The Challenge of Learning: The Future of Education - Nobel Week Dialogue 2020

welcome to the nobel week dialogue 2020. my name is lisa kirschboom i'm a science journalist and it's my great pleasure to be your host for today's event i have here with me to kick it all off the ceo of nobel prize outreach mrs laura thank you lisa and welcome to you all this year education has been disrupted for many students around the world it's hard to predict the long-term effects of it what we do know is that learning and education are key to building resilient and inclusive societies today we're here to learn to discover new ideas and to ask new questions lots of new questions that's what nobel week dialogue is all about the nobel prize was named by because of alfred nobel who believed that we could build better societies and that this world would be a better place if we invested in science in learning and knowledge and in peaceful collaboration in that spirit is that we organize nobel week dialogue a meeting between science and society before i finalize i would like to thank our dear partners for your long-term commitment for this wonderful collaboration and to being with us also in this difficult times and not least my dear colleagues and all the team working on this you are fantastic thank you all and let's get started thank you laura it really has been a different year and it will be a different dialogue with many of our guests and laureates taking part from their home countries as is the nobel prize outreach chief scientific officer dr adam smith hello adam hello lisa thank you very much indeed and yes like the great majority of our participants i'm having to join you virtually this year in fact joining you from my laundry room here in london which turns out to be the quietest room in the house with the very best acoustic surrounded as i am by all this linen as you can see i've decorated though um i'd like to add my welcome to you all adding my voice to that of lara and lisa apart from the digital side this meeting is organized very much as we always all gonna organize our dialogues taking our lovely wonderfully diverse array of participants and putting them into different constellations to have conversations throughout the day you'll notice a number of red threads running throughout the meeting covered certainly and also of course the unprecedented rise in online education but also the need for evidence-based decision-making and the need for much greater inclusion in education globally you the audience will have the chance to make comments at various points throughout the day and also in the breakout sessions ask questions with masses to get through and the schedule is even more packed than usual so i encourage you all to just sit back and enjoy the show from the comfort of your home office or indeed your laundry room you'll see a little more of me later in the show but for now back to lisa thank you very much adam today's event presents speakers and panelists from all around the world this truly is a global event and a very special week for us in sweden when we welcome people to honor the memory of alfred nobel and celebrate this year's laureates this map shows the location of all of you viewing today fantastic you're all very very welcome before we move into our program we will listen to some of you we asked what education in 2020 means to you education has to change for one thing the students that we have to teach are changing they are from a different generation one that refers their mobile phone to a book or even a computer so as a student transitioning from the traditional in-person teaching format to an online format has exposed me to new learning opportunities it seems that a new model of education that is personalized and totally non-discriminated has been established in a very deeply moving revolutionary and inspiring i also think that we will see more hybrid interactive and game-like learning environments where people will explore and discover knowledge and solve complex problems in creative ways with a critical mindset we must understand that only once we accept a one-size-fits-all approach does not work only then do i think we will see the better days of education during the afternoon we will present a number of interviews panels and presentations all on the topic of education but we also want your view for those of you logged in to twebcast there is a box right here on my side there where you can write your comments and reflections and we will present some of them later in the program so in our first panel we ask what is education for panelists are carl wyman who together with wolfgang catholic was awarded the nobel prize in physics in 2001. irina bokova the former director general of unesco and andreas schleicher director of education and skills at oecd the panel is moderated by adam smith so welcome to this first session in the nobel week dialogue 2020 and for this opening panel we thought we'd ask a question which or perhaps doesn't get asked enough which is what is education for so carl what do you think the goal of education is i think you're right it doesn't get asked nearly enough but i think that education really ultimately is about helping people make better decisions and focusing particularly on my area of science and technical literacy there's so many places in one's life when's personal life public policy decisions in one's work where education and tech and technical knowledge and decision making is is a critically important skill for someone to have and tremendous value education could provide and do you think that that goal of producing kind of uh independent thinkers if you like is it any it is in any sense at odds with government's desire to have education just produce conforming citizens who will be good parts of society uh i think [Music] people come in to some level both independent and completely dependent thinkers naturally it's kind of the way humans are and in some ways this just gives them better tools to be in some sense more competent whether they're independent or dependent or not they're less their decisions are less framed by arbitrary things and more framed by what history and research as it tells us works better thank you very much indeed irina same question to you what's the goal of education well i think if you ask this question the easiest answer probably simplest is uh education joseph is the foundation of human development of what we are what we know about the world how we act what decisions we take as carl said how we relate to nature uh what kind of jobs we take how we communicate with the others and i'm always reminded of a fantastic beautiful report that was prepared commissioned by unesco the famous the law report in the 90s learning the treasure within and in this report there were four pillars of education learning to know learning to do learning to live together and learning to be i think it really embraces all the different aspects of what education means and it is still very relevant today particularly when we have the crisis economic social health sustainable sustainability which is under threat and the others thank you very much indeed andreas over to you yeah you know maybe it's worth reminding ourselves that the world around us is in large part a reflection of our past educational efforts now we have seen such amazing technological and social progress fueled by education but we've also some formidable challenges ahead think of the growing disconnect between the infinite growth imperative and the finite resources of our planet or the growing disconnect between the haves and the have-nots or the growing gap between you know social needs and what technology technology offers i think our schools have to think a lot harder about how to create you know a more peaceful more sustainable work world and i think the framework that arena outlines here still holds but you know these are words and the role of the school of the future is to create the agency among learners the agency marked teachers to put those words into action it's clear that you know education is no longer just about teaching students something but about helping them develop a reliable compass the tools to navigate through this increasingly complicated volatile world we know how to educate second-class robots you know people who are good at repeating what we tell them but you know in this time of artificial intelligence we need to think a lot harder about what makes us humans and build our schools around us i think the point carl made about decision making about intellectual about moral maturity is so important artificial intelligence around it is a much it's not a magic power it's just a great amplifier a great accelerator it amplifies good ideas in good practice in the same way it amplifies bad ideas and bad practice and that makes the human capacity to make meaningful decisions so important but let me add one more point and that is schools need to help students shift from situational values you know i do whatever the current situation allows me to do to sustainable values they keep an eye on the long-term future of not just individuals but also communities and the planet and for that it will be important for schools themselves to think more about the long-term future the future of schooling is very much about creating that kind of bridging social capital that allows more people to think for themselves but also to work with others others who think differently from them who work differently from them who to appreciate different cultural perspectives thank you very much indeed and indeed we have panels coming up on the future of schools and the future of sustainable education so lovely you raise these points carl please so i completely agree with andreas but i think uh just to add a point which is that as he sort of behind his comments education and the role and need of education has really changed almost in our lifetimes from and so to a large extent schools and our societies are living with an old-fashioned view of education where it was simple basic knowledge simple reading and writing for so people could go do simple jobs better now and it has a much different and a more important and more complicated role and we really haven't i think fully adjusted our thinking about education our educational structures to to deal with that in the way andrea says because we're still living in something that was just a generation or two ago a very different need for education maybe we should not talk about advocating for the future but learning for the future how do we facilitate this kind of life long and life learning of people yeah and indeed yes i was going to ask how how long should education last is it life long well i believe it's it's very clear that uh the uh goal is lifelong learning uh actually if you look at the goal number four of the sustainable development agenda and uh i think uh still having a strategy is important having a goal having some targets knowing where we want to go for governments for the academia for everybody community uh it's very important to to know where we want to go and lifelong learning is here to stay it's in the goal number four for the first time uh and i believe that nowadays particularly with the technological revolution with the crisis with jobs being lost or new jobs created lifelong learning is just a must and i don't see how how it will go away now uh if you allow me just uh there is i believe some kind of a attention inside on one on one side of course we want to make this call of the future we want to to change schooling at the same time i believe that some of the classical goals of inclusiveness of of access of how we really involve everybody still stay there the digital divide is huge and the digital divide not just of those who do not have access to internet but we're speaking about uh a very fast internet connections we are speaking about enabling the environment how community societies help teachers haki so i think there is a huge agenda now to discuss and to look and how we implement indeed these opportunities so that the digital gives us so understanding the goal is part of it but making the infrastructure is equally important if not more important yeah you know we used to learn to do the work and suddenly learning is the work you know life long life right school is going to be one context the workplace is going to be another context of of learning i do think that is the world we need to educate for building the foundations the desire the curiosity among young people that they want to become you know lifelong learners and i think if we achieve that you know the environment will be many and varied thank you carlos and again i'll i'll echo what irena was saying that you know this is again a big change in a very short time of it's it used to be a quite an elite small group who need to be highly educated and now it's almost everyone uh probably is everyone and we need to think how to make that possible because thank you all thank you so much the three of you have done an amazing job introducing pretty much all the themes of our meeting in just 10 minutes thank you so much thank you [Music] thanks looking forward to meeting all these great panelists soon again now let's see if we have some reflections information is not knowledge this is a great challenge for educators indeed education is to empower people through knowledge and skills sharing it's very true the challenge for educators is how to best support learning in a fast-changing world education is for expanding our horizons online education is here to stay education is the most important pillar of sustainable development education is about learning to choose wisely from the for the good of the whole thanks and keep them coming if you're logged into webcast you can write your comments and reflect reflections in the box here on the side so please do and we'll use more of them later on in the program time for a conversation between cena badawi chair of the royal african society and a member of mainz the mandela institute for national development strategies and mary robinson chair of the international ngo the elders and former president of ireland a conversation inspired by a quote by nelson mandela education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world [Music] mary robinson it is always such a pleasure to be interacting with you albeit i can't see you and it's just across the airwaves as it were um so here we are the challenge of learning the future of education and i know that you have got so much experience in myriad ways but of course the covid19 pandemic which began as a health crisis has very quickly become an economic social and even political crisis that's left no corner of the world um untouched however it has led to calls for building back better and in terms of education making sure that people are educated particularly the young to um be prepared to take on the kind of jobs that the economy will need to recover in a green inclusive and sustainable way so just flesh out for us your thinking on that well it's also a pleasure to be with you zainab uh and i i'd like to begin by by reframing the way the title given to this section which i understand is education is the most powerful weapon i don't like that it's kind of male and war like and no no education is the most significant human right because it enables all the other rights if you know because you're educated to it that you have rights how much more you can cope with what life brings but you're right covert has provided us with a particular challenge and it has brought home a truth that we understand better now and that is that we need lifelong education and that education has to be an education to learn to live sustainably in a green regenerative future and no country is doing that well so it's a huge learning and quite i am learning by the day in the zooming that i'm doing and you know i'm doing it in part as chair of the elders and we're trying to encourage that we have a covered immediate crisis and then looming behind that we have the climate crisis which is urgent and therefore we have to come out of covert in a way that aligns with the paris climate agreement and the sustainable development goals and that's different for developed and developing countries as you very well know um we have to understand the lessons of covet and to me they they are quite important i would summarize them briefly as four lessons and the first is that collective human behavior actually matters it's the only thing protecting us from the vaccine and that collective behavior in the developed world has to be a collective rethinking of our consumer habits of how much we produce that is stupid and throw away in plastic and destroying our oceans and our food chain at the moment and so a lot of thought into that the second point of the lesson of covet is that government matters uh government that deals well with with covert saves lives saves health saves economies and i'm glad as i'm sure you are that it's women-led governments that have been doing quite well and the third point is that science matters and so as we come out you know we've been listening to the health experts we have to come out and listen to the climate scientists and then the next point is that compassion matters um it's subtle but you know there wasn't much empathy for the parts of the world that were being affected most this is the climate justice argument the injustice of climate change affecting the poorest countries and communities the gender dimension the intergenerational injustice but there wasn't much empathy in the richest parts of the world the parts that should be coming off fossil fuel more quickly now we're all out of our comfort zone and i hope there will be more empathy and openness to the other so when you say education is a lifelong process so do you mean by that for example people in the more advanced economies who've perhaps been engaged in activities related to fossil fuels or whatever they have to be retrained and i hate this word but i'll use it and re-skilled as it were so that they can take on the new green jobs that hopefully will be yielded absolutely and it needs to be done with what we call just transition i'm very glad that the eu has a just transition mechanism and it's a really important concept that as we make the transition we don't discard those who help to build the economies of the developed world which were built on fossil fuel and those workers in coal and oil and gas and in my own country ireland pete um have to be um part of the move forward with their communities so we have to make a special effort to ensure that the the green jobs and the training for them is available for those communities and that's all part of education but schools and even preschools and schools and universities also have to really um you know give you young people the capacity to give that leadership you know when you when you go into a green school in ireland i'm overwhelmed by the way young people really get it and they're into a circular economy already you know and so yeah there's actually a capacity of young people as they're doing with their fridays for future to educate my generation which so failed and your generation which pretty failed too and to address issues in time i don't want my children to think that they i can learn from them so i'm hoping they're not listening no no they you can't have you can't you're right you're right you're right so it's interesting you you framed this um debate about education in terms of human rights and of course another aspect of human rights gender rights you've been a very very staunch advocate for gender equality but another aspect of education really is teaching women and girls about their sexual and reproductive health rights and sadly we've seen that kovid 19 all over the world has seen an increase in domestic violence as women are locked down with abusive partners and you know it this is a very very important often overlooked aspect of education so i wonder if you could just highlight here your concerns about this particular subject yes i i i think a lot about girls education because the elders recognized at an early stage that we should help to promote girls education to reduce early child marriage and it's one of those kind of hidden sensitive issues for uh countries but also for a lot of small organizations trying to deal a few years when archbishop tutu was our chair um we prioritized looking at girls education tackling um as you say issues of reproductive health but also um not being not falling into early child marriage which denies girls so many human rights and we traveled to ethiopia we went up to the amhara region in ethiopia and myself and archbishop tutu and grew brinsland and later we went to the bihar state in india and we went to a school there and i'll never forget it where girls were clubbing together so that if a girl heard conversations between her parents and some strangers that were you know about the girl having to marry this older man that they would group together and come and beg that she'd stay on another year in school and i'll never forget those messages and now i see because of kovitch when schools are shot or when girls don't have access to the internet and can't join in and when they have to do home um duties more in in the covet crisis the numbers of child marriages is increasing dramatically that makes me so sad as a mother and grandmother myself um so we really need to reinforce um the point of access to education as a basic not only human right but that significant right that enables all the other rights and that has to be much more of a priority we shouldn't be cutting back on development aid i'm very sorry that the uk that is leading in the cop 26 is also cutting back on its dramatic legislation for 0.7 which i so often praised and now it looks as if that's not going to be a leadership point for the britain um in leading on the on the climate issue mary robinson thank you so much indeed ever the human right defender and champion we salute you and uh may you flourish in all your efforts on behalf of humanity it's been my pleasure talking to you thank you so much indeed thank you zena it's been a pleasure for me [Music] cena badawi and mary robinson and this is the nobel week dialogue sending live from a studio in stockholm this year's topic is the challenge of learning the future of education it's a year when the global pandemic has created challenges and some new opportunities for learning we have all quickly had to adapt to a life where web technology and video has been used for meetings lecture and mentorship in the next panel on the impact of kovi 19 we will meet francis arnold nobel prize laureate in chemistry in 2018 asha kanoa president and ceo of the commonwealth of learning and daphne caller co-founder of coursera but first akinwumi adesina the president of the african development bank group in a conversation with adam smith about the impact of kovid 19 on africa so akinwumi adesina welcome now your position your position at the african development bank gives you a unique overview over the continent so how would you describe the impact of covid19 on education in africa well i mean it's been a real terrible disaster for everybody around the world but in case of africa let me break that into three things one in terms of spending on education in terms of enrollment on education and in terms of performance and education in our spending on education it has really significantly affected our locations to educational sectors because the monies have just gone into the other sectors like health and all that that are very much needed and social protection now the financing gap for education still remains about 40 billion dollars and that has simply gotten worse now in terms of enrollment if you look take a look at it because of the lockdowns that you have increased a lack of income by people uh and the fact that a lot of the children of the poor have suffered disproportionately uh from this a lot of out of school children has increased tremendously on the continent and in fact if you take a look at it like only seven out of 27 countries are high schools open by the end of october and you'll have nine million kids right that are not in school in places like nijay mali and and grab faster and uh 12 million kids that are miscalled for their performance in places like you know nigeria church and and and faster as well so that has affected it and in terms of the performance you know as they also moved out of the kobe 19 everything went virtual people started using digital information uh platforms to deliver education but of course that's good if you have it challenge is that 25 of the primary schools only have electricity only forty percent of secondary schools have electricity and you look at those kids that are supposed to be learning eighty-nine percent of their households have no access to computers and eighty-two percent of those children have no access to uh two laptops to be able to do anything about 28 million of these learners are within areas without without access to mobile networks so we are going to see the impact of that in terms of performance of the educational system at the end of the day all i just want to say is that a lot needs to be done in terms of infrastructure to enable digital learning going forward yeah it sounds like an almost insurmountable challenge but do you think in the end positive things can come out of that absolutely i think we are continuing to invest massively on the continent the bank actually put up uh we announced a 10 billion dollar uh facility crisis response facility to support countries to that we also launched a three billion dollar global social bond to fight coverage 19 which is the largest social bond that's us denominated dollar denominated in world history so we continue to push money uh into that but the fact of the matter is that there are so many competing needs and so that africa needs some breathing room you know while developed countries have trillions of dollars over 10 trillion dollars to do fiscal stimulus right all africa needs is 145 billion dollars and it's so difficult to even get that so unless and until we make sure that africa gets uh support to free up their physical space it's going to be competing limited amount of money competing for health for education for infrastructure and all of that so but we'll continue to work with all the partners i'm a very positive person and i know at the end of the day we'll get some resources to get things back on the right track thank you very much indeed so my last question was going to be what do you need people to do to help and it sounds like you've already you've made that pretty clear yeah absolutely i think you know africa does need a lot of global support on a number of areas i think maybe i'll just mention three the first is making sure that you know we can have fiscal distance i mean uh social distancing right which is all we have to do but we cannot have fiscal distances so which means that africa needs a lot of support uh being able to get the resources to do it the speed and the at which way and the quality of recovery will depend on how much we are able to mobilize resources are to deal with this the second of course is that we need to also support uh africa to deal with the issue of quality healthcare infrastructure i mean health infrastructure is the basic thing primarily secondary and tertiary healthcare infrastructure so there's a lot of work that needs to be done in that particular area and third and for me you know most critical is that a lot of the young people need more jobs on the company so we need to make sure that the educational system is tools we need to make sure that we have people with technical and vocational training support systems and make sure that we also support kids to have entrepreneurship capacity to create businesses of their own and that's why at the african developing bank you know we are going to be supporting countries to launch what we call youth entrepreneurship investment banks these are going to be new types of banks alike banks and we create financial ecosystems around young people on the continent we got 486 million of them those people coming up by 2050 that must be an asset for the continent for us to be able to to unlock and so i think in terms of you the employment that's going to be a big one for us and also invest in digital infrastructure i can thank you very much indeed you packed an enormous amount into a very short space thank you so we've just heard akinatosina tell us about the effects of kovid 19 on africa and of course everybody listening has their own story about how kovit has expected their own education or the education of people they know and love and we thought it would be interesting just to take three representative participants in the meeting and have them tell us about how the pandemic is affecting their world at the moment so i'm very happy to have daphne collar francis arnold and asha kanwa with me and let's start with you francis how is the pandemic affecting you adam what we've learned is we can learn at home but not all the time because science it's all about collaboration and learning from experience and experiments and that's pretty hard to do from home and while we're all grateful for tech tools like zoom and slack which has made it possible to connect virtually in the end we need to be together especially younger scientists because the conferences the forums the events that bring us together including the social components help build that local and the international network but one upside i've seen though that we're connecting across the world in a way we simply didn't do before yesterday i was on a call on a on a webinar with a thousand people from brazil to bangladesh was it was wonderful yeah and and this meeting is a wonderful example of connecting people it's funny that we've connected you three and you're all in fact along the west coast of north america but uh how nice to have you here daphne how about you so i can speak to this from two different perspectives one is from my own personal experience and one is from the experience of my two teenage daughters who were in high school at the time that the pandemic broke out so i'll start with my own personal experience which i think is very similar to what francis said which is we do need as we engage with other people especially in the context of a scientific endeavor that brainstorming interaction is so difficult to do in when we're all relegated to you know blocks of this size on a computer screen and there's no body language and ability to jump up and draw something on the board and i think it's been a challenge to maintain the same level of energy and excitement and engagement that we've had but at the same time it does open up opportunities to interact with people in a more i don't know less with a less energy barrier that are on the other side of the globe because before there would be an expectation to get on the plane and now there isn't and that's i think a big upside which hopefully might help us with another long-term crisis which is the climate crisis if we all get on planes a little bit less um i'd like to speak to the experience though of my two teenage daughters who were both in high school at the time that this broke out the older one is now in college and um and what we and you know they move to what we call zoom school and these are both you know they're smart kids academic high performers and it was just striking to us to realize a few weeks into this that they would both turn on their camera at the beginning of the class say a few words so the teacher would know they're there turn off the camera in the microphone the younger one was busy perfecting her sims game and the older one was going through the netflix catalog so i think what we learned from this is that it's very difficult for teachers and i think they've gotten better but it's still a huge challenge to maintain engagement and connection with students through a video screen and how does one really build a learning platform that really creates that ability to do distance learning effectively versus using sort of a video conferencing platform that was built for a completely different purpose i think we need to think much more deeply about how to employ the right kind of pedagogy for an online existence that is very very different than face-to-face teaching especially as you said francis with younger children and it's not just education that's doing that right i'm flipping through the netflix catalog myself on most of my zoom meetings i i'm just impressed that you knew what your teenage children were doing i mean that's that's quite advanced um i wonder i want to come back um i want to come back to uh you in a minute daphne because you were you know as the founder of um coursera um is the largest supplier of moocs in the world you know this is a fantastically interesting experiments going on for you i imagine so let's come back in a minute but asha um in your world you you the commonwealth of learning has this extraordinary diverse field to to work with a huge range of countries what have you what have you experienced during the the pandemic you know uh it's so different because uh 48 out of these 54 member states you know which span all regions of the globe are developing countries and in some of them access to the internet is less than 10 so i mean how did we continue our work the caribbean is slightly better and of course teachers needed a lot of capacity building so we were able to do online courses within trinidad and tobago where you know over 8 000 teachers were trained which is about half the task force teaching task force in the country in india we work with women farmers and in the past this had to be in person now we used moby moocs because you know what daphne was talking about you know what kind of platforms do we need and this mobi move you know is a basic mobile interface which has social media integration and it works in low bandwidth situations and where people can learn in their local languages in the pacific again where access to the internet is very low uh the real issue was lack of quality content and there we curated content and aligned it to the curriculum of fiji nauru samoa and provided a video on demand service which actually helped so what we are trying to do is and of course in some cases it's just face to face you know in bangladesh we were working on both schools where children were picked up in the morning and dropped back in the evening you know after studying in those both schools now the same boats because the children can't be brought in the teachers are being picked up from their homes and taken to communities where they teach for 45 minutes you know six children sitting on maths observing social distance and then they move to the next group so we've had to sort of you know look at a whole range of technologies for print because the parents can't help them so they're using tatted textbooks and this is the way we've tried to ensure that nobody gets left behind it sounds but it sounds as if good things are coming out of this well i mean crisis always generates creativity doesn't it but do you feel that corbin are getting the necessary education if you cut the time with a teacher to one-fifth at the time can they really can you really do that you know the other thing which has happened uh francis during this whole pandemic is uh this whole kind of tide has turned in favor of self-directed learning i mean in the past few centuries we've been looking at the didactic mode but if you actually were to sort of uh look at the time we spend in school it's about 18 you know of our waking hours between grades 1 to 12 and then of course that keeps reducing as we go to higher levels so is this an opportunity for us where we are not able to provide that kind of you know the full didactic services to sort of now look at education as a blend of formal non-formal and informal learning which means a different paradigm from what we are facing now so we have teacher-led sequential learning where the teachers are coming for 45 minutes and then unstructured learner-led approaches so this actually takes us to this whole lifelong learning approach which we've been talking about you know sustainable development goal talks about lifelong learning for all by 2030 but it's not clear how we are going to operationalize it so i think if there's a silver lining in the pandemic it's certainly this that people have sort of pivoted to self-directed learning and we really need to think of how we can sort of you know build on these foundations uh to have a different educational system which is you know a lifelong learning system but i think one of the challenges with that thank you adam the challenge with that asha especially with younger children is they don't necessarily have the learning skills and the discipline to stay engaged and focused on the material on their own and one of the challenges that i've seen with some of our employees with young children mine are older and they just go off and watch netflix as we said but the younger ones they come and they interrupt their parents every few minutes saying can you explain this question to me can you uh what did the teacher mean and and that makes it very difficult for parents and when i think about the situation of uh children with parents who don't necessarily have the educational background to provide that level of support to their children it creates not only the challenge for the parents but also creates a sort of in inequity in learning outcomes for the children who are able to get that level of support from their parents and the ones who are not and so while i love self-directed learning i think and it works well for some self-motivated children or ones who have that extra level of support i think we really need to come up with a way of creating a pull towards learning that involves teachers maybe involves parents but ideally doesn't rely on the scaffolding of the parental unit in order to to make and to ensure student success because i think that reliance is really problematic for working parents and even more problematic for children who have parents who are unprepared for that type of challenge francis but you won't i couldn't agree with that more what we see is that children that come from say more chaotic households or whose parents don't have the education or time or you know ability to help their children they get left behind even more and so it's leading to enormous disparities uh for their children exactly you saw that with a nanny's child really challenging you know that's true because sorry please go ahead what i was saying is that you know thousands of people have been displaced you know migrant parents obviously they can't help the children but another constituency we could become very important during this pandemic is the parents and if we were sort of you know to sort of go into this lifelong learning mode parents could become very important stakeholders in all this teaching learning process because all parents are not possible and in where these cases you know where parents were unable to teach the children what countries have done they've put loudspeakers where teachers are speaking you know around a big field with loud speakers to children sitting on mats you know in the field but people have tried all kinds of methods you know even newspapers teachers are printing their lessons in newspapers in local languages and then those newspapers go to the parents and then children get the lesson okay grade nine i've got my lesson today from my teacher in the newspaper so people have been quite privileged creative i think thank you thank you all so much absolutely fascinating and this issue of inclusion and what to do about the growing inequalities is going to be very much a theme of today's discussions and the audience will at times be able to give us their reflections on what kovit has done to them but thank you all for the moment very much thank you thank you [Music] the miyagi orchestra is a south african orchestra dedicated to helping the nation overcome decades of violence conflict and division through the power of music right here behind me laura sprechmann the ceo of nobel prize outreach is getting ready to talk to the cellist and conducting student seppo poe sepu takes part in the dialogue from his home in paris but first let's listen to the orchestra [Music] when people come together and they really try and work things out and they have hope then that is when this country will [Music] change [Music] [Music] music in essence is a collective effort every voice is equal and the voice should be unheard [Music] so tolerance is not enough we need to really love each other to become just one south african [Music] uh so nice to see you i've seen that film so many times and now it's like you stepping out of it so um we just saw about miyaji tell us a little bit about it and its purpose you know miyagi signifies hope and besides it being just an orchestra it uh caters to education it caters to digging deep into society and uniting people from different backgrounds who would normally never meet and the music the music making process it's just the beauty of it and you know it extends into the deepest societies and that is miyagi opening doors to people from different communities different colors different races and also different social classes and how did it lift you up what did it mean to you as a person you know the moment i i held my instrument and i played in miyagi and i could see on see the different people that i could connect with then i realized that this tool this miyagi being a transformative tool in the south african context can make me also a community leader it means that i also have the ability to put change even though i'm holding a cello or holding a baiten miyaji said to me there is hope in music and it shows that the music can also transcend into even the toughest and darkest parts of society and bring light into it and that is the beauty of it and that's how i got involved in miyagi and that's why i'm still there now do you see what what is your thought about the the prospects of building a nation i mean and also the individual responsibility because this is very much what it's about right of people meeting each other and seeing each other and building a solid nation and a solid democracy you know the idea is that you know music transcends many differences and cultivates innovation and you know in south africa we contend with many factors from racial cultural religious class gender and age differences and when we unite together and we are in an orchestra we are a diverse diverse people but we are unified by one purpose which means making music and this same context can be taken in in society where we need to unite on one common purpose even though we're coming from really diverse backgrounds diverse classes and also with the context of south africa we are trying to be unified now coming back from a really uh dark history and music says to me now that music is uh a tool for nation building and being in the orchestra says that we can to some extent agree even though we have differing opinions but we can also essentially contribute to one single purpose which is in the nation building context is very important to contribute but what how do you do sort of to to get those waves you know to spread through throughout the the country i mean you were speaking about well when we think about learning we we think about learning math or learning geography or history and in the film you say that we need to learn to to love each other and and so how what would you do to for for to see that everybody learns to love each other and and use maybe music as a tool as you were saying yeah you know humans are inherently capable of showing both love and hatred to each other and also i mean directly to themselves but you know it is only when we start seeing each other as equal beings do we start to navigate towards a certain level of understanding and dr king once said love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend and with music this facilitates a community communication which goes also beyond words and enables meanings to be shared and it promotes the development and also the maintenance of the individual group cultural and national identities and you know as soon as you start breaking down the barriers and start understanding your neighbor then you you start building on something not just the music not just uh politics but you start building on emotion which is basically what humans are built on on just emotions and that is it yeah yeah well with that message of hope i i hope to see you at some point or listen to you when you are a director which i know you're starting with you're studying for in berlin all the best of luck to you and i look forward to seeing you zepo nice to speak with you thank you very much our next panel is on the very important topic of gender and education in the panel we find ana kisina senior policy analyst at unesco francis arnold nobel prize laureate in chemistry in 2018 and kathy n davidson founding director of the futures initiative moderator is calling clauson curator at nobel prize outreach [Music] warmly welcome francis arnold anna cristina daggio and kathy davidson um a pleasure to have you here even on a screen then um before we start our discussion uh on achieving gender equality in education we will have an introduction talk uh from from you anna christine now so please let's let's start with that one good afternoon everyone all countries committed to inclusive education when they signed up for sdg for the sustainable development goal for an education to be achieved by 2030. it is a commitment we cannot afford to lose sight of if anything the case of it has become stronger over time the message of the report is very powerful in this respect all means all inclusion is for everyone and for every countries our report has defined inclusion as a process that celebrates diversity and builds a sense of belonging to achieve social equation and these actions are rooted in the belief that every person has value and potential besides other nine recommendations concerning funding for instance and the educational workforce and data the reports call for everyone that is involved in education to widen the understanding of inclusive education and include all learners regardless or of identity background or ability which still too often dictates education opportunities it looks at inclusion considering those that are out of the school system the 258 millions of children youth and adolescents but also those million more that are alienated within and through education like children with disabilities girls refugees etc however this principle is not very often enshrined in laws and policies 68 of countries considers in the report have a definition of inclusive education and just 57 percent of them include all marginalized learners concerning girls there has been a huge generational leap in access to education over the past 25 years this may this has meant that 180 millions more of girls have been enrolled in primary and secondary education tertiary education enrollment have risen by three times and girls have caught up with boys in reading and mathematics however they still face the worst forms of acute exclusion there are those that are most likely not to set a thought in the school nine million girls are in this position and they are also at more risk of experiencing illiteracy when they are idled however girls education can break the cycle of disadvantage and for each year of the education achieved my mothers in the 80s cohort each daughters has achieved seven months more of education progress towards gender equality has been uneven distributed across region and educational levels in 2019 fewer than 90 girls were enrolled for every 100 boys in four percent of countries at primary level nine percent of countries in lower secondary 15 of countries in upper secondary and 21 of countries in tertiary education and gender parity is just on average its region is heterogeneity is huge and girls and women are still unrepresented underrepresented in stem the share of women in engineering and ict fields of study is below 25 in more than two-thirds of countries and there are subjects are still male dominated which implies that women and girls are prevented to achieve the same career and earning opportunity than boys or men stereotypes and gender bias are very pervasive in textbook and learning materials girls are not only very often not represented in images and texts in textbook but also they are depicted in traditional roles which can strengthen gender roles and stereotypes schools are also the arena of violence for girls and women very often girls are more likely to experience verbal and sexual harassment and also cyber bullying and also the distribution of power and equal distribution of power between men and women means that very many women are still marrying early and having babies very early too which are huge obstacles to achieving secondary universal secondary education and even if there is a huge feminization of the teacher profession women are still very rare in educational leadership and management position in 48 middle and high income countries there was a 20 percentage points gender gap between the probability of achieving a teacher position for men and women we know very well that a shift to inclusion is not easy and that's why it is important to foster policy dialogue and learn from peers as we are doing here today and for this reason we have developed some tools that can help to foster these processes please go there and look at them and help us to disseminate the messages of the report thanks a lot thank you anna christina for a very informative and an interesting uh talk uh francis and kathy any any immediate comments thoughts reflections on this cathy yes yes the um concepts of inclusion and exclusion seem to be really central here and there's both the numerological demographic how many women are being educated there's also the whole range of judgment and evaluation i was involved in a project for several years where we looked at many studies of how gender exclusion works in higher education and many of them were studies where the same data was sent out to many many people some with a male name attached some of the female name and citation whether articles were reviewed whether articles were quoted everything varied depending on whether it was a female or a male name attached as much as 30 to 50 percent more likely for citation review acceptance and that happened whether it was admissions student evaluations peer-reviewed articles awards uh it was quite depressing and for me one of the things that really needs our educational focus it's almost as bad when women are making the judgments as when men are making the judgments so we absorb those cultural norms and also pass them on ourselves thank you francis any comments well i can really only speak to higher education but what anna christina says is just such a shame that half the world's population that can contribute to solving all the tremendous problems that we're facing aren't getting their full chance to do so and this is particularly true in stem where we are going to have to solve some enormous problems and women are very good at that so i i support in any possible way the inclusion and the encouragement of women to go into stem and i'd just like to make an interesting point all three women who won nobel prizes in the sciences in the last three years all three of us jennifer dowd now andrea gass and myself were supported early in our careers by the packard foundation with just a grant to support taking risks right and it also went to child care we were given additional money to make it possible for us to fulfill our family desires but also do science we have to support women in order to do that yeah to make it possible yeah and a christian yeah um i think that the issue here is a very important one and uh one of the messages of the global education monitoring report in this respect and also the gender report is that inclusion is a process it takes time but should be an ambition and really the the data that we have analyzed in the report have shown that a huge progress has been done in access to education for girls but we are not yet there and that's the point so the question is how we can get there how can we support this process in all the ways that are possible because there are so many girls that do not have a chance do not have a chance even a chance to get into school not to talk about higher education secondary education and then it is pervasive it just is just a question of looking at every single piece and put the piece together and then do not forget that it is really necessary and the pandemic is really showing that an integrated approach to gender and to gender in education is really needed but how do because i guess that this inclusion and exclusion it's based on on structures and and old structures how do you how do you demolish them yeah i love francis's point that the last the three women who won nobel prizes recently were all structurally supported by a foundation that was not only willing to take a risk but invested material uh support in things like child care uh recently in the pandemic there have been many universities in the united states that are insisting that people come back to teach even when they're ki they have children that are at school without any kind of child care facilities well of course there's going to be a deficit these are structural and institutional not just individual choices we're making yeah there shouldn't be have to be a choice between having family and having a career and unfortunately so many women see that as a choice and they also don't see how they can contribute to solving these real problems now access to the early education is an absolute prerequisite to that and i feel terrible for the millions of young girls who don't have that access because all these brains are being lost for the future and and in fact this is really something these two interventions are really important because they highlight how much is needed to understand that each single part that is related to gender matters to determine gender equality in education the pandemic has shown many things it has shown for instance that digital divide is very important especially for women this is an emerging concern especially we have seen that in low-income countries many girls lack telephone and even when they have telephone they cannot access internet so this is a point but even in high-income country there is the issue of child care and reconciliation of work and family life many many women have had to leave their work or taken paid leave to take care of take over the double burden as usual of care and education in addition because the school closure has been a huge issue and this keeps and keeps being a huge issue so this implies that however i would not want i don't want to be pessimistic i think that a lot of progress we are here to witness that has been done many woman many great women are doing wonderful things and one thing that is important is really activism how to bring and to continue to bring these uh these ideas and values forward uh a last question and and perhaps to you francis uh when when from a gender perspective uh if you compare your professional scientific um environment today to the one that you met when you entered the scientific world once um is there a difference well there is a there's a quantitative difference and there's a qualitative difference and it is for the better um we're seeing more women win nobel prizes in the sciences and that's because women started going in in full force 20 30 years ago as long as we keep encouraging women to do it they will succeed at the highest levels because half the brilliant brains belong to to women and so we have to structurally make that possible and encouraging and we might have lots of choices right why would they go into higher education and and compete in science when they have so many other options as well so it has to be attractive but i i'm i'm optimistic we will continue to do that if we make these structural changes that we've been talking about yeah so we're on our right we're on the right way but uh there are things left to do for sure thank you so much uh francis arnold anna christina dadju and kathy davidson thank you so much thank you thank you thank you thank you it's a pleasure [Music] inclusion is indeed a very important aspect of education and we will take some time to dig even deeper into the theme all means all inclusion in education starting with an interview with asha kanwa president and ceo of commonwealth of learning and followed by a panel on how to be inclusive with irina bokova former director general of unesco daphne color co-founder of coursera and lynnea lindqvist principal of hamarkul scolan in sweden moderator is adam smith [Music] so asha kanwa welcome now your organization the commonwealth of learning promotes education across all commonwealth countries which gives you a marvelous perspective so let's start with the central question how can we increase access and decrease inequality and provision of education thank you adam increasing access to education doesn't automatically decrease inequalities let's take the example of two sixth grade girls one studying in a private school in bangalore who interacts daily with her teachers and classmates using her laptop and she has access to discussions videos assignments etc in the same city a sixth grade girl from a lower income group who studies in a government school has access to a textbook and has been told to watch educational programs on television so both girls have access but ironically the inequalities are very clear and this is where distance learning can help us bridge these divides which is what the common wealth of learning promotes and what do you precisely mean by distance learning you know distance learning refers to the separation of teacher and learning and because they're separated in terms of time and space some kind of technology must be used to for communications and of course distance learning requires careful planning for design and delivery and self-instructional materials are in any format whether it's print or whether it's online are absolutely central to distance learning and these are designed with clear objectives outcomes assessments and they're also designed for asynchronous use where teachers and students don't necessarily have to communicate simultaneously and this gives them greater flexibility and convenience and learner support is provided according to the needs and the context of the learner so if we were to take those two sixth graders in distance learning they would be given the same quality content and appropriate tutorial support and this would lead to equitable outcomes and social justice has always been the central mission of distance learning so we're all part of a distance learning experiment at this precise time but what evidence is there that distance learning really works well i mean first in terms of access distance education has always been used around the world to reach the unreached in fact there are 33 open universities in the commonwealth which cater to about 5 million learners annually for example if it wasn't for these institutions where would these 5 million people go persons with disabilities too have always found distance learning more accessible second its costs distance learning costs substantially less than campus provision we conducted a study in india which shows that the cost of putting a student through an open school which is you know secondary education at a distance was one-tenth compared to a student in a government secondary school and it's not just about formal education you know distance learning programs for honey gatherers in the deep forests of uganda enabled them to learn through their mobile phones in local languages and the community came from poverty to prosperity in three years third quality research also shows that there's no significant difference in quality between distance and campus instruction and of course fourth ecology with all our concerns about climate change studies in the uk and botswana show that the carbon footprint of a distance learning student is one-third compared to that of the campus counterpart so in short we have evidence that distance learning can increase access reduce costs improve quality all with a lower carbon footprint and i believe this is the moment when distance learning is set to move from margin to mainstream thank you very much indeed that's a perfect framing for our panel on inclusion that's to follow asha kanwa thank you thank you adam um i'm delighted to welcome back daphne koller and irina bokova you've already met and i'm particularly pleased to welcome linnea linkfist who's a school principal and teacher from sweden welcome to linnea now we've heard ashikanwa emphasize that access does not necessarily result in equality in education let's start with you irina what are the greatest challenges do you think to implementing sdg goal 4 which is to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education let me say first of all adam that i entirely agree with asha kandwar saying that access not necessarily means inclusiveness and quality when we were adopting a goal number four of the sustainable development agenda 2030 all three elements were equally important it was access inclusiveness and quality because we know we knew at that time we still know that 250 million young people children and youth are out of school but because of the poor quality education because of the lack of inclusiveness more than 600 million nowadays according to the unesco institute of statistics do not have the basic learning skills of reading of meth and some of the others and half of them live in the g20 countries so my point is that in order to make inclusiveness work you have to create the enabling environment you have to have the right community approach you have to train teachers you have to nowadays in the post covetory in the covet crisis that we see you have to give them access to the digital platforms and here comes i believe now one of the biggest obstacles to those who do not have this access and there nowadays in the world more than 3.5 billion people that do not have this access and among them of course millions of children and young people so the the digital access and we know that education becomes more and more digital it creates enormous opportunities no doubt about it but unless we solve the problem with these bottlenecks of the digital excess of children i don't believe that we can speak about inclusiveness and achieving the implementation of goal number four and at the end of the day i believe this is the heart of sustainable development agenda and just a small point and i think it's also important to know that uh schooling uh and education in many countries it is also providing children with the breakfast with food going to school it also a social interaction and education is about values education is about transmitting these values and all this has to be taken into account when we speak about the achievement and of the goal number four into a new digital era thank you yeah there's so much to consider but if we take the digital divide daphne would you like to comment on that yes so i think irina already spoke well about the importance of getting access to people to things like the kind of equipment that can allow them to engage meaningfully with the course content and the as well as the internet connectivity that is required for watching videos and interacting with fellow students online so i don't think i need to repeat a lot of those themes i'd like to come back to one of the other uh themes that ah spoke of which is that of quality and the way in which quality plays into that into that divide into the equality situation because part of the problem is that the quality of the materials is so much more important in a in a distance learning setting than it is in a face-to-face instruction because frankly if you have a bad teacher and you're sitting there in the classroom you're kind of forced to learn anyway and i'm not saying it's ideal but uh but the fact of the matter is you're there and there there's an opportunity to learn in a distance learning setting people just tune out and there's been study after study that shows that without high quality instructional materials and even more importantly without a strong engagement between a live human and the student be it a teacher or a coach to keep students with less academic preparation or less advantaged backgrounds engaged with the course content they just drop out and so i think quality and engagement with ins with teachers is much more important in addition and is the only way to really get us to a point of equality and as as digital education encompasses far more people what is the bottleneck in sort of increasing engagement where what do you have to focus on to make that happen i think it's the human touch asynchronous course content is wonderful and allows us to take the best of breed in terms of um videos highlighting incredible scientific experiments or or historical sites or whatever and really present some of the best teaching masters to students but also you need that interactive content context because learning is fundamentally a social experience and so how do we create that engagement between student and teacher students and students to create that active learning loop and also the sense of accountability that students have when someone is actually uh looking at them waiting for them to be successful irena please yes i uh i totally agree with daphne and i would tell that uh just uh like to add that the um importance of supporting teachers uh i believe is critical i have always said that nothing can substitute the good teacher in education whatever technology and i think it's even more important today with the digital platforms because it it does not go automatic we just go digital and everything's fine uh teachers have to be supported more they have to the pressure on them and the demand uh on them to be more engaging to be more innovative to be in a in a way uh better in transmitting this social value of learning of teaching uh is even higher uh uh and of course it's about the content it's about how you match the content the teaching in an environment which is uh entirely different so um i think we have to rethink everything that we have for spoken about teachers and learning and they i believe stay still the key to a good learning uh and to the inclusiveness thank you well let's bring a teacher into the conversation linear you work with some of the most vulnerable students in sweden 99 of your students in your current school do not have swedish i gather as their first language so what for you is the key to engagement for those students yes as you said 99.1 this um swedish as the second language so it's a huge challenging for us to both teach them swedish they they go to school where the swedish is the minority language which is a huge problem they only have like everyday language and you don't manage school with everyday language you have to have advanced language so what we do we have we have a look kind of we have a lot of one-to-one training in in swedish with the children um yeah so we we try to to do it individually a lot because it's really hard to to teach them both the subjects and the language at the same time but the teacher are relating the children they stay after the the lessons and try to to help them more so it's really about what the teacher do so it's really it's really a focus on the teacher it's really a focus on the support that is required for the teachers as irina was just emphasizing yes exactly and what you can say one one of the thing that is important to see that only 24 of the parents to my students have a post-secondary education so we have a lot of parents that they don't even even know how to read and write by themselves and the first book our students not everyone but the majority is the one that we give them in preschool class the second book they own is the one they get from us when they finish in the third grade so we have to do everything in school we have to learn how to read how to to write and we have to give them an arena to read and write and we have to we have to do almost everything for them it must be incredibly challenging to to to deal with that in what becomes a digital environment where they're then at home trying to accomplish these things yes we have ipads and we have some devices but we also want them to experience books so we have a lot of print printed teaching materials and our libraries like the center of the school the library is so important daphne so i i think the it's really important to understand the role of the teacher as a potential surrogate for the parent when the parent doesn't have necessarily the background to help their children and also to install the same set of expectations in terms of achievement that uh parents who've gone through the educational route might have had more exposure to and i think that really does put a much greater burden and therefore need to support teachers as they help encourage um students whether it's kids or or even older students as a way of making sure that they stay on the right path and become successful and again that delta between people who have that intrinsic set sense of need to achieve instilled in them versus the ones that might not have as much of that is only enhanced um in the digital world where there is more opportunities to go off track and so i think that's that comes back to the need to really support teachers in helping them keep students on track and engaged thank you very much indeed i think that's a fantastic point to end on unfortunately we have so little time for these panels but that's been a lovely conversation and i've really enjoyed listening to you thank you very much indeed thank you [Music] we are getting some great reflections from those of you following this um this show and i would present some of them to you right now sweat already writes education should go hand in hand with compassion that is very true peter campbell in person connections are essential to our mental health yes susan pathkiller online learning will need to incorporate the aspects that make the simpson netflix more attractive evangelina guru quality education throughout life can bring us closer to personal and collective well-being happiness and success yaya si patel music is a language that can do wonders it can heal it can bring people together it shows emotions linda peterson diversity is the key so many problems remain unsolved because of homogeneous groups and groupthink thank you next we change pace a bit and in a segment devoted to the meeting of art and science we feature a conversation between one of this year's nobel laureates in chemistry emmanuel chopranti and concert pianist igor levitt igor is here in the studio with us having given last night's nobel prize concert while emmanuel chapman t charpentier speaks to us from her office in berlin moderator is julian searat professor of clinical integrative physiology at karolinska institute [Music] well i've been really looking forward to this conversation about art and science and i think there are a lot of commonalities between what you both do i mean you both start out by learning fundamentals and training on the basics but there's another big aspect of what you do in your world of art and your world of science on a creative level and i was wondering if we could start the discussion around the basics and the creativity and how you bring both of those aspects into your work and imagine emmanuel maybe we could start with you on just a reflection about how you balance the basics in creativity yeah i think in in science i believe this is the same in uh arts because i was uh i studied the classical piano and also classical dance when i was younger the methodology is is very important so this is part of the basics so when you're a biologist and this means good laboratory practice good scientific practice the knowledge how to analyze the knowledge um and so and it's years of actually of of knowledge acquisition i shall say it um having said this after uh this is where the creativity can can come in however i believe that at least in in my case as a scientist creativity is also a methodological process because it's it's it's associated to the repetitive work to the hard work um it's uh you know it's about testing hypotheses uh taking a step back yet having the global picture a lot of questioning being ready to see failure to come back so it's always with regard to also including observation pose reconsideration reinvention and so all those aspects that are i think important as as a part of creativity so eager in your field you spend years and years studying the basics but there's also this real creative aspect and i perhaps you can recognize some of what emanuel is is reflecting on as well even in in the arts first of all it's great to be here with you and congratulations um i can't very much relate to that i mean it is i mean it's you know in order to to be free and i know to be as creative as you as you possibly can a full bouquet of things must be fulfilled you have to you spoke about knowledge let's just call it language as better you know the language as freer you can deal with it and you can play with it if you don't know the language if you're always in the reactive mode rather than the active mode you can't you can't play play play with it right and so you spend years and years and years and years of learning and understanding i i always tell my students um when you play the piano it's not just the act the act of pressing down the key consciously it is also the conscious act of releasing the key so you you act and you react right you breathe in you breathe out and it's very easy to forget that but what is absolutely crucial is to understand that in at least with music yes there were great composers in the past who wrote great pieces and great masterpieces etc etc etc we all know that but without us the the artists who are alive today in the year 2020 literally music would not exist music from the past so we can talk about the great you know the great composers of the past if a musician doesn't press down a key that's what you hear absolutely nothing and so we are the enablers we fill you know this information we have on the piece of paper with life if this is not an invitation to creativity i don't know what what else can possibly be emanuel you're not into that so you recognize that even probably in science yes indeed indeed yeah surely i recognize this in science i mean yes the basics we understand you can teach the basics how do you teach the creativity and it's so vital to what you're both doing and your successes so maybe emmanuel how do you think you can foster that creativity yeah i think what is important in science is to to understand that one should not be too much bound to the dogma so one has to be ready to to the unexpected and i guess in the case of chris barr you know for example when we published the first article of the story in nature i had not met my collaborators so this was maybe helpful because we were not influenced and we were free to to think we wanted it was also a new field of of research and so it was important to know what the others had done so i remember that i read all papers of my colleagues and i knew them by heart but it was about to figure out what could be novel uh in the system that i was working and what was not shown by others so it want us to have the global picture and then one it's also to be uncertain in a way because the uncertainty allows to have an hypothesis a plan a b and c uh then we do an experiment maybe ah we are not in the right direction we switch so this is what uh the way i approached uh the in general project together with my students and postdocs so it's important to to always take a step back come back um as igor mentioned one it's important to to to do this in um in a free mind uh when you feel that you're free to go from left to right the goal is important the global picture the goal but it's it involves a lot of failure i guess a composer is the same or someone who you know like ego or pianist who will try to reproduce a piece it's a lot of you know try and fail and yeah when you when you said um let go of the dogma igor reacted and um you know what was your reaction when you heard her say that because you recognize that well one of my if not my greatest house god the composer pianist thinker writer ferocious buzzoni was only wrote that the aim the purpose and in a way the job description of a creative person is to set up your own rules and not to follow just to follow by the rules of the others and if you just follow the rules made by others you literally stop being creative and you stop being a creator and then he goes on and says and once you set up a certain rule and once you realize oh here's a rule i achieved something break it apart immediately and start anew because because this is sort of the other the other kind of death of creativity is the acceptance of a status quo and um and both in in a creative sense in the artistic sense but also to be honest in a um in a day in my daily life and my idea what what sort of political togetherness and what societal questions are i think the single most one of the most dangerous things is to accept status quos and if if anything this time we live in teaches us that there is no such thing as status quo right and so um you asked before how do you teach that just remind day after day after day time and again you are the creator without you there is no music without you there is silence without you there is no society worth is there for you to shape it do it and emanuel you know in science we get critiqued all the time and we also get a lot of um negatives how do you persevere over that and holding on to some of these unusual ideas just to go forward yeah it is true i think this is most likely what the public does not know really we it's it's uh it's it's a strange uh let's say field where we we are constantly judged and constantly criticized and and uh you know rarely uh awarded i have to say for what we are doing i think what i try also to tell my students and postdocs is that you know it's very very critical that they they foster this kind of you know self-satisfaction and positivity positivism that allow them to cope with you know with the criticisms and and the judgments and this is really important and i guess uh this is maybe what is challenging in a creative setting because uh for sure uh the creativity does not come like this right away so you have to go to these phases where maybe you wonder where you go and whether you will achieve something and you know and then at some point you see the light uh you know at the end of the tunnel so i think but it's important to be self you know self-happy happy about oneself well unfortunately we're gonna have to come to the end of this dialogue but the one thing i recognize in both of you is the conviction and belief and the ability to move beyond the dogmas and see what's out there on the horizons so thank you both for this dialogue thank you okay thank you very much what can neuroscience teach us about learning the next panel will give us some more insight into that uh we'll hear martin invad professor of integrative medicine at karolinska institute and bruce mccandless professor at stanford university talking to moderator adam smith [Music] martin ingvar bruce mccandless welcome bruce let me start with you what insights are we now getting from neuroscience that tell us how we should be teaching and learning well at the large scale i think that we're starting to appreciate how this period from early elementary school through adolescence is a period of profound changes in the human brain we're just starting to grapple with the brain is being shaped and rewired and growing in strength and abilities in all sorts of novel ways this is at the same time during this period of life children's access to high quality educational opportunities is having a profound impact on overall human flourishing quality of life uh even longevity we're trying to understand how these two things are linked and i think most of the action that i'm most excited about right now is by studying the week week-to-week struggle that children go through in productive learning inside education there are now numerous studies that are actually combining the dynamics of an effective educational intervention with brain plasticity studies to see how guiding a child through an educational experience like overcoming barriers and learning to read or overcoming barriers in learning mathematics can actually drive changes in very particular brain circuits i think this provides a new form of collaboration between education and brain science which might help drive new innovations we're starting to begin to understand new principles of how is it that learning to read a cultural invention emerges in the human brain what are the precursors what are the processes of integration why do some children struggle so profoundly if we address this question at multiple levels educational level at the same time systems neuroscience level i think we're going to make we're already starting to make great progress fascinating thank you martin inga let me ask you the same question well to me one of the things that have emerged over the last decades or so is that how wrong we built our school i mean school is a very late artifact and the biology is very old and we know very well that learning together and having a leader for the earlier earlier phases of learning are profoundly important with imitation and social guidance etc and we yet we have pushed this individual learning types of paradigm all the way down and the only kids that thrive there are the ones that have a very strong home so we've actually created on industrial scale full social full width over society a school that actually actually is a machine for inequity and it's really upsetting when we when we look at it and it's all written in in in with big letters in neuroscience that the social dimension of learning is so underestimated when it comes to the pedagogical leadership and the ability to to guide people and bridge them in an area where they're cognitively are very insecure do you think that the shift that we're all experiencing to online learning as a result of well natural progression anyway an expansion of education to those who can't necessarily access it in other ways but now accelerated intra enormously by the pandemic do you think that's compatible with this sort of approach that you're talking about or is it um in fact working against what you're trying to see as a change uh it tends to and the data data are clear the it tends to make it even worse worse for kids we challenge social socio-economic challenged kids very very simple the closeness the the the my eyes are on you it matters to me that you are doing well as a student happens to be the most central central part of the early early parts of learning learning how to become a student learning how to learn all about that all of that is a social it's a social drama that every kid has to go through bruce yeah i agree that i think that this shift to perhaps lower quality educational access for many many children and reduced access to that is having a profound exacerbation of all of these inequities that we see we think that the development of brain structures for the foundations of future learning such as reading critical thinking and mathematics are profoundly linked to powerful educational environments in which kids are motivated to engage in productive struggle guided to the right material and having helping somebody focus their mind on just the most important things we know that this leads to a cascade of changes in their brain structures to help them wire their brains up for success this shift to online learning is providing some opportunities for very robust highly skilled learners to engage in more independent pathways for learning but it's also having a dramatic impact on children who really need that social guidance and that kind of culture of engagement that schools produce and as many of our children kind of learn on smartphones these days and things what does what is our knowledge of brain pro of of the processing in the brain tell us about how distracting it can be or how how um how negative it could be to have the distractions of a smartphone when you're learning even uh i mean just having a the smartphone in the room actually is disturbs you i mean creating a real thought it's about a seven minutes process when you look at it neurochemically and it's about you know like a one two hour process when it comes to training and really settle that memory which means that the the time span of creating uh the imprint necessary in order to create the basis for further thinking uh it's disturbed and and it's like having an army where a hundred soldiers walk in random direction they walk essentially in average nowhere so the neurons don't settle that new learning when you're disturbed too often bruce please um i think that these new technologies these pervasive multiple screen devices offer tremendous new opportunities for kids to engage in technology in new ways that are going to prepare them for a new future that current schooling hasn't even imagined but at the same time i think there's huge pitfalls that need guide rails we know that children that are prone to distraction tend to really uh engage in these multiple devices in ways that are destructive to learning and actually impair their ability to learn compared to a more focused environment without so many possibilities for distractions so i think that you know as we unleash this large uncontrolled experiment of pervasive access to screens for all day long in education i think we need to figure out what are the what are the guardrails that children need to engage this technology productively and then what are the principles by which they could harness these new opportunities and as a last thought the the the environment you describe bruce ware you have educationalists talking to neuroscientists and many different people involved in trying to come up with the right system sounds complicated to produce very briefly how do you make that coalition work well myself and many others are starting to drive radical collaborations between neuroscience laboratories and actual living schools and classrooms and bringing the neuroscience to children and some research has suggested that when children are exposed to the very idea that their brain is plastic and it's changing with all of their learning experiences on a week to week basis they tend to persist more in challenging learning environments and so i think this is an incredible opportunity to do this at an even deeper level by having children have access to being able to see and experience and watch their brains change over time as they go through schooling it's a lovely idea to have them to have the the participants really involved in the experiment thank you thank you both very much indeed thank you although we as human beings of course learn from the very day we are born a lot of our learning is done within the framework of school education andreas steisha is director for education and skills at oecd and a lynn goodwin is dean of faculty of education at the university of hong kong we will now start with the short talk by director schleicher and then he will join dr goodwin in a discussion led by corinne claussen [Music] warmly welcome lynn goodwin and andreas schleicher before we start our discussion on the future of school education we will have a brief introduction from you andreas so please okay so take technique is failing us but let's continue anyway um we if we're talking about the future of the education systems um i guess my guess is that the ideal education system is well anchored in the presence should be relevant and adapted to the needs of society but how do we prepare for the future how do we predict a society that is yet to be developed thank you so much and uh hello to everyone um i'm going to start my um comment with by borrowing something from esther d flo um one of the the nobel prize winners um in economics and i was struck by a comment that she made where she says good economics does not assume a conclusion but is willing to question assumptions at every turn in light of new evidence and so i want to sort of um use that saying um to say that good education also um good schools should not assume a conclusion either but must cultivate skills in learners to keep asking questions and searching searching for creative solutions so the reality is that you know we've never been very good at you know schools educators at predicting the future um so the constant focus that we have right now on trying to imagine what future trends would be and using education to meet them may have us sort of looking in the wrong direction especially since if we look backwards history indicates that education has always been much better at sort of reacting to future as it arrives rather than predicting what lies ahead so i think that we have to think about educating for ways of thinking and doing and acting and being that are enduring and can enable young people to pivot and adapt as the future arrives um and that includes you know pivoting and adapting today um we are we actually have you know some um ideas about how to do this and the reality is is if we could enact those ideas um we could actually you know sort of equip young people with the sort of open-ended skills that they need to uh be ready for an uncertain future you know we talk a great deal about 21st century competencies we're 20 years into the 21st century and we are still sort of reaching for those skills such as collaboration or critical thinking um the the the fact is that even though we are focused on these competencies and we talk rhetorically about them all the time we have not been able to realize them or actualize them so in some ways if we could do what we say is important to do we would already be sort of ready for the future along with our students the second thing i i would say is that um because schools are better but only by comparison you know to you know responding to emerging needs i would like you to suggest that one thing we ought to do um as we think about schooling for the future is to help young people imagine the future they would want and to help them work towards that so rather than thinking the future is murky and blurry and i don't know what it's going to look like to say what do i want my future um to um to be for me and for my community and for my family and all for my and for my friends and to help young people play an important role in shaping that future um the future that is inclusive and safe um and kind um to everyone um we we have lost andreas into space so so we will continue and hope that he will come come back to us but but oh maybe we have uh reached him now we'll see um to continue lynn with the premises uh for education systems around the world they they do differ uh and and uh does a sustainable education system in the future require some sort of a foundation um like democracy equality um basic human rights economic stability is there a ranking order in what's uh what's needed to come first that is very hard question um i think that um because there are so many um important issues um that we need to uh to solve um to faith um to manage um to imagine um as a society and um you know young people are the ones who will take care of that um we are not myself i'm i'm an example of a person who will not necessarily be part of that future certainly for as long as they will be um so i think rather than trying to decide what's more important the first thing is to bring young people into the conversation because there is a lot of um there's a lot of anxiety um amongst young people i mean there there is now a phenomenon called climate anxiety um they are um as a a a wonderful early childhood teacher uh once characterized their students all our young people are in the world stu um they are listening they are observing they are participating in their own ways they are receiving lots of information and what they need is thoughtful of doubts to help them make sense of it and thoughtful adults to help them activate um their agency um so that they can be part of the solution so that they can decide what the issues are that they want to focus on the the and you know sort of the the antidote to um anxiety and fear and uncertainty is to feel powerful to feel agent to feel as though you can take action and that you can be part of the solution so can we solve everything at once no will there be some things that will present themselves as more critical than others that will happen as well but i think the key is going back to your notion of a foundation is how we support and nurture tomorrow's citizens in ways that will allow them to kind of meet whatever comes with agility with creativity with courage and with um you know sort of ways of working um together but also ways of working that we haven't even thought of yet uh i do think we have andreas with us now very welcome andreas well uh nice to to see you and to hear you uh we are discussing uh the the future of school education as you well know and we talked a little bit about the capacities of the the future teachers what is needed in the future and how much can we predict the future if we look at high performing education systems today is there something that we could use as a role model for for the future to come what do you say andreas well you know i think what is high performance today may not be high performance tomorrow i think the future will be different i think the one thing we figured out all in this tuple and times is that schooling is no longer just about teaching students something now it's about helping them about developing uh more reliable compass and their tools to navigate through this increasingly complex volatile world throughout their their lives and i'm not sure every any education systems is yet prepared for this in a way so success in schooling today is about building curiosity curiosities about opening minds it's about compassion opening hearts and it's about courage mobilizing our cognitive social and emotional resources to take action and those are also going to be probably our best bet against the biggest threats of our times the ignorance the closed minds or hate the closed heart and fear the enemy of agency if you think around those lines our current metrics of you know success for schools are probably not enough to to get us there but clearly those education systems that have built very strong foundation skills that have made teaching not just financially but intellectually attractive that have moved away from the very industrial organization of work towards a more professional organization of work where teachers are you know great designers of innovative learning environments where they are great coaches great mentors great facilitators clearly those education systems do have an advantage and you find them in northern europe you find them in asia you find them you know in canada so i think there is something to build on but i would not say that success today is going to be a guarantee for success tomorrow what uh what challenges do you see in creating this new uh education system yeah you know the the challenges that building sort of the kind of cognitive social emotional qualities that are going to account for tomorrow requires a very different you know learning environment in a way you know our school systems got very good at educating second-class robots you know people are very good at repeating what we tell them but you know in this time of artificial intelligence we need to think harder what what enables us to be human it requires a different approach to teaching and learning where teaching was about imparting prefabricated knowledge you know governments could simply tell teachers exactly what to do using this very industrial organization of work today again the challenge is to make teaching a profession of advanced knowledge workers who work with a high level of professional autonomy and at the very same time there's a collaborative culture learning from their colleagues and those people you know don't like to work as exchangeable widgets in schools that are organized like assembly lines so attract the people they need modern school systems need to transform the war organization so that professional norms replace the kind of administrative and bureaucratic structures that we have today the past was about you know received wisdom the future is about user generated wisdom and you know teachers who build their careers solely based on knowledge transmission will face the same fate as truck drivers you know in a world of automated vehicles i think that's really what we need to keep in mind we need to see the emergence of a new profession also the past was divided you know with teachers and content neatly divided into subjects and students separated by expectations about their future careers schools were designed to keep students inside and the rest of the world outside with a lack of engagement of families a reluctance often to partner in network with other schools and the future needs to be a lot more integrated in this and last but not least you know the in if in the past schools were technological islands with technology conserving existing practice rather than transforming it and students were always outpacing schools in their adoption of technology in the future schools need to use technology to liberate learning from past conventions and connect learners in very very different ways and that is really i think a very different work organizations we're talking about now time is running out thank you so much lynn goodwin and thank you so much andreas um for joining us here thank you thank you thank you very much thank you thanks to carlin and the panel now there are great comments keep coming in from you the audience so we'll share some more of them santosh sisolikar writes science and arts share the same basic nature identifying and playing with patterns in the nature andreas michalski creativity is learnable when will this be a school subject luis alonso salcedo creativity and freedom can be found once you open the door of art and science malatandon children need to be given the opportunity to explore and experience charles white learning can be enhanced by removing the fear of failure this inspires creativity and provides courage to navigate the unknown and malini rahendran distance learning is going to be the driver of creating an equitable society thank you all and those of you who log into webcast please keep them coming send your comments in write them in the box right next to the ear on opening the minds of young people and teaching them to be critical thinkers here are volley so inca noble laureate in literature in 1986 and leima bowie nobel peace prize laureate in 2001 11 sorry in the power of knowledge learnings from a literature and peace laureate usually people say knowledge is power and it's true and when people talk about education unfortunately today is basically focusing on just the classroom but i think beyond the classroom how we're able to open the minds of ourselves and young people to be critical thinkers you have indoctrination you know in which people are not encouraged to use their minds real education is critical in my information the ability to look at more than one aspect of an issue so really and truly that education that will make a person to to have more compassion to have more humanity is the kind of education that the world needs that's what i understand by education and that requires of course really educated minds to be able to bring about that formulation of the mind especially in young people now we will meet mary beard professor of classics at university of cambridge mary will be talking to the ceo of nobel prize outreach laura's freshman on the topic what can classic teach us [Music] mary beard i'm thrilled to speak with you you have given the classics a public engagement and interest so my first question to you would be why do classics matter they matter because they're part of the past that i think we have to go on talking to and they're part of a past which has formed the present now you know look uh nobody would say that even in the west um the only ancestor western culture has is a greco-roman one that is simply not true but it is a very important one and as it were to cut that off not to look at it any longer always seems to me kind of the equivalent of a very nasty amputation it would be like culture and thinking cutting off its leg and deciding not to use it any longer um it's it's part of us still renegotiated re-debated and still exciting very much so and and so what could we learn from the past and and should we find the connections to now or is it just interesting by itself well i i think you you learn if you look at the past you learn about the past but just as important and probably more important is that you learn about the present too and you learn about why you think as you do and i think that it would be impossible now for us to understand our engagement or debates or differences about democracy imperialism racism without someone being able to open up the history of those debates which go back to the fifth century bc or even before you know you're you're learning about why it is you have come to talk about things that matter in the way you have is that normally do you see that that way when you watch people discussing on tv you see sort of as recurring themes that that we just that have been around we approach them in different ways i mean i mean in some ways yes thank heavens we've come on a bit since the greeks and romans you know i don't i don't think that that the ancient world has got lessons to teach us in any kind of very direct way and i don't think it's relevant in a in a very narrow way in a very utilitarian way but i think thinking about the similarities and differences between ancient democracy and our own version of democracy i think makes us better observers and analysts of ourselves as well as the ancient world you know and i think um it you know in some ways the ancient world turns us enables us to see ourselves in a different light and also to think about you know why sexism in the way it remains why racism i mean i think you've got to go back to classical antiquity if you really want to understand that otherwise it's an impoverished understanding a very presented understanding but you know i don't think you can be classics you're buried in the past far from it you know you you know you're partly looking at the past but more you're looking at us and trying to make us better citizens really that's very well put what what drew you into studying classics was it exactly that was it sort of a hunger for understanding or was it anything else [Music] i wish i could claim that i really i would love to say that when i was a kid i wondered what liberty was and and found all my way back to cicero um in fact it was archaeology that drew me in it was a sheer romantic pleasure of knowing that five miles from my home in england there was a roman villa that i helped dig up and you know i picked up that coin that no one had touched for 2 000 years you know i held it in my hand and so my first engagement i have to confess was um a visceral and emotional and the sheer excitement of touching the past um i still have a bit of that too you know still exciting and that's probably the best entry point into learning right sort of a natural curiosity and and then sort of a passion it sounds like it when you describe it yeah i mean i i think you know i challenge anybody to go to pompeii and herculaneum and look at those very those tragically buried cities and not actually to feel up an emotional wonderment about them first but after that wonderment has gone uh to feel a sense of an obligation really to the past and to us to find out more about them you know and it takes you you know in all kinds of different ways you know and i think that look there isn't there hasn't been a single day for two thousand years when someone has not been reading virgils and eared you know and that's because it's eye-opening and it's really worth reading and it helps us engage not just with the greeks and romans it helps us engage with the people who came before us and read virgils and you know it it's our connection with dante among other things um so or homer and james joyce you know it's it's about a cultural embeddedness and a cultural critique really this is not i don't admire the ancient world you know i don't want to be a greek or roman i'm really pleased i live in the 21st century and i think in all kinds of ways the greeks and romans were horrible but they so stimulated a whole chain of thinking and a tradition of thinking that you know we can't lose that we might do better than it but we can't lose it and it certainly triggers our imagination as well sort of to to to uh think about how it was and and um and think about our presence so i i unfortunately i need to wrap it up but you certainly triggered my imagination so well thank you for this wonderful conversation mary beard thank you thank you thank you thank you mary and laura now we take a short break and for those of you logged into webcast we will divide the group into three separate breakout tracks you can either stay here in track one or you can choose to join tracks two or three in all three tracks they will we will be inviting questions from the audience by text and in tracks two and three there was also be a possibility to ask questions via video track 1 features a panel discussion on the theme of learning for sustainable future track 2 will feature a q a with three laureates and this one is designed specifically for a student audience with questions for nobel laureates and finally track three consists of a q a with some of the nobel week dialogue participants that you have already met in the program more information into webcast and first a three minute [Music] break [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] do [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] welcome everybody to this breakout session my name is julian zerath and i'm a professor of physiology at the karolinska institute and a member of the nobel assembly and i have three panelists that i'm going to introduce to you and we're going to have a lively discussion so we first have irna bokova and she was the first woman to act as the director general of unesco where she was engaged in the un efforts to adopt the agenda 2030 for sustainable development we also have esther dofo who received the 2019 nobel prize the prize in economics for her experimental approaches to alleviating poverty and her research is seeking to understand the economic lives of the poor with the aim to help design and evaluate social policies and we also have john holmberg with us he's a professor of physics resource theory at chalmers university of technology in gothenburg sweden and so i just want to explain the format and then the point of this is to have a discussion around learning for a sustainable future the other element of this session is to have a q a with members of our audience so i'll start out with a discussion with the panel and for people who are watching and viewing it's already good to start to formulate questions you're going to see a box on the right hand of your screen and you can put your questions to the panelists but i thought i'd take it in three parts so the first part would be i would ask uh internet to give sort of a framework um from what she has learned from her work with agenda 2030 and to frame some of the important questions for learning for a sustainable future and then i want to turn to john and i'd like to give you the opportunity to share some experiences you have with the challenge lab that you have set up in at chalmers and then esther i'll have you share some thoughts about perhaps some solutions you know how can we solve some of these challenges and perhaps some of your own experiences how you can use that to help us look forward so with that um you're not maybe i could just give you the floor and you could share some thoughts with us about what are some of the important things we need to be thinking about with 2030 and how we can you know learn for a sustainable future well first of all thank you for this opportunity to participate in this panel uh and the week and focus on education uh as somebody who was very active in all the debates about agenda 2030 and particularly on the goal number four on education on inclusive equitable and quality education and lifelong learning for all it was very important to inscribe this formulation about education in the global agenda and it was for the first time and there were many firsts uh in in the goal number four uh one of the first was also education for sustainable development i'm very happy to see ho also in this panel uh professor holmberg who is one of the first i think unesco chairs on education for sustainable development and has accompanied the united nations decade uh from 2006 to 2014 and nowadays to look at education and learning i think learning uh also is important to emphasize as the foundation of the achievement of a sustainable development agenda because education it isn't i just listened to the debate it's a passion at the fascinating debate education indeed is about no poverty it is about gender equality it is about health it is about climate change it is about decent jobs inequalities and i can continue the list so my first point is that education for sustainable development is vital for the future my second point is uh and i will try to be very brief my second point is that uh with the covet 19 we are in a crisis because the pandemic and the lockdowns uh were a big blow to educational efforts there was already a learning crisis and now we add another one it is very important to look at it and to see how we overcome inequity in education how it may make it inclusive and the third is very much linked to the second is about the digital we are fascinated by the digital there are a lot of opportunities incredible opportunities for innovation but how to make it inclusive how to give all children access to the digital platforms and to the good quality digital platforms i think nowadays is vital otherwise we will have a lost generation and we don't want to have this for the future of our sustainable types of development well i think you made some excellent points and um one of the most important things you're saying is that lifelong learning we will be students from basically the time where we're coming into this world until the time we leave this world um john you're doing a lot of work with a challenge lab in gothenburg and i thought perhaps you know you could share with us some of the work that you have on going there you very much for giving me the opportunity to do that and i also want to thank you for this excellent program today i have learned so much and i can subscribe to to be seen as a student to to support students to learn while creating value for society rather than just talk about the problem and i'm also moving back behind the dogmas in schools and maybe also i will and i will particularly address a different approach to learning that we might need to rethink a little bit what we're doing in schools and elsewhere when it comes to learning and gregory bateson he suggested three levels of learning the first level is about doing things better almost all learning that is done in schools cooperation municipalities and elsewhere only reach this first level we act as we are on the right path and are trying to improve what we already do focus on getting the right answers and avoiding mistakes you often have the feeling of being controlled and measured by people that think they are in control and we can call this the cruise mode for transformation i think we need to reach the second and third level of learning that is what we are trying to do then in shannon's lab and it can be seen as an expedition compared to this cruise mode while the first level of learning is focusing on solutions the second level is about doing better things here we instead stay with the problem and ask why we have the problem and what the big picture look like entering the field of system thinking is about addressing the right problem before searching solutions and often the solution is to be fined somewhere else than the first thought a really good expedition also reached the third level and that is seeing things differently but reconceiving is difficult it is hard to learn if you already know so in challenge lab we therefore think that we these three level of outside in learning needs to be supported with an inside out learning and inside art learning start with the recognition that we are that i am part of the system i think to change as pointed out by peter sengei it is a reflection on my most important values in life which give me direction is also a reflection of my perspectives david bohm said we do not describe the word we see but we see the word describe and it's also about my willingness to listen to others and challenge my assumption and goals asking how can i be wrong about this rather than seek to be right so transform our world we need more expedition and system thinking in schools and in all kinds of organization not instead of growth mode but as an important complement and maybe the motto we have it borrowed from your encore stat and using challenge lab can be useful think big start small and act now to be part of something i think those are good points to reflect on um esther i want to turn to you because we really need to move into action and um it's one thing to have grand ideas but we also want to ensure that we move forward with these ideas and you know you've been so incredibly successful in your work so how do you see us moving forward um how do we actually move from ideas to action to reality we actually don't hear you esther no we still are i think you're still on mute so we're we're still missing you here i think now all right i will hold on to that thought and i will um take one of the questions that we have from our audience esther um can you try once again esther i think i'll astral hold on to that and i'll take a question from our audience um one of the questions that we have is is learning um is learning to influence politicians and others essential for sustainability and i think perhaps john you touched a little bit upon that um and i can hear esther too so we'll let john answer this question then we'll come back to esther but is learning to influence politicians and others essential for sustainability john or or arena any thoughts around that we need to teach the politicians as well is that essential yeah but i i of course everyone but maybe the most powerful thing is not to teach but to learn so asking questions might be stronger actually than trying to teach and convince to invite them to conversation and ask a relevant question they have to answer to and and try to figure out how the system works together rather than trying to convince me right okay that is my short answer just to say one go ahead go ahead important question i don't think teaching them but holding them accountable okay uh and i could say from my perspective of international organization uh it is important that governments politicians are held accountable to what they have been agreeing speaking about the thing about development the gender climate and all the others okay all right well i think that's a good point and um you know there is a lot of buy-in so then there needs to be sort of action so um esther we can move back to you i think you're coupled in now yes that's great sorry um so i actually maybe i respectfully disagree with the not teaching them i actually think that once you hold them accountable and once there is willingness to to act on improving education then there is a ton of things politicians don't know policy makers i would say don't know and that there are no things we don't know and in fact over the last 30 years there have been considerable progress in education in some ways with now almost everywhere except in in countries that really were termed most kids going to school at least for the primary levels and we're also making progress on the secondary level but where they have a complete stalling of progress is on learning that they are going to school and then they are not learning anything so for example in india they they can about half of the kids who have gone to school till the end of primary school can read at the first grade level and that's not isolated for india it's something you're finding from country after country after country so the real crisis is learning and it's of course was learning until covet hit and now of course it's like demultiplied by the fact that the by the fact that the sorry it's the uh by the fact that the the uh the kovid crisis hit and the reaction of most countries in developing in developing countries was to keep a student home as it was in rich countries but for most developed countries they haven't gone back and there is not yet a definite plan for how they are going to come back so it's an extremely long interruption and it's a crisis on top of a crisis now it could also be an opportunity for action precisely because one of the big problem of leading to the lack of learning in schools was the attempt in many developing countries to teach a unified curriculum to everyone regardless of what the what they come up with their support system how much they they could be helped at home and there is a lot of diversity in the classroom that was not reflected by diversity in the way that the teaching goes and this uniform elitist elite bias teaching coupled with by diversity of levels meant that most kids were actually completely lost in the classroom which is why they understood nothing so with the covet crisis we arrive at a situation where this is going to be the same problem multiplied by thousands because people would have had very very different experience in during the the crisis itself and it's an opportunity for policy makers to say okay what can we how do we address this do we go back to try to teach the same curriculum or do we try and do something different and that's where the teaching can happen not us teaching them but like experiences from one place to move to another places learning from what works and what doesn't work in a rigorous way so the way you get action is by you know trying something as john said you tried small trying something evaluate it rigorously and if it works uh scale it up all right well one of the that was an excellent point and in fact one of the questions we receive from the participants is sort of dovetailing right into this so in a world where communities struggle to meet basic needs how would you persuade governments to place education as a top a top priority um and um you know is anybody there want to jump to this one how do you persuade the governments go ahead arena well uh i have confronted many times this question saying that education is very expensive it's complicated there are other urgent needs but we all know that if you try ignorance we see the devastating result in many societies i do believe that those countries and those societies those are getting out of crisis much better and much faster whatever crisis natural disaster conflict and others when kids go to school if they don't go to school there is no normalcy in the community there is a lot as we say generations for the future and there is no way other sustainable development goals or other problems in societies can be can be solved so um i think investing in education is one of the best investments that a government can make in order to get out of the crisis john do you want to add to that i also want to say that unesco also this week celebrates the 60 years anniversary of this uh treaty the right to education so it's so so extremely important i i i and and when that is what unesco really do best to put pressure on on nations and i i enjoy that very much another thing that i really enjoyed in unesco was actually when i went to a meeting and when you had a photo gallery on the wall around unesco headquarters in paris each one big photo for one student on his on her way to school i think the photo gallery was called journeys to school it was so fantastic uh do you remember that i must have a lot we opened it in new york at the headquarters of the united nations and then we made a big publication i think it was beautiful to see in all different circumstances children intense so much about just what your choice all the emotion and all everything so it was fantastic yeah well action is really important and people are really burning for that and um another question that we receive from our audience is you know we need to act now but what action do we need from young people that was a question we talked about government's role but what action do we need from people on the you know citizens young citizens who are looking at their future esther yes i'm very happy to answer this question because i've worked with a wonderful movement education movement in india called pratham which gives us really an example of how to use the young people the older brother and sisters in the communities to help their younger siblings to learn and basically going back to the fact that the central problem of school is that people are getting there they have a right to an education but they are not actually learning one way that they can learn is if we go and teach at the right level so if a kid arrives in grade five and is not able to read it's not because they are not able to it's because nobody has stood them yet and that is something that the older sister and and brothers can do in fact we have evaluated on large scale and unskilled and then pratham has killed across millions of children in india and now in africa these models where this is the older kids in the community after a very short training who go back to the school and help the teacher with forming little groups for the kids to be able to teach to learn exactly at the level where they are and once they are caught up they can go back to the curriculum so if there is a willingness again and an ability to do that with policy makers which i think they might be post-covered then they will be needing a lot of young people to participate in this movement yeah and i think that's really exciting because people it's very gratifying to be able also to see the fruits of that um as well there's two sides to that the the learning element and also the mentorship aspects that come in as well um there are a lot of questions about covid and one question is could the covet 19 crisis be used to rethink the ways of learning and applying sustainability and we've lost esther but perhaps some we could turn to you john yes it can of course if you have access to the technology but that is the starting point for for many students around the world and also many schools to attack have access to this remote learning technology but if you have it is of course a huge opportunity to have a meet we have had meetings with the students in south africa just a couple of weeks ago and that worked fantastic it was as they were in the room so so they're open up also possibilities they will open up possibility to flip classrooms so you you get the presentation uh before you meet and then you have discussion and dialogues when you meet so that is a possibility of course my may i also just add to what sdl said i totally agree with teaching at the right level and and relates to ryan and decky when they talk about intrinsic motivation right competence level is important but they also talk about two hour levels uh factors that is important for creating this intrinsic motivation about students to make them active and that is to give them a space where they are seen and and are trusted to even make mistakes and and that space needs to be feel they have to feel the safety so it's okay to make mistakes and it's at some point it's also some meaning in that space as so they contribute to something that is bigger and if you just create the space it's my my experience is that students fill that space very quickly quickly and we you can just support them and facilitate them but we don't dare really to make it give them the space and that is a problem i think okay well that's important as well we're coming up to where we need to start to round off but i do want to ask one other question here to arena and it's um you've worked a lot on goal four but there's a lot of questions related to goal five achieving gender equity and empowering women and girls and one of the questions come up is you know how do we actually break down the disparity between males and females um women and children girls and boys in terms of education and science and engineering so i thought maybe you could share a few thoughts on that as i said uh the sustainable development agenda the goals are very intrinsically linked they're interdependent they're very very close and definitely goal number four and five are there in order to empower women to give girls the opportunity to go to school and also to have inclusive education i think one of the most important is to look at what are those impediments that do not give the right to education of girls be it because of poverty because of belonging to minority because the lack of safe schools because of stereotyping i think this is the beginning the second of course is to create an enabling environment girls will go to school if there is an enabling environment there may be the respective laws but there is no such such support from a community or from from from a family and i have probably visited schools in 50 countries and i have seen how important this enabling environment is there and the other side of the question as you mentioned is about girls and stem education girls and mathematics girls as we say in esteem education nowadays because it's also about arts about creativity i think it is extremely important to once again to look at how we can change the perception about girls in the new technology so unesco published last year a very interesting report about artificial intelligence intelligence and gender biases i think if we don't look at this particular aspect of now we will build this uh stereotyping into the artificial intelligence and it will be reproduced for the future we should not allow this to happen okay all right uh final word esther just briefly um any thoughts for the future moving to action i think we have to go back to what the arena started with which is if we if this cohort this current cohort is sacrificed we are going to pay the cost of the covet crisis not next year not the next decade but for the next for the foreseeable future so it should really be the priority of everyone in the world to think about how we can now have the kids back in school and once they're back in school back in school and learning and we actually now have a lot of models for how to get it done we discussed one here but there are others that have been proven scientifically that can be adopted and this is the time to empower uh countries financially to do it for countries to be empowered to do it and to uh to to really make it the priority of 2021. all right i think that's a wonderful wonderful thought for us to leave on we need to take action and we need to really think about the future as well what we do today is really going to have a big impact on how we live our world in our world tomorrow so with that i want to thank the panelists it's a pity we couldn't be here but this virtual medicine this virtual magic is really fantastic so have a great afternoon and thanks again for your input [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] welcome back to nobel week dialogue sending live from stockholm and our studio here with participants in different forms coming in from all over the world in london the chief scientific officer nobel priest of nobel prize outreach adam smith hi adam hi lisa and yes welcome back to everybody and it was such a joy to meet some of the audience in the interactive q a session we just had lovely now one thing that's really struck me about the dialogue so far is how the spirit of the dialogue those kind of spontaneous unpredictable discussions that arise when panelists meet panelists have has transcended the limitations of the digital technology that we've all been talking about and indeed flourished the other thing about the limitations is that it makes it hard for us all to watch digital things all the time as francis arnold said earlier you can learn at home but not all the time and so i think there's a we need to congratulate those of you who are still with us and have stuck through the dialogue to this point and i would like us all to give a virtual round of applause to the audience members who are still with us um you'll see more of me at the very end of the meeting but now on with the show and enjoy the next plenary session and back to you lisa in the studio thank you here are a few comments on from today's participants on education in 2020 in the past decade we have already seen digitalization of education in terms of how laptops have replaced books schools and universities have started recording lectures of the professors so that students can always go back and re-watch it adapting to a new academic and social culture is of course a challenge for institutional leaders staff and students this however has also opened up opportunities to develop efforts regarding diversity and inclusion internationalization lifelong learning as well as the issues of co-creation and partnerships with students and society i think that our knowledge and technologies are changing so rapidly that lifelong learning skills and learner-centered product pedagogies will be even more important but as we scale up one of the major challenges that i see is how to ensure that we give all students the support that they need to learn in other words how do we help every student reach their full potential let's hear more from you if you're logged into webcast we really still want your reflections what's one what's being said here today on education use the text field on the side write your comments and we'll get back to some more of them really soon in the next panel you will meet kathy n davidson founding director of the futures initiative mary beard professor of classics of university of cambridge martin invar professor of integrative medicine at caroline's institute and didier kilo nobel prize laureate in physics in 2019 the topic is the future of higher education and moderator is adam smith thank you to the nobel prize committee for hosting this forum on the challenges of education and thank you to all of you in the audience who are taking time out from your very zoomified lives to be here today that means you care and i think there's no subject more important to care about right now than education economist mariana mazucato has said we should be thinking ahead to 2023 in other words hopefully the time when the pandemic is passed and we're thinking about what it means to return to normal but her admonition is we don't want just normal we want to use this crisis to think about what we can do better in education i believe there's lots we can do better we need to be preparing our students for a world of organized misinformation of people worldwide spreading incredible conspiracy theories that cause uh that are designed to incite fascism and populism of theories against science where hundreds of thousands of people are imperiled because they're told that masks don't really do what we know they do um it's a time where we have to have students who are as aggressively prepared for information as we have people organized for misinformation unfortunately the system of education we've inherited was invented in the late 19th century for the research university and was based in a time of assembly lines standardized testing and what lonnie guinea calls the tyranny of meritocracy iq tests multiple choice tests test based on the idea of eugenics and racism and standardization we don't live in a standardized time now um educators call the system of education we have now as sequestered problem solving what a great expression we tell our students we're going to teach them to solve problems and then we sequestered them literally judge them before they come in into a university before they leave our classes before they leave university in a sequestered world where their knowledge is supposed to be limited to what they're learning in a specific class nobody learns that way whether we're a nobel prize winner or trying to find a map to the in a city we're in we all have information at our fingertips but how do we know if it's reliable we should be teaching students to learn how to learn not just memorizing but applying that memorizing in experimental ways creative ways experiential ways trying to move from knowledge to actual behavioral change it's not easy this means active learning and yet we know active learning is works in 2014 the national academy of science commissioned a meta-study of over 235 individual studies of traditional and active learning and their conclusion was if this had been a pharmaceutical study traditional learning would have been taken off the market they then replicated the study for first-generation students low-income students students of color and found it was equally important for the best students and for those least prepared to have active learning as the way they were learning the world it prepared them for their future not our past their future it's a tall order to think of revamping our highly standardized educational systems for active learning by 2023 so i'm going to end with a quote from a late nobel prize winner tony morrison to inspire us to what is certainly a formidable challenge of learning morrison writes this is no time for despair i know the world is bruised and bleeding and though it is important not to ignore its pain it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence like failure chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge and even to wisdom that's our challenge and the challenge of learning thank you cathy thank you so much for that lovely talk and that lovely optimistic ending so welcome to this uh discussion on the future of higher education kathy is joined by three panelists who you have met before earlier in the meeting mary beard martin ingvar and d.d.a kayla so let's get started um cathy's talk was entitled equity and excellence so mary can i ask you do you think that in higher education equity and excellence can go hand in hand well we've got to make sure that they do haven't we that's that's the challenge isn't it you know that we can't be in a position where we say well look i have a very um wonderful version of um higher education um but it can only be given to a few so what we're going to do is give give everybody else the second best that cannot be right and i think the the main challenge for me is to see how the kind of some of the radical old-fashioned ideas in some ways that kathy was coming out with even even though she was presenting them and partly rightly as as a as new i think underneath it it that is the big question and when we have to be prepared for disappointment because we're never going to be in a position where we say oh i think we've got education right now you know um already perfect as it can get if it's a we're destined to disappointment but we've got to try so kathy kathy says we we have to do it better but how will we know whether we've succeeded the trouble is with education is that you can see what you're getting wrong but it's very very hard to know what you're getting right you know um and besides it's a very long lead time you know we're not educating kids or students or ourselves the next year we're educating them not for 2023 we want them to be great citizens in 2053. so you know it's very hard to get a controlled test i think one i think one way that we would know i'd get it right is we've had 60 years of critical race theory and gender theory and yet our academy worldwide has not changed substantially in terms of who is represented in the professoriate now not every student is going to be a professor nor should we be trained training for every student to be a professor but that's one measure we can think about is who are the best students and how are we helping them to thrive and how do they go on to become professors who will train the next generation so that's one simple metric and i couldn't agree more with mary that we will always be destined to failure and maybe that's a good thing i mean i think we learn we do learn from failure we know that and learning how to learn from failure and how to improve is part of our mission martin presumably you agree that higher education cannot continue just as it is very much so i uh i'm just so worried that the isolation of the question about higher education actually lacks the lacks the connection with the pre education that precedes higher education and we have seen all over the the oecd countries how we lost the the socio-economically challenged kids in in school already we have lost the reading ability the focus and the concentration ability and the actual sense of achievement that you get from from the early education experiences and we note when we look at attitudes with our students that that is really a social divider the ones that are that are successful are the ones that know how to learn know how to be a student and that type of practicalness i would call it studentship is something that we need to foster to much greater extent because it's to me it's simple biology it's simple cognitive system hooking into the real world and we really need to foster that and especially now when we go to zoom and go to everything in terms of education we need to foster the practical moment more moments of studies and we need to foster the idea of actually understanding what it is to be a student that's a it's a great predictor of how they're going to do you want to come in well i also think that we mustn't be too self-flagellatory here i mean there are some bits in higher education education in general they're actually really good right you know they're satisfying at both ends you know a student goes on to do great things serving their community with intelligence comes back and says you made me think differently about the world you know and those moments still happen i mean i think the problem that a lot of them are still particularly i don't think in the uk they're still very exclusive moments um they're still socially exclusive they're racially exclusive and the question can i take what we do really well actually i mean i know i said we'll you know we'll never be satisfied but what we do is good how do we spread it how do we share it more equitably [Music] if we focus on the point which has been made throughout the meeting of the the change in learning that's going on now and the good and bad side of the move to online how do you think that is impacting dda your your subject your your students the the teaching of experimental science well there is so much to say about education but there is a couple of very basic facts i think that we all have to acknowledge here the first one is there is no special age for education she never stop and that's something that anybody in my positions uh is every day facing on i keep learning every day and i think we all wire to do that the curiosity is embedded in our brain this is the reason why we are what we are now this being said that's true that we are living kind of strange words because we are in a society which is essentially built on the knowledge base aspects and everything we do the way we communicate the way we just move is absolutely driven by the results of the knowledge that we have built up by the research being done in the past and in global science but at the same time being this the reality we see it was mentioned the kind of disconnect between a fraction of the populations and this knowledge which is easy to get i mean the access to the knowledge has never been so easy to get when you think back 100 years ago while at the same time there is a massive confusions on the way this knowledge is being captured by the society and i think this is really a big challenge for education and there is something maybe education should accept is education never stop you don't finish your education when you leave your school you should keep in a way of being educated through life and it's maybe time for education to break the right tips and to go mainstream and accept that education should be much more wider much more flexible in a way it is being programmed and being installed by the society and and i think this is really the big challenge for the future and we have all the technicality to do that we can do that and by doing that i think we would expand all the fronts we would expand on the access to education to low-income countries to the gender balance aspect it will come in a way with it but we have to break the wall so you still need some high education places to conduct some specific targeted educations but the global education is not it's not about this it's it's every day and i really hope that this kind of situation we're leaving all this new technology will develop this kind of new way to see the education so i'm trying to do my bits by doing a lot of communication aspect the more i can but i think everybody can do it at all level and that would certainly help the global level of understanding of the society where we are and maybe not being afraid by our society and rejecting it and having this kind of counterproductive reactions that we see these days mary would you would you say that your institution cambridge university was afraid of the change or embracing it oh i think we're compressing it from library i think it's probably embracing it a bit too eagerly you know i i i think that um we will never ever go back to what it was like in the old normal and i think there is um a huge commitment to uh to online stuff and i i totally agree that that there's a great way forward there there's a great sharing um students claim to like it um i have a little bit of me that is so old-fashioned that i worry you know i i want to look a student in the eye and make their head hurt because they're trying to think about something they've never thought about before and uh you can't do that online you i challenge anybody to do that online so i worry about the the the two the two track system we might have the online and then privileged places that are partly online but still do that you know looking them in the eye and i don't i think there are worries about this there are online situations that can be pretty challenging like keeping four panelists happy at once martin you wanted to come united i see higher education institutions has been very progressive and very open to change as long as it doesn't change anything we met with radical teachers with good ideas for the future but it's exactly the same today to go back about changing the the social base i mean in my career in cambridge uh the the the gender balance of my university has changed at all recognition it's changed there's been a revolution in 50 years you know so we can do it we don't see any boys here in our university well i think worldwide there are more girls attending university than there are boys this is another another social issue that has a lot of ramifications field specificity though is still um still rather gendered in a number of fields i think there's uneven development in in higher education with some things changing rapidly and other things i would have to agree that seem not to be changing at all and to be very very fully and and vehemently resisted and so we have to resist back maybe i think that's a perfect place to stop unfortunately we run out of time but alright you've done exactly what these panels are all about which is seeding a whole bunch of ideas for people to consider so thank you all very much indeed it's a pleasure thank you thank you thank you very much adam and panel now we'll have one more look at some of the comments from you dirty a blank writes let's start bridging gaps between ages gender ethnicities and cultures absolutely lucia terharkel linking different areas of knowledge will be an important part of learning in the future sofia yarbur learning how to learn is definitely more relevant than memorizing information just paulikas together as a society we should start loving and believing in ideas again and anam fatma what we need to build as educators is a mindset that fosters a lifelong learning everything else will follow thank you great comments now time for a short conversation with constantine novosilov whose work on the extraordinary and by now famous former carbon known as graphene led him to receive the 2010 nobel prize in physics in the second of our art and science segments interview recording clauson curator at nobel prize outreach explores his lesser-known interest in chinese calligraphy and painting [Music] so nice to talk to you constantine novoselov you are a physicist and you receive the nobel prize for groundbreaking experiments regarding the material graphene and you are also a painter are there any similarities between making art and being a scientist uh first of all it's really a great pleasure to be here with you today and uh to be honest it wasn't the reason why i started to do painting i was i just wanted to to to do it all my life and then i had a chance to to to start doing this and i i continue and i enjoy it all the time but this the similarities indeed are indeed there but they're a little bit probably hidden on the on the background and and i would start with the with the fact that both arts and science really rely on on uh inspiration it's very very difficult to understand how or we probably don't don't really notice how a collection of uh of data become a groundbreaking discovery in the same way it's very very difficult to figure out how a craft becomes a mastership becomes becomes art and for me that is it's they the two phenomena are probably well connected unfortunately i still don't know how and what would you say that the differences are well uh i think the the differences are are probably up to it's completely up to you how do you uh how do you want to to to separate them but actually i i probably would would rather say one more or more similarities one one of the reason why i do uh the chinese painting is because i find similarities with the kind of physics i do in the lab it's i do condense metaphysics so it's really it's uh it's it's a lot of uh it's a lot of craft in terms of nano technology works working in the in the clean rooms in the lab and chinese painting it's uh it's a lot of really fine well-defined strokes with your with your brush another similarity uh especially for the chinese painting is the is the reductionism because the chinese the ideal chinese painting of course is the is the uh empty is the empty canvas right so the more brief it is the less your the the less number of strokes you make the more you the more you can say and it's really absolutely impressive to see um how how people can can put five strokes of the of the brush and then say say so much with this but in fact it's exactly the same what we are trying to do in science as well most of the phenomena which we research in our in our everyday work in the lab are extremely complex and the art of the experimentalist is to really separate the phenomena which you are interested in and remove all the unnecessary bits and that's exactly what chinese art do yeah and speaking of minimalism uh graphene is one thin layer of carbon atoms if i understood it correctly so have you ever used graphene in your art well of course yes so graphene is is the thinnest possible material and these days because we go much beyond that we use it as a building block for uh for uh for uh heterostructure uh artificial materials but indeed uh one of them one of the applications of graphene is in imprinted electronics and there are a number of startup companies actually already established companies we which which use printing of the electronic circuits with with grapheme and you would use graphene ink for that so i modified that that graphene ink to to be used for my for my painting it's not functional yet it's uh it's it's it's mainly just to achieve certain shades of gray it has a different uh different uh hydrophobic properties than than the traditional hydrophilic uh chinese ink so you you can achieve certain effects when you mix the the tools so i do use it in my in my painting and you a new material within art fantastic thank you so much constantin novoselo for joining us here today thank you thank you thank you the majority of nobel laureates are of course scientists and many of those think deeply about how to nurture the next generation of scientists here we'll meet three of them in a discussion on teaching science carl wyman nobel prize laureate in physics in 2001 ben ferrinka nobel prize laureate in chemistry in 2016 and donna strickland nobel prize laureate in physics 2018 moderator is adam smith but first carl wyman on lessons from the education science initiative that he set up [Music] in our modern society everyone needs to be scientifically literate and this doesn't mean just knowing facts it really means knowing how to apply the facts and ideas of science to make better decisions decisions about one's personal life and health in their work and in public policy now this is really a new and large educational challenge to achieve this but fortunately we have major advances in research on learning that are giving us guidance on how to accomplish this this research is revealing much better ways to teach science particularly the university level and particularly teaching people to make decisions using that science and this kind of research involves doing experiments collecting data developing concepts doing controlled experiments like so we get results like shown in this graph of comparing different teaching methods so really very much like doing more traditional areas of science and at one level this has really changed our whole paradigm of learning this kind of complex thinking from the old view of you've got this brain and you're filling it up with knowledge and instead what research is showing us is actually what's happening is through educational process when done well you're really transforming the brain changing the wiring in there to giving it new capabilities capabilities to make these better decisions and in this process it's also established expertise a set of practices and principles that when known and implemented consistently produce better learning across many many different studies and this shows there's lots of features all these different boxes contain areas of research that are part of this but together they really give you the idea of how to properly design and implement educational activities to produce greater learning so how do we move this how do we take this research and put it into practice much like medicine faced in 1900s of going from a folk art than any individual sort of did what they felt worked uh to a skilled profession and i like to think of it as we're really trying to make a large scale shift from the pedagogical equivalent of bloodletting to use of antibiotics what research tells us works so i led a big experiment at university of british columbia on trying to do this try to change the teaching across many science departments there and discuss the details in a book but the basic elements of this are we had substantial competitive grants to departments that really provided them then with the individual level with incentives and teaching staff development in these teaching methods in use in their disciplines and some of the most important results is first we showed it was possible we changed entire departments how they taught and hundreds of courses and teaching staff and ended up though with the same cost just much better results in learning we found that when faculty learned to teach this way it took some time but they actually preferred it enjoyed it more but it was essential that at the department and the higher administration level to recognize and support this idea of teaching expertise and the bottom line was they really had to find better ways to evaluate teaching better ways than in practice now so that they can measure and reward expertise thank you well thank you very much indeed carl and now for the discussion on teaching science um i'm happy to be joined by two further nobel laureates and teachers of science ben ferringa and donna strickland both of whom you've met earlier in the day um so um having heard carl's talk ben let's start with you have you any reflections yeah i'm not sure if i uh fully grab what is meant by teaching science as folk art which was just mentioned but definitely you know teaching not only facts but think in terms of concepts you know and what this fact means and analyzing that and that is i think a very important message you know and we should strongly advocate that it is about how to learn uh how to use things what is the value of information the quality of information and try to to translate that in concepts principles that you can apply to different problems i think that is essential um in the current environment where so much teaching is having to be done online do you think that the sort of approach that's talked about where you really have to get to grips with the problems is easier or more difficult no it's way more difficult i have the experience now because at the moment i'm teaching also and i must say that i'm in the natural sciences and their experiments are extremely important of course eh we train with our students to go to the process of discovery and i think it is so important there and for for instance when you teach only via the internet it's extremely difficult to have practical causes to to do this kind of discovery etc so i think we have to do something there to uh to change it for instance to make programs where the students learn more this practice of using information and then go to a problem step by step and get this feeling of discovery i think that is really important and to do experiments either in the lab but if that's not possible do the experiments fire for instance computer games uh other ways i think there are great programs that we could uh could make to get them engaged in this uh whole scene of doing experiments and discovery it's nice that you use this word of discovery because i suppose everything one learns along the in any teaching course is a personal discovery and it's not always portrayed in that way it's not just a fact yeah you have to be very careful there because if it's just a summary of facts yeah it is not what you want to to teach or what you want to engage with with your students you know you want to get with them in this adventure of learning how to use facts how to go to make the steps also to make mistakes that you go into a route where it goes wrong and then you suddenly realize oh i did a misinterpretation i have to go instead of to the left i have to go to the right i think this is important uh for for for education thank you donna please well first i'm happy that carl mentioned the university of british columbia uh because i sort of got involved in this a little bit of being in charge of our undergraduate labs and redeveloping them using these teaching principles and one of the i think first phd grads from the program that i think carl started at ubc is natasha holmes and she's now at cornell and so i took a trip to cornell it's easier than going to bc from where i am um and and we are trying to redo our labs and then of course covet hit but you know there has been some thought put into that and so we've sent little kits to each of the students and has already been said by ben it's about um getting the students to ask the questions it's getting the students to wonder why that is what science is about right and so i i've also heard you know in teaching it was always just five percent of the professor 95 percent the student but in the traditional lecturing um yeah maybe we professors started to think it was ninety-five percent of us and five percent down uh and so yeah it's how to get p how to get the students to go oh i have to wonder why i have to ask why and so we are still doing little labs at home um and then they have to decide if it's a good experiment so it used to be that we thought oh experiments are all about just reinforcing teaching physics concepts and this education or the research into the teaching that carl talked about is really showing that that didn't work you know that what we thought we were doing with the labs wasn't doing what we thought it was at all um and and so why not the lab should be about what does it mean to be an experimentalist why shouldn't they be thinking about oh if this is the question what would make a good experiment and i think a lot of like sorry carry on please carry on well i was just gonna say you know like first year physics is still mechanics uh first term you know so you and we always start with the whole you know box going down the ramp so you don't even have to send a kit pretty much everybody has some piece of flat thing and something they can fly down their ramp if they want to and start asking you know what's a good experiment to determine and how keen are the students to take on this approach do they like it or do they worry about the fact that it's harder to be self-generating carl please um so i mean this is something that i i my group and particularly led by natasha holmes who's worked with me that don has mentioned has studied quite a lot in the introductory labs and we find that this giving students some autonomy some independence they like it much much better they they find it much more rewarding and you know because otherwise it seems like they're just following recipes which of course is boring so this idea that to to just to elaborate on what donna's talking about is when we actually study in detail kind of not just both how the students are engaged and what they're enjoying but also what the thinking they're doing this idea of putting leading them up to decisions about the experiment can they interpret this data what can they conclude how could it be going wrong you know leading them up to but not telling them they have to make those decisions and then see what that means that's a that's both very powerfully motivationally and cognitively in terms of the actions so i'm just using different words but saying much the same as ben and donner are saying but we just studied this in a lot of detail thank you donna sorry you wanted to come in and then ben yeah donna well i didn't want to follow what carl said because also a big part of it and when i visited the labs of cornell what was great is use there was huge discussion there would be groups of three and there usually is when you do labs but they're they're they used to in the old fashioned way would be following sort of a cookie cutter recipe and you didn't see discussion whereas now when you're leaving it up to them again it's more like doing real science as it should be a conversation there should be a give and take and learning from each other and and you just see the students really doing that and i think that's true even in the new ways they're doing the classroom teaching it's about getting students to talk to each other teach each other try to see if you can figure it out and again that's how scientist really ben yeah i i fully agree i strongly advocate also to start early with small research projects and you have to at the undergraduate level of course you have to uh to balance it with with the techniques and and what you what you know but i think it stimulates students enormously and that's my experience if you get them involved in these tiny research projects where they can think themselves they have this level of autonomy but you just mention what was just mentioned and i think working in small groups where they encourage each other and criticize each other and ask questions and i think this working together is also reflected what will happen in real life later when they become advanced students when they come in a research environment they have to work in teams they have to work with people with different backgrounds many of the projects we do in research real life research laboratories is of course with different expertises that's our people talk with with students from different backgrounds and different levels and i think if you start early with that it gives them this spirit and enthusiasm why science and education is so nice um carl we're almost out of time but just to finish with you please yeah so i just want to take this back to the online i mean the point ben makes you can understand why it's much more challenging to have these things happen online but what it means is to be effective in the teaching one has to be much more intentional about setting up ways for students to interact and talk to each other in the online environment well thank you all very much indeed we've been focusing quite a lot on lifelong learning throughout the day and i wish i could uh join labs with any of you it sounds such fun so thank you very much indeed it's an inspirational panel thank you thank you very much to end this year's dialogue we will as always invite all our attending laureates for last panel the topic of today is my best teacher and the moderate moderator is julene cirat [Music] all right this is going to be a bit of a lightning round and we'll go around the horn and i'm going to ask each of you to share some words about your best teacher keep in mind we have about 10 minutes for this and i know many of you can tell us a lot about people who have influenced you and inspired you but francis tell us about your best teacher well it turns out my best teacher is not a person the best teacher for chemistry is the best chemistry of the biological world and i realized that i have learned tremendous amount from people but i've learned much more from observation and from getting out and experiencing and so many people have been talking about experiential learning if you just observe what's going on in the natural world there's so much innovation so much creativity and so much to learn about how to build a sustainable world oh i think that's wonderful i mean it's right around us in our environment if we're there to see it ben your best teacher yeah going on in the in the same context as francis you know i grew up on a farm and as a small kid i think nature around me was probably my best teacher that is where it all started when i asked endless questions to my father and mother and on the farm you know there is so much to discover how is it possible that from such a tiny seed a big sunflower grows and then of course when i was at the university and i became a chemist i think i have to mention one person professor hans windberg he was american and he stimulated us so much to discover my own molecules to make my own molecules and and that opened for me a completely new world to be able to go beyond mother nature to design molecules of my own that never existed before that was absolutely a teaching experience you know to do experiments in the lab and to discover something completely unexpected i think that was the best teacher of all that's wonderful i can imagine as a child you were the child that always asks why why why and was probably never satisfied with the answer always looking for more constantine probably drove my parents crazy constantine your best teacher i think i was extremely lucky in my life that i had fantastic teachers in my in my school though it was absolutely normal school nothing special but they somehow they really picked and picked me from the from the crowd but if i really have to choose one i think it would be my my phd supervisor and colleague and and and friend uh andre ganges who will share the the prize later and it's really uh it's very difficult to teach science because there are many physicists around but there are much there are much less scientists because you cannot teach how to do science by the by the textbooks you really you either have this this hunger for for knowledge inside you or or you don't and but uh hunger for knowledge is is great but you also need to know where to where to search for those new phenomena and that's something what i learned from from andre okay that's lovely um dieter any thoughts on your best teacher oh it's it's me sorry uh well well actually um my first best teacher is my family in a way because there had been very supportive uh in a way that they left me to do what i wanted and to exercise all the freedom i could have and and since i was extremely curious i can tell you i did a lot of experimental setup in my home and in my house and in the garden and so i'm this is really the first one the second one is i think i had a long series of of teachers i cannot really point to a specific one but what they did is something really crucial to me i think they just managed to convene to me that learning is fun and and always that is feeling and i'm always trying to to to give that to the others i mean learning is so much fun and you can do so much when you are when you're learning so these are to me my kind of uh most impactful event of course there's a lot of books and and people i can name but that's exactly this kind of surrounding that makes me i think what i am okay all right that's lovely as well um and donna best teacher well like it's already been said i had a lot of really good teachers so it's hard to pick um i'll just give a couple examples in high school um my grade 9 science teacher and she was also my grade 13 chemistry teacher uh her husband was a chemistry professor at the university and so she would bring in uh little experiments to do in front of us and she was all about the wonder and all about the excitement of it and all about that she also the one time i was on a high school band trip and had to miss the test and a bunch of us did uh she brought in chocolate bars for all of us after class when we were doing it you know after hours just you can't think great on an empty stomach and she made sure we all had our chocolate bar which i thought was so cute and sweet of her but on the other hand unlike all of my colleagues here uh in high school science i was sometimes very lazy and we had to do some kind of science fair project and i don't remember what i did but i didn't put my heart and soul in it and i've been asked a lot especially as a woman you know did i get encouragement even if i was a girl and i had a male uh physics teacher and he sat me down and went don i'm so disappointed in you for heaven's sakes i know you are so much better than this it's not acceptable you should be doing so much more so i've had teachers on both sides and you need both sometimes that's an example of being around someone who perhaps sees something in you that you don't recognize yourself and they help to bring that out of you by encouraging you and what i notice is that irrespective of whether you're talking about a specific person or an environment all of you have really talked about the creativity um and and sort of being in environments where you can let your curiosity grow um and and these creative environments and does anybody want to reflect on just the environment in addition to the teacher there's something about environment some francis you talked a little bit about that well i'm lucky to work at an institution that's very small but filled with brilliant people and the environment is one where science is fun we are so lucky that we actually have a job to do lifelong learning and to do what we find best i love to be surrounded by people like that and that environment where risk taking and innovation are encouraged is an incredibly exciting place to be and i think ben you mentioned always asking why and i bet you still do that today so feeling safe in the environment to always ask the question that we might think well that might be a silly question but just something about the environment can you reflect to that yeah i mentioned already when i grow up and my parents were a great stimulus as were my nine brothers and sisters you know that was a great environment but then what i really want to emphasize it is a privilege to work with these students every day these young talents that question you that are creative that are uncompromised and we stimulate them you know to make also mistakes and ask questions all the time and this is absolutely wonderful and i learned so much from them you know to be in such an environment is absolutely wonderful that hits on the idea of the lifelong um working and constantine again a little bit about the environment um yes people are important but environments are as well uh absolutely environment is really crucial but uh it is crucial in in in many aspects it's uh sharing sharing ideas and generating ideas is is much easier in your environment but probably the one of the way i i use it is basically the reflection of your of your own mind the idea just thought and the ideas spoken out are are completely different it's something how our brain is wide when you're trying to formulate your idea to uh to explain something to your colleague it's really for it it forms new connections in your brain and you and you and you start to see it much more much more clearly so i use it basically as a tool you know i think that emphasizes the importance of um you know if you're doing research some of you are you know obviously researchers but the idea about teaching as well and being able to communicate these complex problems that we're all struggling with to students and sometimes that also helps you reflect upon the course that you're taking in your research or the science that you're doing um dieter you coveted i think you commented about family and the importance of family and siblings in in motivating you as well well yeah i i like to spend a bit of time on this environment because i think this is one of the main challenges of education these days i think i was very lucky because i was born in one of the richest country of the world which is switzerland that offer free educations to all its citizens and and even more in my days i was lucky to be a boy because i still believe here there is a major problem that we need to fix in the society so the impact of the on the environment or the family is absolutely essential and i would certainly love to see progress on that i think we're certainly missing a lot of people because they're not have the chance to benefit for this good environment the brain is outstanding they have immense capability but just missing them because they are in a low-income countries they don't have access to education and there is still a major gender issue that we need to fix so i think family can be extremely crucial here because family is the close cycle that help you and push you and support you when it's difficult but in some cases family is not enough i think the society has to work together for that so um donna i'm going to turn to you you'll have the last word we spent a lot of time today talking about you know equity in terms of teaching and education and you talked a little bit about your role as being a young woman in a hardcore scientific environment we just heard teachers say that we still need to do more environments to foster diversity and to give everybody an equal chance and protect potentially young girls who want to go up do you have any you know words that we can kind of hold on to here at the end well again i guess i grew up you know very lucky i grew up my high school the three the top three math prizes all went to girls and nobody said that's really weird so i haven't had uh face these problems that so many other people have had and so i think i wish everybody had the kind of upbringing that i had that everybody it's public education here and everybody's welcome at the table and hopefully we get to that in a more worldwide way i would like to say during these covet times i haven't enjoyed talking to my students online i would rather be in the lab with them on the other hand i'm talking to students around the world now uh through these types of events and so in some ways we're opening it up and making it a much more equal uh playing field uh during these cover times with all of this online platforms all right well with that um thanks a lot for sharing your own personal reflections about favorite teachers favorite environments creativity and we'll take that to heart and that concludes the nobel week dialogue 2020 i'm lisa kirschbaum it's been a pleasure to be your host today thank you so much for watching and contributing and back to london and adam smith thank you so much so the goal of the nobel week dialogue is fundamentally to be thought provoking and while we hope we've entertained you we also very much hope we've made you think it was really lovely to hear from some of you during the course of the meeting and i just wish we could have heard of from more of the audience in line with that um important and challenging comment made by seppo poe in his interview earlier that no voice sorry that every voice is equal and no voice should be unheard i want to thank three groups of course the participants for giving us their time and their energy today it was very kind of them to be here and to make themselves available and we'd loved being with them to the audience who by being present have made this a truly global meeting thank you all very much indeed and of course to our partners without whom none of this would be possible thank you so much for your continuing support and it only remains to say that we all very much look forward to to seeing you again for the next nobel week dialogue on the 9th of december 2021 in gothenburg when we very much hope that the majority of us will be on stage thank you for listening and goodbye [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

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Published: Wed Dec 09 2020