peers, I think
Speaker: Even if there is a choice in voice, it's very difficult for students to express that during the project time.
Speaker: So we can step back and kind of start from there as well, because it doesn't take a lot of time and we can make it into routine practice and evolve from there as well.
Speaker: Thank you again for listening to Human Restoration Projects podcast.
Speaker: I hope this conversation leaves you inspired and ready to push the progressive envelope of education.
Speaker: You can learn more about progressive education, support our cause, and stay tuned to this podcast and other updates on our website at humanrestorationproject.org.
