Xperienceships Thought Leadership Series: Education Rebooted with Dr. Stephen Harris of Learnlife

This week for our Thought Leadership series for educators we spoke with Dr. Stephen Harris, co-founder of Learnlife, an innovative hub of lifelong learning in Barcelona. He was formerly the President of the Sydney Center for Innovation in Learning and Principal of Northern Beaches Christian School.

Andreu and Kyra spoke to Stephen about new paradigms of learning and how education institutions can change to adapt to the needs of young learners to support them early on in their career exploration journeys. 

From our conversation, three key themes emerged:

• If we consider that the point of school should be to foster the development of kids as integrated members of society, then schools cannot be closed institutions separate from the world around them.
• The Covid-19 crisis has made two things clear: education systems across the world are in crisis. On the other hand, for the future of work we need to develop students' emotional intelligence and adaptability, because we are living in a VUCA world.
• Career exploration should be more embedded into school and university activities. Education institutions must make an effort to embed society into schools: the more experiential the better, no matter how difficult it is. The idea of a career for life is dead. We must help students understand the key skillsets for success and navigation of a fast-changing world.

Read the full interview below or watch a 5 min teaser video here:

Xperienceships: Stephen, we wondered what kind of career experiences prepared you for the job that you do today? 

Stephen: Interestingly enough, nothing from my formal learning prepared me for the jobs I ended up doing. So much training focuses on what they think you might need, and what they think you might need is probably grounded in something from 20 or 30 years ago. it's very irrelevant to what you actually have to do. 

I think as a person working in education, for me the key skills are human relationships and emotional intelligence. And again, they're not taught at University at all, so that you've got to acquire those things by yourself and if you don't naturally understand those things, well, then you will struggle.

X: So how is Learnlife adapting and growing?

S: I think the first thing is that there is a big crisis in education globally and we need to understand that. When I see parents of young kids panic about what their child is going to be doing in college in 15 years time it's almost laughable. Now, think about how technology has changed in the last 15 years and try to think ahead into an accelerated context. 

So I think we have to adapt. That's what for me Learnlife is about. What does it look like learning in a constantly adaptive environment? 

When you use old terminology like: school, with timetables and structures, you expect a child to come into that. We flipped that on its head and said, for every person that comes to join us, that might force us to change our grouping. So that grouping has to become an adaptive notion, not a fixed structure. 

And so that when you start thinking about life and learning in that way, when it comes down to how we best prepare kids for the next step, you should not have set structures, because kids are going to be going in many diverse directions. The endpoints are now very, very different, and you can't possibly have a one-size-fits-all approach. So I guess if there's anything that's happened in life for me, it's that realization that we're already living in that world of the future now. The future of the kids who are now 16, 17, 18, 19 is very, very different from even five years ago. 

X: How would you work with your own students to develop skill sets that can change and adapt and grow as time goes on?

S: There's no point in actually taking the kid through any learning journey if they don't understand the world that they're about or they've already entered into that world of collaboration. You could be aligned with the notion that things have to change. But if you can't collaborate, if you haven't got the innate capacity to be emotionally intelligent to relate to people, well, then you're going to struggle. 

The stakes have suddenly got a lot higher because of the pandemic. So you've suddenly a whole generation who won't have access to the normal career pathways the way we have known them.

X: When it comes to career advice and exploration and guidance, how can schools assist with re-schooling and de-schooling [Editor's note: as per the OECD’s 2001 paper What Schools For the Future - re-schooling is building powerful new community links and transitioning into socially networked hubs, de-schooling is breaking down and dismantling outdated systems and concepts]: How can schools start if they haven't already?

S: I think one the biggest things about Learnlife is the fact that we have other companies in the same space. The very fact that there are different people who do not work for Learnlife in the same space - it’s game changing for the kids. Suddenly the space is no longer a school, a separate building that they go to. 

When I was a principal I used to hate when you're in a school talking about being in the real world. That used to really annoy me because if schools aren't in the real world, well, then they're complete failures. 

So for me, one of the aspects of Learnlife that was pretty important was to replicate the so-called real world that the kids come into so that they don't feel I could see it in school. 

What needs to change in traditional schooling is that it's as long as you have this idea of school being separate from the rest of the community, well, then you're going to have this complete chasm between the kids’ finishing point at school and where they have to go, because they've not experienced the real world. And there's no reason why it has to be separate.

I think that's the challenge for schools is to say, whatever your context, can you get the kids to imagine and view themselves as actually being in a real world now. So that means if you're studying entrepreneurship, or commerce in a school, and it's nothing other than just a theoretical exercise, or then of course, you’re not in the real world, because you're not actually experiencing it. So whatever schools come up with has to involve the experience of reality, no matter how hard it is, because that's what the kids are going to have to learn.

X: So, in your opinion, what do you think should be the role of career centers or services, and how they could provide a better service for the student population they serve? 

S: I've watched my own son go through that process at university and not necessarily find help in those career centers. I think it is critical that people live the process. So therefore, a career center needs to be working as much with the lecturers and the teachers to make sure that the learners’ experience is actually grounded in the real world. 

It's not this add on that you do a course and then you go and see a career person to know how do you find a job, or help place you into a job. I think it should be far more integrated than that. 

So that if a professor or a lecturer or teacher, whoever it is that's working with kids or young adults really has to be able to help them to understand the realities of what they're about to head into. That concept of a real experience, (and possibly a real failure) is probably the most useful. When you understand the differences between the generations: Gen Z, or millennials - there are differences in the groups because of the technology or the environment they’ve come through. If the adults in the learning environment don’t understand the key issues or take awareness of the people sitting in front of them, there’s always going to be that gap. So it’s better to be targeting the adults as well as the kids. Any Xperienceship should be located in both demographics. The adults have to be with the kids in the context which they’re going to experience, and talk about it. You don’t keep them locked away from the real world: have an awareness of who the kids are.

X: At what age you think students should start exploring interests, not only personal but interests that could be linked to possible early professional paths.

S: My answer here is that I think we should be teaching kids resilience, initiative and creativity from the age of four, five and six, as an as a highly intentional thing. When you start bringing conversations about possible professions, well, that there's no reason why you shouldn't be doing that in primary school. You're not trying to lock the kids into one idea for life. 

I mean, if I think about different programs that we've run at Northern Beaches and Sydney, now the kids who are aged 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 they had some amazing outputs from different projects that we did that were career based, but I wouldn't want them to think that at the age of 10, they had to then lock themselves into their future career. But what I did want them to do was to then link their learning to an understanding that could be career-based.

X: What does the future of work look like in your opinion? Or if you prefer what the future of work looks like in your industry? 

S: The future of work in education is going to be incredibly disrupted. 

Because what I'm watching around the world because of the pandemic, is a very, very different situation suddenly. Suddenly the whole of education has been turned upside down, and we really don't know where it's going to land. 

So I think if I was a professional now, working in a traditional school in education, I'd be wanting to teach the community about blended learning about options for continuous learning. 

But then I think that becomes a little bit similar to the wider world of work anyway, is that if we really want to seriously try and predict what it's going to be like in 2030, let alone 2040, the reality is that we're going to have to be agile and adaptive. They've been saying for the last 10 years anyway, but I think we've just suddenly seen this year, that that's the reality. If you can't be adaptive, even if you've got a closed mindset, you're going to struggle and so the future of work is about that. 

X: What can educators do to ensure that their students feel more future ready? Or what can education do as a whole to help with that process of agility?

S: The harsh answer, perhaps, is that no one should be an educator, if they're in it for their own self. If you're a teacher, because it provides you with a steady income you are the wrong person for this world. 

As an educator you’ve got to be thinking about what these kids need, because what's needed now is so very different from the past. And we need to have people who are committed to that. Schools need to have people who are committed to trying different things, because we can't get caught out again, like what has happened in 2020.

The sad thing is that probably 75% of the world got caught out by the pandemic, because they had refused to actually adopt technology into their learning. If we had been aware of what we could have been doing even five years ago, it would have been far less painful for a lot of kids.

X: What do you think you would do differently if you were starting your career exploration all over again today?

S: That’s an interesting one! Probably followed my deep passion, which I've still managed to do a little bit. As a person who hated science at school, (probably because it was taught shockingly,) I did a horticulture botany course for three years in the evening in my 40s. And if there was any job that I had now that would be different it would actually be working with plants. 

Now, having said that, I've always enjoyed education and teaching as well. So I guess if I had to give myself advice would be to follow all of your passions, not just one of them, merge them together. I’ve had many conversations about a garden at Learnlife! (laughs) ?