Pasi Sahlberg, Glenn Savage, welcome to FreshEd.

Thank you, Will.

Thank you for having us here.

Congratulations on organizing this conference. This huge amount of work, I think, went into it. And a really exciting week of just amazing different students and scholars and practitioners coming together here in Melbourne to talk about some pretty big issues in education.

So I want to start by really thinking about the purpose of education and trying to rethink the purpose of education, which is what this conference was trying to do to begin with. And you brought in Gert Biesta, a very well-known educational sort of philosopher, thinker around the world. And he talked a lot about purpose and how we had to get away from some of these distractions that keep us from caring about the point of our work as teachers and practitioners.
So maybe Pasi, I’d love to hear you. How are you thinking about the purpose of education, given what you’ve heard at this conference this week?
Yeah, I think first of all, this was a question that we all agreed that is the question that we need to think about at these very challenging and difficult times in the world’s history. The one reason why I think it’s important to have this conversation is not only here but in the workplaces and schools and homes and communities. The gold fact that things in education are going downhill, almost everything, all these indicators that we care about, the engagement and sense of belonging and learning and equity and all those other things.

We simply are in the point of time now where this question has to be asked seriously. What is the education for? Why do we need schooling?
This is what Hert Vista was talking about. If we only talk about learning, then we are not really talking about education. Because learning can happen.
And most of the learning actually happens these days among young people, mostly outside of school. So that’s why I think this whole, not only purpose of learning, but this whole concept of education is almost like a classical sense, that what is education? So I would actually include this question there as well.
What is education? And what is the education for? So that we would not get lost in this conversation, by thinking about, you know, school, for example, only a place where learning happens.

Obviously, learning is an important thing. But like Herc, when he was defining these things, he said, you need the teacher, you need somebody, another person to help you to learn. That’s what is called education.

So I think that this purpose conversation is really essential. I think that although we have been carrying this question of what is the purpose throughout the week in different sessions, but I think we are still now towards the end of the conference. We are still in this thing where we are probably more ready to have another conversation rather than ready to go home and say that we fix it, that now we know what the purpose is.

And, you know, if we are able to have more people going home from this conference, convince that, you know, this is the conversation we need to have about the purpose, about what is education, what is it for. I think that that is the outcome of the conference, rather than having the ultimate answer to the question of what the purpose is.

It’s sort of like part of trying to find what works and we fixed it. It sort of goes to the heart of that sort of thinking was the problem with the education that has gotten us into this really narrow definition of learning, of learning that can be measured in certain ways so we can see some sort of progress and achievement. What you’re talking about, it’s learning as relational, learning as social is kind of a rhetorical thing that there’s never going to be an answer or one answer.
It’s always going to be this evolving sort of social process.

Yeah. It’s like if you go somewhere, this travel, what happens there is more often more important than the destination. This is the same thing that these conversations are probably more important than actually having the answer.

How do you see this?

Yeah, I mean, I agree 100% that one of the strongest threads from the week has been questioning the bigger purposes of education at this point in time. So there’s been a lot of reflecting on where we’ve come from and the kind of social and political context that we inhabit now, but also a strong thread on wanting to reimagine and think differently about the purposes as we go into the future. And I think it’s interesting because if you think about what the role of this conference is about, there’s obviously an implicit focus on improvement and on effectiveness.

But I think what the sessions this week have got me thinking about is if we can’t come to a broader sense of agreement around what the purposes of education are, it’s difficult to know what we’re trying to improve or what we would even determine effectiveness to be without that kind of guiding light in the future. And I think often the discussions can become very reductive at a policy level and at a system level because we either assume that when we say improvement everyone’s talking about the same thing, and often they’re not, or improvement gets talked about just as saying, look, like, let’s just get better at what we’re doing now rather than actually imagining different possibilities and different purposes. And you know, with that, with the reimagining kind of process, I think the next sort of logical step is, well, how are we going to understand what that would look like if we were to reach that new destination and then the big question around measurement.
So I think there’s been, I mean, we could talk about measurement for a few hours, right? But like the way in which the ideas and purposes and the bigger meanings underpinning education then get related to things like metrics and measurements and what we’re going to shoot for and what governments are going to value and so on. So that to me has come through really strongly and also just a general feeling.

And I think it’s shared amongst a majority of people I’ve heard speak that we need to move beyond narrow metrics and purposes and narrow, often very economic framings of the utility of education.

Can I add one thing here? Because I want to do this because I’m a minority in this group that we have here. This whole group, you are my majority in the sense that you both native English speakers.

So you think and write and speak using your own language. But I’m not English, it’s my third language. And there were some other people, including her and Sharon Davies on Wednesday, who were communicating these ideas, being part of this dialogue and conversation using other languages that they own.
And that is something that has also been part of the conversation in many sessions, is that we need to spend more time in understanding and giving opportunities for people who don’t speak or think or write in English to express themselves so that we really know what we are talking about. I just came from the session where a German speaker was very kind of a strong about saying that she doesn’t understand this conversation, because the words, these concepts and ideas don’t have meaning now. And I think that this is particularly important for the, you know, this purpose and the purpose conversation.

And when we try to make sense of the future, if we are not clear about what words mean, or if we are not careful to make sure that these minorities like myself in this conversation will have opportunities to express and kind of give them time to make sure that they communicate these things in a way that makes sense to others.

I’m hearing you both sort of saying is that there’s sort of this, we need to return to the philosophy of education, right? And how knowledge systems are different in different language groups around the world. And, you know, there’s just different ways to understand education, the value, the purpose.
And we need to sort of embrace philosophy in many ways. And yet, at the very moment, we might be saying this as a sort of professional group. We see countless, you know, initial teacher education courses trying to get rid of philosophy of education, right?

We’re seeing sort of, there is this movement to narrow down the curriculum to very clear standards that can be measurable, that can be effective and improved in a very economic way, as Glenn was saying. And so to me, there seems to be this little tension, right? Like we might all come away saying we need more philosophy, but we work and live in these systems that are saying the exact opposite.

But, you know, it’s interesting when we introduced Gert, give his keynote on Tuesday, that in the introduction we used the term that you’re a philosopher. He took the floor and said that I am actually not a philosopher, that I’m a physics teacher. I think we need to be careful.

I agree with you, Will, that the philosophy will have a kind of a place in the conversations now. But again, people may understand differently what the philosophers do. Some people think philosophers as people who have no touch or connection whatsoever to practice.

But, for example, Gert, why I like him so much in this conference, is a very practical person. He had a very practical way of explaining very complex things, like the purpose of education or the role of students there. So I agree with you, we need to be careful what we ask for.

And I guess so, I mean, you know, purpose is, to me it is deeply philosophical, but it underpins all practice. And there’s always going to be an assumed purpose, even if we understand that or not.

Exactly, and I think that even the way of speaking, as we have about purpose, I mean, is it purpose in the singular? Is it purposes in the plural? And, you know, one of the things that’s come out strongly for me this week is a really complex tension between what I would probably just call sameness and difference, you know.

So whether you’re talking about the role of the system or you’re talking about contestation over meaning and purpose, on the one hand, you know, I hear a really strong message out there that we need greater coherency and agreement around some of the bigger meanings and purposes. But at the same time, another really strong thread is that you can’t impose meanings in the singular from above onto people in vastly different contexts. And that, for me, is really exciting because I even caught myself earlier saying, oh, we need more coherency.

And then straight away, the other bit of my brain is going, but these are contested ideas, right? So that contestation over meaning and over purpose. And how do we then, for me, and Pasi as well, being very systems-orientated people, the question I have is how do you design educational systems where you can have some levels of coherency and shared meaning, but at the same time, allow people within vastly different school contexts to interpret, make their own meanings and enact them in ways that are powerful for them.

So why don’t we move down to that sort of system level, moving away from philosophy and getting, you know, because that’s where the sort of rubber hits the road, right? That’s a lot of hard, difficult work. And I would imagine there’s many people that listen to FreshEd.
There’s many people that were at this conference that are trying to figure out some of those practical issues, right? And Linda Darling-Hammond was another big keynote you brought in. She sort of came up with these three new Rs.

It’s not writing, reading, and arithmetic. It’s now she’s talking about relationships, responsiveness, and restorative practice. So, Glenn, I mean, talk me through some of this contestation you see when you’re trying to create a system that is both cohesive, but also sort of flexible to allow so many different purposes.
Yeah, and I mean, I think Linda’s keynote came at an interesting time in the journey of the conference. You know, we’d heard different messages around what the role of the system might be, or could be, or how we could think about it differently. And I think she sparked a lot of debate around learning and the focus on learning as a primary goal of schooling.

And I’ve heard a lot of people since her keynote debate the keynote, you know, whether they’re affirming this idea that learning is the central item that we should be concerned with, or whether we need to be worried about other things as part of the school system. Look, for me, I don’t think it’s an either or. I don’t think you can have three principles.

They’re useful as a heuristic device to get people thinking about what’s going on. But for me, this conference, more than any other I’ve been to in recent memory, for me, has emphasised the complexity of schooling and the complexity, if you think in ecosystem terms, of all the ideas and the different practices and the policies and the actors that make up any given schooling system. And I don’t want to sound too sort of reductive, but I don’t think it’s actually possible to lay out a set of, this is not to oppose Linda’s view because I think hugely useful provocations, but I’m not sure it’s possible to lay out a set of three or four or five things that you would say this is the answer.

Because I think you could have certain principles or certain provocations, but each individual system has got, in some cases, quite different needs. So if we, as a whole, decided well-being is important for our young people, or equity is important for our young people, I think to some extent the centre or the government or the state in any given system can lay out some steering work around what that might look like and how it might be measured or how it might be understood. But ultimately, at the end of the day, you can’t have the minister or the director general down in every classroom, making everybody do their version of equity or well-being.

So for me, the bigger question is, how do you empower at the grassroots level or at the organic, more bottom-up level, leaders and teachers and so on, to be able to engage in intelligent ways and to become designers of their own futures in relation to these big-ticket items? I don’t know if that makes sense, but it’s sort of flipping the way we see it around a bit.

Exactly. I mean, really, really working with the people in the schools, right, and saying, how do you from the ground up sort of create some of this? And also what I’m hearing you sort of saying, Glenn, is that it’s also not, you know, we need to sort of try not to create the overarching framework that can be used sort of in any context around the world, in any time, and say, we’ve solved this tension between multiple purposes and cohesion, right?
That’s probably, you know, the wrong way to even frame the issue.

Pasi will have heard me say this many times before, but I think we’re completely fascinated and distracted with asking this question, what works, you know, and then trying to put in place policies and practices and processes based around a particular vision of what evidence is. But I don’t think it’s the right question. I think we should always be asking what might work here.

And that brings a need for experimentation into the mix, and it brings a here into the mix, which is context. So it’s not to say let’s give up talking about evidence, because obviously that’s not what we want. We want to be thinking about impact and the different implications of different practices we have.
But I think it always needs to be seen through a contextual lens. And if systems can set themselves up in ways that allow people to do that contextually based experimental work, we will avoid the kind of prison of what I’ve called alignment thinking, where you just got to line everybody up and get them all doing the same thing, and then suddenly the path to glory will arrive.

How do you see it, Pasi?

Yeah, it’s interesting what you’re saying. I’m kind of thinking about, Glenn, your approach to Linda’s wonderful keynote on Wednesday. But we have had three system leaders here.

We have Martin Westbrook on South Australia on Tuesday morning. And today, we had a wonderful panel with Jenny Atta from Victoria as secretary for the Education Department here. And I think one thing we need to keep in mind, that all these system leaders, Martin and Linda, Linda is the head of the California School Board, leading the massive public system over there.

And Jenny, you know, they look at the, they don’t look at the individual schools or even individual students. They are leading the systems. Their language is also about the system.

So that’s why I think, you know, I would defend a little bit, as somebody who has been working in the system leaders for many years, is that the language that they use when they talk about learning is obviously, it is a language that is coming from this point of view that who the audience is. And that’s why, you know, if the education system leaders begin to just talk about education or general things, they will be challenged immediately by, like, so what are you trying to do? Just provide education.

Learning is more about focusing on the what is the kind of outcome or reason for being in the school. But yeah, I mean, it’s an interesting world to try to understand the mindset of those people who are leading very complex systems, like all of this, like, for example, Martin, who is leading the South Australian movement there right now. It’s not an easy space to be having hundreds of thousands of schools that you are thinking in a very different situation.
So you need to be, you know, you can be philosophical and you may have theories about, you know, what should happen. But in the end of the day, all these three people who are speaking here, they work in different jurisdictions and systems. They primarily, they are thinking about the system as they have to kind of also survive in this world of different ideas and different concepts and terms and words.

And they talk about their world as they do. And I think it’s our job actually in the audience to try to kind of understand where they come from and what they’re trying to say. It is an interesting space and I think we have been very fortunate this week to have all these three leaders talking about quite different systems actually, but within the same framework about this redefining education and try to position what they are doing right now to the kind of future.
One thing I’ve really loved, Pasi, is the openness and willingness to listen across the borders of different systems as well, because I think particularly, you know, for those who are listening in Australia, you know, we have a federal system where you have these, you know, state and territory borders, and we do it differently than you, and so on, these sorts of conversations. And then we have all our different schooling sectors. So if you’re not careful, you can get into an us versus them kind of logic with systems.

And this conference has been so good in terms of bringing people from very different and sometimes similar systems together to hear what each other is doing. And I think there’s been a real willingness and openness to listen and to learn from each other and to do that kind of cross-pollination work, which I think is really one of the main keys to moving systems as a whole forward, which is actually listening and learning from each other. And systems that on paper you might say, oh, they’re very different.

When you actually hear from the leaders and they talk about what they’re doing and why they’re doing it, they’ve got a much more in common than they probably think, you know, and they’re dealing with very similar challenges. And, you know, their solution, so to speak, might not always be the same. But I think it’s nice to come together and think we do share a lot.

And at the end of the day, everyone here is committed to making education better for young people, which is really what the whole game is about. So it’s been very affirming.

But there was one interesting, going back to Linda’s keynote on Wednesday morning, if you paid attention to what the words she was using when she spoke about the California public school movement there, that she used the term re-inventing school. So it was not re-imagining or reforming schools. And, you know, I stop and think about that because part of my work here in Melbourne has been to try to help this re-inventing idea of the school.
And it’s a different, again, for me, it’s a different idea than re-imaging. Re-imaging is more like just think about kind of a new ideas, but re-invention is that we have something, but we just need to re-invent that again. And she made a reference to this $3 billion investment in this community schools that they’re creating in California.

That means that the school is not just an education, not just a kind of a knowledge and skills, but it’s a well-being and health and engagement and many other things there. That I think is another example of the language that makes a big difference in terms of how people hear those things.
So finally, why don’t we talk just briefly on going down to that classroom level? Because there was the most important thing, and there was plenty of classroom teachers, school teachers, not just sort of the system level work, but the classroom work, the teaching work. What did you hear this week about reimagining or reinventing classroom practice, how to be innovative?

Well, I mean, I’ve been completely overwhelmed with how passionate and inspired and, you know, kind of deep thinking so many of the people here are. And I mean, we’ve got, you know, I gave a master class earlier in the week, and it was, you had principals there, you had teachers there, you have system level people there, all kind of talking around, okay, what does this mean when we take these ideas or more abstract things and try and put them into practice? So there’s sort of a commitment to applied learning, I guess, across the spirit of the conference, which I really, really like, because as academics, but we all know that you can get involved in conference spaces sometimes that just feel like you’re in the ivory tower and doing absolutely nothing to connect with what the subject of your work.
So for me, it’s been really, really powerful and so many conversations with people saying, oh, we’re going to follow up about this, or you need to say this, or I’m going to send you this video. And it was really nice in the session this morning with the Victorian system, Pasi, to have a student there as well, because so often you come to conferences and you’ve just got a bunch of old people talking about young people and to have a young person there trying to express what it means to them, to have agency over their learning and things like that. It was really great.

But there were actually more than one, because there was one high school student there in a panel with his principal of the school. But they brought along a beautiful collage of student voices in the video. So there was probably about ten different, answering questions like what makes the school kick, what engages in the school.

And I think that’s the reason the takeaway from what happened this morning here. But I think that was for me, that was again a powerful reminder of the students, and not just the giving students a voice. And this has been in different sessions here, this student voice conversation.
And I think one takeaway for me is here is that we are shifting away from this just killing student voice, just hearing what they have to say to the student agent, student leaders, doing these things with them. And this was exactly what this is saying, very plain language about what makes learning fun, or interesting, or curious. And I think it’s a very important thing that we listen more carefully, and not just listen, but invite students more often into designing and thinking about how to reinvent or reimagine these goals, rather than just ask them.

Yeah, rather than tokenistic sort of participation, but actually saying, you can be part of the decision making. That’s hugely different.
Yeah, giving them shaping power, not just like Pasi says, not just, oh, what do you think? And then you move on. But I think that’s true of this conference, not just in relation to students, but also teachers and leaders, because I think so often we talk about how the system is shaped or government policies and things.
But there’s a real commitment amongst a lot of people here, more than I’ve seen at any other conference actually, of saying, okay, that’s all well and good. We can have broader policies that set directions and courses forward. But how do you then set the system up in a way where teachers or leaders or students or the people who are the users of the thing that we call educational schooling can actually have some agency over shaping and designing these things in their own environment?

And that to me is like the most exciting bit of all. Because you can set all the policies you want in the world, but if they’re not translated and interpreted and enacted in meaningful ways by the people at the chalk face, then they don’t mean anything. They only become real when they’re put into practice.

And I’m seeing a lot of that.

Yeah.

I have a last question here. Are you leaving this conference and these conversations and dialogues more hopeful than what you were thinking? Do we have more hope?

For me, that’s a tough one. Maybe not more hopeful, but excited. And maybe there’s, you know, that can move into hope.

But it just seems like excited that there’s a conversation that’s happening that is moving us away from, as we said earlier, about the what works sort of ideas.

That’s moving away from the students being sort of tokenistic and actually being empowered to shape practice and systems. Excited in the sense that you can see dialogue from system down to principles, down to teachers, but also across different spaces, right?
That, to me, is exciting. Now, hope, I just feel like we live in a time where it’s very hard to be hopeful. But maybe Glenn, maybe you feel slightly differently than I do.

It depends if we’re talking about the world as a whole, or we’re talking about education. I actually do, Pasi, like I feel really energised and really, yeah, productive rage, as I’d call it, but there are a lot of sessions that we’ve seen this week that have laid out the huge challenges that are ahead, you know, stagnating performance, like worsening well-being indicators, issues with school refusal and attendance. The portrait can be very bleak if you want to look at some of those indicators globally and also here in Australia.

But I feel like there’s a real sense like and a real, I don’t know if a wave is the right way to describe it, but almost this rolling force of broader recognition that we have to do this work together and do things differently and do them better than we have before. And I don’t often feel like, you know, this is more of a personal reflection, but sometimes I feel like other people are having conversations and I feel like I’m up on the balcony not included. Maybe this is something about my childhood, I don’t know.

But I feel like I don’t, that’s not my conversation that they’re having. But I don’t feel like that this time, it’s probably one of the first times in my career, this conference and maybe just the last few years in general, where I feel like I’m actually, people are talking about what I care about and I’m part of the conversation and part of trying to do something different. So I think when the rubber hits the road after is how can we kind of, how can all of us who are here maintain this desire to keep developing and evolving and not get caught back up in the madness of the every day where you can’t take a step back and think in bolder terms.

So maybe to end, Pasi, are you hopeful?

It’s a good question, Glenn, when you say that it depends on what we think about. But, you know, I was thinking about the, just this conference and conversations and what would probably happen in some other point of time in the history. Because we brought, we designed a very careful, peculiar program for this week.
Some of the presentations were not easy. I mean, there were a lot of things that could easily be judged and criticized by not fitting into the XC, the school improvement or school effectiveness framework. Or somebody might say that, you know, this is political or this is not practical.
Just, you know, starting from Martin’s keynotes. And then Herb Wist’s very kind of a strong provocation to challenge, you know, he said that I’m not really… I don’t agree with this whole idea of school effectiveness improvement.

And Sharon Davies, the Indigenous voice, very important, you know, keeping that in mind. And this morning, the very strong obsession on diversity and equity and race in the morning. I’m hopeful because I see that, you know, those themes in this Ixie context have really positively have been received by everyone.
And most people think that these are the conversations, these are the issues we need to be talking about. And I think that in a different situation globally, that we would probably have much more people walking out and saying that this is not our issue, this doesn’t belong to these questions that we are here to talk about. So

I’m hopeful in a sense, I think that people need more and want more opportunities to be part of these questions that they probably have previously been so much curious about.

Because this is all about this humanity, this is all about the peace and love and relationships and these things. And you know, if you hardcore school effectiveness person, you just hear about how you’re measuring facts or doing your studies, you will not always think about these things. But now when we are here together, kind of sharing these concerns that we have, that I think my hope comes from that, that there are probably more people deeply thinking about these things as part of their own work.

And I think it’s going to be a good thing.

Well, Pasi Sahlberg, Glenn Savage, thank you so much for joining FreshEd, and congratulations on this conference. Hopefully, the tide has turned, a new wave is coming, and all of us can surf it into the future.

Thanks, Glenn. I will as well.

Thank you very much.

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