Title of talk:

Let’s Talk about Identities, Choices and Freedom

 

Bullet points of what you would like to talk about:

• Education as transformation
• Buddhist philosophy of impermanence, possibility and opportunity
• Doctoral studies in self-making, constructivist theory, identities and improvised selves
• Life experience and overcoming challenge
• Emergence, choices and freedom
• My literary output as a trilogy in ultimate reconciliation and arrival.

 

A few paragraphs on your subject:

Extract from my doctoral thesis:

The purpose of this research was to explore the relationship between learning and identity in relation to five key participants in two specific learning settings. Holland et al.’s (1998) and Holland and Lave’s (2001) work on identity as constructed and practised and Markova’s (2003) work on the links between identity, dialogicality and dialogue informed my choice of research topic. I conducted my field work in two courses for adults learning in classrooms in Scottish further education (FE) colleges. Although I engaged with both student groups and their teachers I focused primarily on five learners. I used a biographical and interpretative approach to consider matters of identity with these five learners. I also used semi-structured interviews with them, the wider student groups and their teachers to explore perceptions and experiences of learning and whether learning had led to changes in them.

 

Although there was evidence of some permanence in the identities of the five learners I found that in the main their identities were situated, constructed and practised. I also found that learning processes and experiences in the classroom were as significant to them as other major self-making events in their lives. Their inherent dialogicality and its articulation through dialogical processes were evident in their accounts of the forging of their identities in their current learning settings and in their wider lives. It was clear that these specific learning settings, through the use of dialogue as the major learning tool and varied learner groupings, promoted these learners’ dialogicality and offered opportunities for them to affirm selves and to construct and practise new selves. Their accounts also show that their views of their histories, their current situations and their futures were reframed as a result of changes to and enactment of selves in the learning context.

 

These five learners saw their learning processes and experiences as strongly interconnected with their wider social and personal environments and therefore aspects of the identities they forged in their learning contexts were also enacted in their wider lives and vice versa. I therefore concluded from my research that in relation to these five learners in these specific FE settings, there was a significant link between learning and identity.

A few paragraphs about you:

I am a poet, essayist, translator based in Edinburgh. I am the grandchild of Italian immigrants and was raised surrounded by the culture, traditions and dialect of southern Italy.

After a long career in Education, I retired from HM Inspectorate in 2009 and started writing. My literary work focuses on identity, immigration, language, otherness and sexuality.

My creative memoir Language of My Choosing was shortlisted for the Saltire Award for Best New Book of 2017. In 2018, I was awarded the Premio Flaiano Italianistica: La Cultura Italiana nel Mondo.The Italian translation Ho Scelto La Mia Lingua was published in 2018 together with my first poetry collection, Transitory.

My new book, Magnaccioni My Food My Italy is a glorious celebration in poetic prose and recipes of a part of Italy, of a philosophy, culture and way of life which I share with joy.

Keeping Away The Spiders; Essays on Breaching Barriers was published in November 2020 by Luath Press, and my second poetry collection The Sweetness of Demons with translations from French, was published by Vagabond Voices in April 2021on the 200th anniversary of Baudelaire’s birth. Dragons Wear Lipstick my poetry pamphlet was published by Dreich in November 2022. I have read at the Stanza International Poetry Festival, the Dundee Literary Festival, the Paisley and Portobello Book Festivals. I am listed in the Scottish Poetry Library Catalogue of Scottish Poets and am a regular contributor to poetry and literary gatherings in Edinburgh and more widely in Scotland. In 2018 I was a guest lecturer at the British Institute in Florence. In 2022 I was invited to join the Judging panel for the Scottish National Book Awards and remain on the panel this year.

I play the mandolin in the Gullane Celidih Band. I love music and I have three daughters 2 of whom live in London and one in Bristol.

What free internet knowledge resources would you recommend ?

Classroom Learning: spaces for understanding, practising and making selves. A small-scale study of the learning experiences of five adults undertaking courses in two Scottish further education colleges – A PhD thesis by Dr Anne Pia: https://era.ed.ac.uk/handle/1842/29322?show=full

 

 

Click to download thesis

 

Some key references:

Holland.D. & Lave,J. (2001) History in Person; Santa Fe School of American Studies – click to download

Holland D. C. (1998). Identity and agency in cultural worlds. Harvard University Press.

Markovà,I. Graumann,C.F., Foppa,K. (1995) Mutualities in Dialogue Cambridge University Press

Wenger,E. (1998) Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity.

Nhất Hạnh. (1999). The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching: Transforming suffering into peace joy & liberation – the four noble truths the noble eightfold path and other basic Buddhist teachings (First Broadway Books trade paperback). Broadway Books.

Living Buddha, Living Christ (2007) Riverhead Books

 

What are your weblinks?

I use social media mainly for the promotion of my books. Anne Pia Writer is my FB page. I also have an X account and Instagram too.

I can be found on my publishers’ websites:

Luath Press; https://www.luath.co.uk/anne-pia

Vagabond Voices; https://www.vagabondvoices.co.uk/anne-pia

Dreich

 

Links to Anne’s work:

https://www.luath.co.uk/anne-pia

https://www.vagabondvoices.co.uk/poetry/sweetness-of-demons

https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poet/anne-pia/

https://www.scottishbooktrust.com/authors/anne-pia

https://hybriddreich.co.uk/product/dragons-wear-lipstick-anne-pia/

 

 

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This event took place at The Outhouse (12A Broughton Street Lane, Edinburgh) on 9th November 2023

 

Transcript Begins Here

 

The Journey of Change, Choice, and Freedom

And yeah, her doctoral research and reading of Buddhist philosophy, together with her life experience, have all led to a fundamental belief and experience of change, choice, and freedom. Her books—uh, and you’ve brought some—are here. So, if anybody wants to get a copy this evening, they’re available. Her books are a kind of three-part journey in themselves and an expression of sharing that glorious and creative path. So thank you very much. Thank you, feel them in good company.

 

Education as Transformation

Thanks, Alex. After what you’ve said about learning and education, that it is actually about sharing and cooperation, I’ll say a bit more about that in a minute. Yes, what I suppose having written a third book—I put it out in September—I’ve been thinking that there’s a progression here from the first book to the third book, and that made me think about there being a path. What I want to share with you tonight is the theoretical construct that those books are based on, which I think will ring bells with you.

My professional career was as an educationist, and I had a very strong belief in education as transformation. I saw it particularly, I think, in youngsters who were disadvantaged and who suddenly grew and developed through a good nurturing environment. I saw it in adult returners; I was an inspector of education, so I was in 42 colleges in Scotland, and I saw a lot of adults learning. Many of those adults had come back to learning in order to have a different life. Their circumstances were not what they wanted, or they felt disadvantaged in some way, and learning was a pathway forward for them.

I particularly enjoyed seeing this when I was a young teacher. My lads, you know, who were very difficult in the classroom, were wonderful when we put them in work experience. When they came back, they were absolutely full of joy and really succeeded. I was also on the children’s panel; I served three years on that after I retired, and again, I saw some wonderful examples—some shining heroes and heroines of young people who’d come from very hard circumstances and who suddenly found something in education that moved them forward.

 

The Personal Catalyst for Change

So I think education transformation really is that. My own life experience—I’ll read you a bit from the language of my choosing maybe later—is that I was born into an immigrant family post-war. My grandfather, who was Italian, had been caught up in World War II and was taken as a prisoner of war. He drowned on a boat called the Alor. Four hundred Italians died on that boat. It wasn’t a marked boat; we could go on about the politics of that. The point is that my childhood home was not a happy one. I was an only child, born about eight years after all this happened. I think there was a lot of guilt, a lot of shame around, and that hung very heavily in the environment I grew up in. Added to this, my mother, not a clever idea, had a Scotsman, which wasn’t a good idea because of the political situation. He turned out to be a drunk and engaged in domestic violence, so I didn’t have a very happy childhood.

The catalyst for me was when I started to board; actually, I became a boarder because they thought that was a good idea. It was for me because I suddenly saw my own life ahead of me—a life that I could make. I was freed from this awful environment that I felt I grew up in, which was very, very depressing, and I found my own pathway. I felt able to make my own life. So for me, for all these different reasons, I think education can be—not always, but it can be—transformative.

 

Models of Education: Reproductive vs. Resistance

Now, it isn’t always transformative because I think—and I’m going to be controversial here. By the way, I had some fun going back and looking at my research when I was preparing this talk. It was great; I thought, “Good, did I write that? You’re great!” But I think there are two models from my reading of education. One is a reproductive model, which is the politicization of education; what we do in education is reproduce the values of a certain sector of the community. We see education in economic terms only, and that was something that I railed against constantly as an inspector of education. So that’s the reproduction model, and I’ve seen it in classrooms; I’m sure you’re aware of that and have had experience of that.

The other is a resistance model of education, and that is where you speak to the human heart, where the human being is absolutely allowed to flourish. You see the learning context as a liberating tool. I’m going to just contrast a couple of names: Foucault, for instance, saw education as a means of social control; Marx saw it as what he talked about—an ideological clash—where children come with a certain set of values and they’re downgraded in favor of the prevailing values of society. Sen and Cobb talk about children coming as injured, and in a sense, they visit that injury in the classroom, particularly when they’re not valued. On the other hand, we’ve got Freire, who talks about education being liberating—education as a democratic tool, education as allowing people to be more fully human. To educate is to educate in terms of the practice of freedom. He talks about empowerment; he’s a wonderful read if you haven’t read Freire; he is fantastic to read.

 

The Role of Dialogicality in Education

Giroux talks about the need for a radical pedagogy that speaks to the individual, and if you look at some of the literature, it’s all about cooperation and collaboration. Heron writes about education being a means of cooperative inquiry. So basically all of these things—the radical view of education, if you like—lead you to look at education in terms of providing spaces where people can self-make, where they can be dialogical with one another and dialogical within themselves, leading to theories about identity. As I read it, there are two fundamental views: one is that identity is culturalist, it’s fixed; you’re born a certain way and you go through life in a certain way. The other—and I think you’re going to agree with me, Alex—is the one where we constantly, throughout our lives, self-make. We construct our identity; we improvise our identity. Our identity is flexible; we do it all the time in different circumstances. We’re one person with one group of people, we’re somebody else with another person, we’re someone else with our family, and we go through life self-making.

The only part of our identity which is fixed is that drive to actually self-make that is permanent, and the rest is about improvisation and responsiveness. So if we posit an education system or a classroom or a learning environment where we allow the human being to flourish, to be who they are, and we support them in that, we enable them to be the person or to self-make into the person that they truly are, to keep self-making, to generate that sense of individuality that is part of their destiny, if you like. So Merab talks about dialogicality. Dialogicality is really about what is spoken or unspoken between two people, and in the interchange between those two people, that communication both emerges slightly different and slightly changed.

 

Nurturing Learning Environments

Now, that dialogicality in a classroom is a wonderful thing—in a learning environment. In my research, I looked at six students who were in a very nurturing, valuing, safe learning environment, and that dialogicality was allowed to flourish. You could see it in terms of the way they had moved themselves, from, for instance, a woman who had just gone to a night class to learn IT suddenly seeing herself as going to university and becoming a social worker—becoming a professional. There are lots of examples of that.

So that, in very, very brief, simple terms, is where I’m coming from. I don’t know if anybody wants to ask anything just now, but before I go on, I had a question. I didn’t want to interrupt your flow, which was in the—I’m a numbers brain, not a word brain. I’d never heard the word “dialogical” before, so I need educating. I had that I started reading from—there’s a lot around. I mean, when I think about the PhD, I was thinking about because I’m a linguist, I was thinking that dialogue—there’s something in dialogue actually that actually—there’s more to it than words. I began to think, “How does that affect identity and the way we move?” You know, and there’s a lot around dialogue. Bruner even talked about dialogue years ago, and so you know there’s something about dialogue, but dialogicality is really, I think, based on dialogue, but it takes it a stage further. It takes it beyond; it actually tries to encapsulate what I’m trying to say, which is nonverbal exchange as well as verbal exchange—like individuals coming together in some kind of creative exchange, actually, as either felt or spoken. Does that make sense?

 

The Importance of Context in Identity

Yes, yeah. I think your example is that we’re sitting around a table here, and we’ve got gestures, which you know—I hated Teams and Zoom meetings for that reason—there were no gestures; you couldn’t really interrupt very easily to make a point. Like, I just—no, that’s right; I’m not going to do Zoom meetings ever again, actually, unless it’s another pandemic, I think probably. So, Sharon, all of this really says that we are the architects of our own lives and our own selves, and I felt that particularly… I mean, a friend of mine at Katana University has just put out a book, actually, and she’s featured the Scottish-Italian literary output, if I can call it a literary output, and she’s focused on hybridity. The way I see it is that yes, I’m a hybrid, but actually it’s a wonderful thing because you sit on the boundaries of two cultures, and you have huge choices—in a way that maybe other people don’t have to the same extent.

I didn’t believe I was formed; I didn’t have an upbringing as such because of all that I’ve tried to explain, and I know people like that. So I was free to make what I want to locate myself, and I think working from that boundary of, you know, not Italian, not fully Italian, not wholly Scottish, somewhere in between, you think, “Well, who do I want to be? What lifestyle do I want to have? What do I want to make of myself?” What culture do I want? Exactly, or do I want to just be multicultural? So self-making—I believe that if you accept the concept of a constructed identity, what a wonderful freedom that is. I mean, it can be unsettling too. I was reading P. Chödrön today, who’s writing about the bardo, and it’s not something I really want to get too heavily into, but I think I probably should at my age. You know the bardo is the bit between life and death, or you’re kind of transiting from one to the other. I’m not sure about reincarnation; we’ll not get into that at all. But what she was saying was that our lives are about a bardo, really, because, you know, the death of what you did at lunchtime is gone, and what you’re doing now will be dead and gone in a few minutes, and all that. So basically, we need to accept that there’s death and change all the time.

 

The Unsettling Nature of Identity

Now, you could say that’s unsettling, that the fact that we are self-making all the time is unsettling, that there’s no fixed thing—that we are not fixed—is unsettling. It may be frightening; death is frightening, all of these things. But the way I see it is that it’s a fantastic opportunity actually to be anything we want. You know, the Buddhists talk about, you know, having another wonderful 24 hours to do something in. It’s a tremendous freedom actually about seeing identity as constructed, as constantly self-making. You know, as I say, it is a bit unsettling too because you think, “Well, I rely on my upbringing; I rely on my culture; I rely on the societal norms; I rely on expectations of me.” That’s very secure, perhaps, but isn’t it more wonderful to think about, “I can be who I want to be”?

Actually, I can choose. Yes, I’m a little unsure if that is really possible throughout the world, and I’m really unsure if one can transcend their identities throughout the world. I don’t know how it happens in Europe and England, but back in South Asia, you might be flowing into different identities. For example, my parents have recently baptized themselves. We were born into a Hindu family, but for them, it’s an identity change, and I’m having an identity crisis right now. But society would always see them as the way they are born. So I think that identity, when I really talk about identity, I think it’s a lot spiritual. And you might end up practicing whatever, but still, the societal norms are so heavy. I could talk about Saudi because I’m from there, but I would really—I’m really not sure if identity would keep that leverage. There are a lot of people in India who are born into the so-called low caste communities who transform into Buddhism. They renounce Hinduism and accept Buddhism, but still, at the end of the day, their identities, or their ancestral identity, never goes away. So even though you are practicing something else, and your children are practicing something else, and it could be like for the last 100 years, but still, on documents and on the state level or on the citizenship level, you would still be seen as a person belonging to a certain caste. So here, the identity is sort of changing, and they’re trying to practice agency in XYZ ways, but still, the stigma of society remains so static.

 

The Struggle Between Internal and External Identity

So I’m really not sure if, you know, like at a spiritual level, one could feel really easy, but it’s just that society gives you a mirror all the time. Yes, so at a spiritual level, I 100% agree, but because I see myself as a unit in a society and not just as myself, I think it’s quite tough to sort of transgress the boundaries of identity. It’s one can define oneself in XYZ ways, but once you step out, there’s always a mirror. So it’s always that tussle. At a spiritual level, you can be, but I don’t know how one could navigate ideas of… you know, having—I think it may be different in the Western world; I think that’s probably right. But I think also you’re talking about the difference between an internal and external. If you’re saying that internally, you know as a person, as a growing person, as a changing person, you can be who you want to be—you have those choices—but in terms of your actions, the way you act, and in terms of your social practice, you are confined by tradition and culture, I think, and I think that’s a very fair point, actually. I think that’s true; we’ve seen that in the trans debate.

Yeah, and I think that’s interesting because you have brought up the differences, I think, between East and West there. At the same time, I mean, Buddhism does really promote the whole notion of self and individuality and choice and freedom; it’s very central to Buddhist thinking. So that’s—and you’ll know that. So I think it’s also about what we call context and culture. Yes, because even within Buddhism, there are so many subcultures—Buddhism in Sri Lanka, Buddhism in India, Buddhism in Myanmar, Buddhism in Bangladesh, or whatever. And I might not make sense of this, but this traveling narrative has to go very empirically. So I don’t know whether you have experienced whether you have traveled or not.

 

The Transformative Power of Travel and Experience

I have quite a lot of experience of Buddhism because I became a Buddhist about eight years ago, and I’ve been in two camps—Zen Buddhism of Thich Nhat Hanh in near Bordeaux, France, and also Tibetan Buddhism. But there’s a fundamental principle in all of Buddhism, no matter what, and that is the concept of impermanence, which is what I was alluding to earlier. That ties in very strongly with the kind of arguments I’m making, really, for self-making and the possibility of change and freedom and choice and all of that. Nothing stays the same, as Thich Nhat Hanh said: “You’re the blue sky, and all the rest is just weather.” So that’s a lovely—it’s so liberating that, actually, you think, “Well, this is a hard time, but it’ll pass.” You know, I think you’re quite right that some cultures are much more restricted and much more rigid in how you’re allowed to live and how you’re allowed to be interpreted. I don’t want to minimize that in any way, but the same applies, actually, even in this culture. I am a man; there are certain things that are expected of me as a man, as opposed to being anything else. When I went to live in England for a while, I was a Scotsman, and you know, I had to be a Scotsman for the English audience, if you like. You know, there are lots of little things like that where there are expectations that are put on you, and you’re expected to live up to them in some way. There are constraints on what you’re expected to do or not do as a result of that, and that can have a knock-on effect on actually what results you get—the practical results you get once you go out the door. You can say you can adopt a particular identity, but if you’re in a culture where it’s not going to get accepted, you might not get practical results.

 

Challenging Norms and Expectations

Well, you can adapt. I mean, I would say that what the expectations—you know, they can be challenged. That would be my response to you. I mean, I was reading a very interesting book called “The Matriarch Scene.” I can’t remember who it was by, but actually, there was a woman—it’s a very recent book. I didn’t get very far, but what was interesting was she was lamenting the expectations of motherhood, and I thought this was fascinating. You know, like, “Do you really—you must get satisfaction breastfeeding?” No, I hate it! You know, and you must—you know, your child must be so proud of your child. Well, actually, that’s not—you know, there are certain impositions put on people in certain roles. Masculinity, you know, it’s a huge thing, actually, causing huge problems for young men, for instance, you know. I think it’s important that we do live in a society now where we can be much more open. We can challenge these things and say, “You know, I don’t model myself in any particular model of femininity; I’m me.” If I cross borders, I cross borders. I mean, I don’t care. I mean, I’ve worn bow ties; I’ve worn tails; I wear sparkly dresses. I’m not a crossdresser, you know. I once actually upset people because I did turn up in tails for lunch once, actually. But I think, you know, we can challenge, I think. My children have said to me—I’ve got three daughters, actually—who’ve said that they very much value the liberty they had when they grew up. I mean, there was no homework time in my house; there was no bedtime; there was nothing. They just—and they’ve all done reasonably well, you know. I mean, they’re fine. So I think the point is to be true to yourself and to challenge expectations and norms. I mean, I was reading Aon R, talking about restoring balance. For weeks, I’ve been trying to settle myself after the excitement of putting the book out, and he writes about freedoms from norms. It’s important to free yourself from norms, free yourself from tradition. It’s important to say, “I know my parents did it that way, but I’m not going to do it that way. I’m going to do it my way; I’m going to do it the way that, actually, I’m inclined to do it.” And so you recreate yourself.

 

Struggles in Self-Making

So it was interesting that he says that, and it coincides for me with all that stuff about self-making and identity. There are a lot of connections around the resistance to change or the performative aspect of identity requiring degrees of uncertainty that can increase our comfort with uncertainty. It’s something that we’re quite allergic to in many ways, and also, change is something that you feel resistance from at a societal level but also from acceptance of yourself. It’s not a linear process. So I think that change is hard, and sometimes quite slow, and can manifest in many different ways personally and societally. There is a fear, actually, isn’t there, about challenging and, in a sense, asserting yourself—whoever you want to be? I think there’s a major point of uncertainty in this. I think the recent AI conference was actually designed to scare people into accepting unemployment and then announcing at the end of it that none of you will have jobs. The final wonder of citizen basic income is what you have; then you are able to do what you want. You’ll be paid like a pensioner, except you wouldn’t have had to work all your life to get it. Politicians muddy our waters greatly, actually, and set a limiting thing in terms of our freedoms. But you talked about the fear of—I was thinking from the cave idea that you have an expectation of this reality, and then if fundamental belief systems are altered, you go out of the cave and suddenly realize everything you took for granted was just a shadow of that reality. Then going back and convincing others that what they’re living is not an authentic version or that there are other possibilities—you can receive massive resistance. You can be rejected, and you can actually be in danger.

 

Navigating Uncertainty in Identity

And then people who have been used to navigating uncertainty—whether that’s about being safe—they become very good at living in a future state because they have to do it for a sense of their own safety or code-switching. There are lots of different factors that influence the difficulty in the performative idea of identity. I totally love that philosophy that we can construct ourselves through our thoughts and ideas, but I totally get the struggles that that’s not an easy process. Absolutely, I think we all have those struggles, actually. But it’s worth the struggle; it’s worth the struggle—that’s the way ahead. I mean, my second book is all about the struggle, actually, keeping with the spiders; it’s all about that. I mean, two major things, actually. My first experience of sex and falling in love, actually, which was not the way society would see things, and, in a sense, I shocked myself and struggled through that and suffered greatly through it. It put me at odds with my family and my friends and all the rest of it, and I had to really, I think for a long time, live a double life because I couldn’t be honest, and that was very, very hard. The other big struggle in my life was that my eldest daughter was born with a physical disability. Nobody helped; nobody could help; nobody knew what was going on. I was a very religious, very Catholic at one time. That’s me; I’m in the tea, of course—suddenly feeling that there was nothing; there was nobody that could help; there was no God; there was nothing. I was completely alone, having to deal with this awful thing at the age of 31. You know, think about my little girl, you know.

 

The Power of Personal Narratives

But I mean, I can read you a passage about that, actually, because I think this—I’m going to read you that if you’ll permit me to do it because I think it’s really important. She’s now 45—oh no, 43, actually; she wouldn’t like it if I said she was 45. But I’ll read you this. I’ll just put you first of all in the picture of the way I felt it. So it’s called “Miracles.” There’s no God, and this was not how it was meant to be. There had been such expectation around, such buoyancy and goodwill; it had gone so well for the first time. It had been a pretty good effort; I’d even taken a moment to put on a bit of lipstick before coming through the swing door to reenter the world. Here I was now alone in the half-light at 2:00 a.m., perched on the stool—only room for one—and how I wanted the warm presence of someone else to sit beside me; someone to tell me all would be okay, that God would see us through. I was 31; I’d always thought, you see, that someone somewhere made sure you would be safe, that answers would come, that nothing was for life, that things usually ended well. Please, please listen to me; my bonding with my baby is not in question. I just need someone to help me. Can someone please help us? Tell us what is going to happen. Please, God, make this thing go away. I’m pleading for a miracle. Please give her my legs; take it all, but make her whole.

And then my daughter gradually gained the wings of excellence and endurance of trust as well. When I look at the woman she is, the layers of adulthood and maturity fall away, and I see through to the loving, fragile child in her, with so much to give and so much to glory in. She’s grown to be a good person, full of love, charisma, wit, mind, and mischief in her wake. I’ve learned a lot; mostly, I learned humility and was stripped of my precious elitism. Our elegant Alfasport car and the middle-class paraphernalia of social contact didn’t quite seem to matter anymore. To hell with the dinner parties, the small talk, and the garden salons; to hell with the badges, the hierarchies, and the pomposity. I learned lessons that deeply affected and dictated the direction of my own professional life, working on behalf of socially disadvantaged children and people in education—lessons that I preached from the heart and the head ever after. The world is not just for winners, not just for the privileged, those born to ready stardom. The challenge is to encourage and cultivate stardom in those around us, to hear diverse voices, to mainstream and not just include them, but to foreground their rich rawness and their diversity—make them leaders, CEOs, headhunters, recruiters, heads of state, policymakers, and strategists. Fill schools, hospitals, courts, and committee rooms with them; break down unwritten codes; remake the fabric with raw, fragile threads. One of the most compelling challenges I ever heard had never been taught and was entirely heart-stoppingly unformed, and from this, my eldest child set the time, temperature, and tide for the entire family. Her younger sisters found their own relentless, restless energy, their staunchness, their fierce defense and consideration for others, and so on. So out of tragedy, there comes something else.

 

Finding Joy in Adversity

I wrote the book just toward the end of the pandemic, and I wrote a bit about the pandemic there too. You know, we were all terrified, but what we all talk about now is how we found joy in those days in little ways as well. I mean, you know, thousands of people died, and we somehow navigated that in the best ways that we could. You know, weeping, horrified, frightened, and yet I made good friends with my neighbor over the garden wall in the street. You know, just—you know, other things came. I can remember my partner turning up, having gone early morning to get me smoked salmon because I was craving smoked salmon, you know, and coming in with that, saying, “Here you are; here’s your smoked salmon.” You know, hopefully, I didn’t get COVID. There were, you know, the joys of climbing Blackford Hill on a Monday morning, you know, the joy of not hearing an airplane, the joy of seeing a 70-year-old woman skating in the middle of an afternoon in the park. Somebody just thought, “To hell with this; leave me freedom!” You know, and people watching—there were joys too.

 

The Resilience of the Human Spirit

So my point is we struggle; life breaks us, but it’s how we respond to that, isn’t it? Well, I mean, what I hear you saying is that being ourselves is not because there aren’t obstacles; it’s because we find ways of overcoming the obstacles. That’s right. In the early days of the long march in April, it was incredibly relaxing because the weather was super. I could go out and go on walks on my own because you weren’t meant to meet up with anyone. But I could read you a little more. I mean, I will read you this poem, actually, because this kind of relates to what we were talking about earlier. It’s called “Joy.”

The dancer, she dances in the swish and chatter of leaves in winter sun and wind, and I seek her as I walk the hill; her new city, she dances across a not-quite-blue sky, somewhere where sea enchants, and I lo, bowled, bound on a solid fairy, follow her to a black house, see her somewhere on the foreshore find pink shells. Sometimes she dances on my coffee cup. I walk a crowded street, offset on monorail; she stands still briefly, and my memory brings back fresh-baked meline France and the aroma of melted sugar. She dances in voices loud, laughter in family, in sweet cursing and thick tongues of Italy’s South. She peeks on jostling plates, red, rich with sauce and rough-sliced sausages. She dances in the tip and tottle of a baby girl. I see her in a well-loved breath. I can’t feel her here; here she dances on the tip of a fiddle. A ball flies skywards from gargoyles; she dances in wardrobes in wools, spangle, and skinnies. I look for her in the mirror. Tomorrow, maybe she will dance in my new dress.

 

Embracing Personal Heritage

That’s just about finding joy, you know, in whatever fiddles my granddaughter enjoys. I’m going to finish with this. I think what this book is really about, apart from it being an evocation of the south of Italy—and I’ve tried to put Italy on the page—so there’s music in it, there are playlists, there are wine recommendations, there are recipes. But actually, more importantly, I think there’s a description of a particular way of life. I’ve talked about locating self, and one of the things I didn’t say earlier but I wanted to escape being Italian for a number of reasons, which are pretty clear, I think, and also the repression of an Italian family on women in particular and the expectations of being a woman. According to my family, I should have had a job, you know, that would fit in with my husband really and the children and so on, and I wanted the whole cake, not half the cake. So I had to deal with all of that. So I deserted that, and of course, I had a lot of Scottish names, so I could pretend I wasn’t Italian, although people told me it was pretty obvious anyway. But at the end of it all, at the end of it all, I—and the pandemic did that, I think, for me—ultimately embraced that. I’ve embraced that part of me. I emerged from the pandemic, apart from being a baker, which I never was before, truly having found something, I think. It was the bottle of olive oil that somebody brought back from Italy that made me cry—suddenly seeing it there in the middle of this pandemic, this golden olive oil, the sun shining from the kitchen window. I just felt this need for reality and truth and something solid.

 

Cultural Celebrations and Community

So I’m going to read you this: My grandparents came from Vuso, which is a small village between Rome and Naples. Vuso, like most villages in the south of Italy and elsewhere, has a patron saint, Sandon, who died a martyr in Syria in the Middle Ages. He is honored every year on the 5th of September, a feast day for which those who have left the village to live elsewhere return in droves. For some, the gathering, which lasts several days, is ostensibly a religious festival, but most people gather there, returning from countries all over the world to come and stand together as a community to meet friends and enjoy family. As one, young and old unite to honor their at times savage history; they come together to celebrate their roots in the land that endowed them with the wherewithal to remain and thrive there or the talent and skill to establish themselves and make their mark in a wider world. With the strangers, they often had to think on their feet in response to changing fortunes. Towns and cities in the south of Italy are often criticized for an unproductive economy and slow lifestyle, a way of life that clings to the past. Italian politics are full of polemics and fierce debates about the problems of the south, which are real, especially in the wake of the pandemic. But as the decades turn, we find ourselves as a society increasingly challenged by world events. Those lifestyles and values on which the modern world has been built are under closer scrutiny. It seems that in order to go forward, we’ve begun to grasp perhaps the urgency of looking backward—to research, to recover, to recycle, and to relearn old ways. This book is a series of snapshots and evocations of our particular culture, which is still alive today in Vio Pino, all the hamlets up and down the southern lands of a country that I’m honored to call mine and which I believe has much to teach us. The culture of this still unsung land has much to offer at current times—with respect and love of nature and the land, delight in a rich harvest, in neighbors, in holding a grandchild, in the aroma of rising dough, in racing clouds, in the blessed rain, in the sun of early rising, in birdsong, in working bees, and in flowering shrubs and trees. Most importantly, an expression of that delight and joy through long, lazy hours and days spent with intimates and loved ones at a generous table put together with a pure and open heart. I’ve spent many years as someone from an immigrant family, trying very hard in many areas of my life and very often not too successfully to fit in. As the months of the pandemic passed, those layers fell away. I felt a new hunger for truth, a need to embrace a part of me that I tried to hide and to ignore. Mana Chi, my May, celebrates arrival, and it celebrates otherness and difference. It celebrates a precious birthright and legacy. It is a joyful recognition of what has been gifted to me—a particular set of values that I’m privileged to have grown up with and that I hope have laid down for my daughters and those who follow them.

 

The Ongoing Conversation about Identity

So that’s the story. But let’s talk more about identity because I think that’s at the heart of all of us. Let’s talk about it very, very… I know it speaks very powerfully. I think for a big part of my life, I was constantly wrestling with the identities that other people were telling me I was, and I could never get it right. So that’s interesting. If I went to England, I was Scottish, and if I was in Scotland, I was English. You know, it just exhausted me—psychologically exhausted me. I remember cracking and remember this moment; it was when Peter Toh had come to town, and he was talking about the first part of his autobiography. I had been bought a ticket, and I went along, and I just—I couldn’t see color in the world, if you know the expression. He was taking questions, and I said, “Well, what do you do when you hit rock bottom?” The whole place went quiet, and I kind of was drawn to his figure because this figure of grace and elegance with blistering blue eyes—Lawrence of Arabia, that idea of walking across deserts and just keeping walking, keep going. He paused and looked up and said, “Well, one waits for an opportune moment, and then one gets up.” And that was a moment when I started to go, “Okay, I don’t know who I am,” and started to listen and seek out ways of self-discovery.

 

The Complexity of Identity Recognition

Right. Um, and Lu Chi, a philosopher, I started to really identify with her expression of distinguishing between whether somebody is seeing you as a cipher, you know, an image they’ve got in their mind of you, or whether they’re seeing you as a human being. She says, “If you’re looking at somebody and see a cipher, you’re not seeing a human being. If you’re seeing a sense of eternal wonder, you’re in a process of discovery.” If somebody tells you, meets you, and goes, “This is who you are,” that’s one way they’re engaging with you. Then there’s another way people go, “Hello,” and engage you in, “Who are you?” That started to immunize me a little bit about the labels that you accrue over time, and I got a bit of resilience from that. “Oh, well, that’s a label; that’s how someone is seeing me.” They’re not taking the time to find out. So yes, I still don’t know who I am; I’m still learning, but yes, it’s a pleasure. Yes, that’s exciting; it’s a work in progress—a work in progress, absolutely.

 

The Role of Belonging in Identity

Yeah, no, I just—this is going back a little bit—because just thinking about the two different types of identity and this kind of very individual one where, like you were saying, you’re meeting somebody, and if they’re really connecting with you, they’re aware enough and present enough that they’re responding to who you are at the time, not who they were expecting you to be. That’s kind of what was going through my mind—that they are dealing with your work in progress as a work in progress, oh, your improvisation. Yeah, they’re open to the curiosity of seeing who you are today, even though they might have known you for years. But the other part of identity that struck me was about the labels that people put on you—not necessarily the negative ones—and it was something that I was seeing in your work, which is identity and belonging, the link between your identity and your identity as

part of a group. Being part of belonging—that’s what I got from your talk many moons ago. I ran a group called the Philos and Psychology meetup group, and the topic one week was where we considered home.

 

Exploring the Concept of Home

And that’s very much identity in that most people tend to think, you know, people say, “I’m going home for Christmas.” Where is home? Is it back to your flat, or is it a place, or is it people? Yeah, I mean, I don’t really have a concept of where I belong at all. It’s really interesting because, like, for me, right now, I really don’t know where my home is. It’s because my parents have become so religious that they are like, “Either you come the Christ way, or you leave your own life.” So it’s like I know why they have become so religious; it’s because my sister was so unwell, and the doctors had given up. My parents went, like my mother went to the church, and she could see the miracles happening. I know what her belief is, and she’s so much into Christ now that they are both baptized. Even to talk to them for like five minutes, there is God in the conversation. So even if I date somebody, even if I get married to somebody, they would be like, “If she’s not a Christian, you do your own thing.” It’s really hard. I have to go home in a few weeks, and my degree at Oxford is over, but is it really my home? Because I might come back in three days because I already booked a US visa.

 

The Influence of Societal Norms on Identity

So I know it’s definitely not a one-day session where home is. It’s very difficult. Where were you raised? I was raised in India. I came to England for my degree at Oxford. There’s an interesting thing you said before you came to England; you mentioned that when you were in England, you were Scottish, and if you’re in Scotland, you become English. Nobody says “British”—in group, out group. There’s a Greek myth story that I really cherish. Oh, sorry, the story of Baucis and Philemon is a myth about xenía, and it speaks to hospitality. For a certain part of my life, I was drifting and really homeless. What I discovered was that philanthropy is not a myth for me; it’s very much a reality because I discovered it in strangers. I witnessed it. The story of Baucis and Philemon—very rudimentary version of it is Zeus has thrown a hissy fit and gone, “All right, this is how I planned it, and I’m going to wipe out humanity and start again,” you know, storms and floods and all of that.

Before I do that, I’ll go down to earth and take a walk, and he disguised himself as a beggar, a homeless beggar, and came across this couple, Baucis and Philemon. They saw, “Oh, you look cold; come in, come into the house; sit by the fire; oh, you’re hungry; is there any food?” They go to kill their only goose, and at that moment, Zeus goes, “Aha!” Well, and he reveals himself as Zeus and says, “Ah, you’ve just shown me the reason why—why there is perfection here.” In that, he says, “I’ll grant you a wish.” At the same time, they said, “Oh, well, when we die, we’d like to go too.” He granted their wish, and when they died, they were transformed into trees—the oak and linden trees. They grew entwined. You’ll see these pictures depicting that. What I draw from that is the humanity; it’s the care; it’s the love; it’s the love of another, and that’s the wild space for me that sustains life and all the things that keep us going.

 

The Role of Belief in Identity Formation

Yeah, that’s true. That’s belief in you. I mean, one of the things that really kept the students I researched was the obvious belief in them and in what they had to offer that the lecturer conveyed. That was really important, actually, you know, and it’s a true thing. At my own experience, I played in a small orchestra for about eight years, and no one ever said boo. Actually, nobody noticed if I wasn’t there. Then I joined a band about six months ago, and everybody said, “You play the music so beautifully.” Because people say that you do play well, you know, it’s a form of validation. So you see that in learning situations; you do, and you get this extra layer of meaning to it. If it’s just a painting you’ve done and it just lives under your bed, there’s an extra layer of meaning if it gets shown, and if somebody wants it. You might not necessarily sell it for the money but sell it to get it out there in the world because that adds to your uniqueness.

 

Vulnerability in Creativity

That’s true. How do you embrace that vulnerability then? Because obviously, if you’re putting something out there and doing something, there’s always the risk that it won’t meet this sort of creative interaction. I think you can. Sorry, I think you can take the—you’re kind of satisfied in the idea that you’ve done it, which even if nobody likes it or nobody sees it. I mean, just talking for myself now, I get a satisfaction out of just having done it—out of having taken the risk. You know, I can kind of pat myself on the back for that one. Do you have a project in mind? What did you say? I saw you had a project in your mind.

 

The Intersection of Creativity and Community

Oh, I think it’s hard to embrace that vulnerability. I think there’s a lot in this of that sort of battle and sort of reaction and interaction between belonging and then the self-creating and risking sort of where you belong and confronting going against people’s expectations. That can be potentially isolating, yeah. Well, the thing I always remember is the Carol Dweck stuff from psychology—the fixed versus the growth model. The notion is that you put something out there and it doesn’t work, and you think, “Well, that’s it; it’s never going to be any good.” You know, people are not accepting it; I made a mistake; it’s a failure. That’s the fixed model. But the growth model says, “What did I learn from doing that? How am I going to be able to do something a bit better the next time? How am I going to be nearer to success in the future?” I think that’s the difference. You know, you don’t see the failure as the end of the story; you see that the beginning of a new story and the opportunity to go on and grow from that.

 

The Importance of Safe Spaces for Learning

Yeah, I guess it’s different if you’re actually creating something and you’re putting your creation out there as opposed to a vulnerability where you’re actually putting yourself out there. That’s probably—it doesn’t necessarily have to be a piece of work; it could be a quilt or something, and yeah, it’s all kinds of creativity, aren’t there? I always remember saying, “If you’ve never made a mistake, you haven’t been trying hard enough.” Back in the early 60s, these four guys called John, Paul, George, and Ringo, as individuals, were actually good musicians, but they wouldn’t have got anywhere on that. When they got together as a group, playing together and writing music together, they were wonderful. They became the Fab Four.

 

Collaboration in Creativity

Yeah, that’s true. If they’d never gone out of their houses, that wouldn’t have happened. You’re talking about collaboration, cooperation—all of that. That’s really, really important to create something together. Something like the Ragged University, as an idea, has been a space where I was looking for a space that was friendly, warm, and able to share in safe ways. Going from the situation of never having spoken in front of people at all, like I was absolutely terrified, and then discovering, “Oh, wait! People who come are interesting and interested and want to hear and discover.” Now I don’t have that fear. From a very physiological response, I could feel my heart beating in my throat, and my hearing went, dry mouth and going, realizing, “It’s okay; I’m going to share this.” It’s really nice to have critical friends—people who have… it’s a place for learning. It’s repelling away from this idea of monetizing. You got expression; it’s not about money. Money is not the issue.

 

The Role of Community in Education

My wife and I talk about it regularly; it’s not having the money; it’s what you choose to do with it. When I did my undergraduate degree, there was a small group of us—three or four—who had similar interests in the modules we were doing. At that time, I was, you know, even in something like microprocessors and digital electronics and logic; I was probably the best. I was never very forthcoming to them at tutorials and things like that. It was very competitive. I saw them as competitors to get into the top sort of grouping of the degree. That was in contrast to when I did my postgraduate MBA, where I had a really good friend from Germany, and we worked together because language is not my strongest subject. So doing sporting assignments, he speaks five languages fluently, and he’d stop mid-sentence at the end of one and start another. He’s got his fluent German; his wife’s Italian, fluent Italian from Milan, so the north. His wife was working with a French bank, so he speaks French and Spanish because Spanish and Italian are very similar. When he came to Edinburgh, his English wasn’t perfect. He’d done it from schools, but he had a sort of German dialect. So I helped him on that side; he helped me in writing sentences. He taught me how to put the skeleton together of a sentence or paragraph and get it done.

 

The Value of Collaborative Learning

We’re now super friends. During the pandemic, we spoke; he was the chief operating officer of a bank in Germany. After doing his MBA, he did a part-time PhD, and he stayed in Edinburgh during that and became really good friends during the pandemic. We spoke every Sunday because he wasn’t able to get a job, and executive jobs like that in Germany have a three-year contract. He got into the shortlist for lots of new roles but couldn’t do face-to-face interviews. I’m sure you had the time to speak. Since the pandemic ended, he’s got a job. He’s now Chief Operating Officer of one of Germany’s biggest banks. There’s your… there’s your… absolutely. Absolutely.

And a great rapport. He’s got three children, and his oldest boy just completed a degree at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The two boys are super footballers; one got a full goalkeeper scholarship, a 100% scholarship to the University of Santa Barbara, and the second boy is doing a degree called business engineering at the Technical University of Darmstadt, which is the sort of place that in Scotland we got rid of—places like Napier, Napier Polytechnic—which was a sort of establishment where you did the theory and then you went out and did practical work. But Pely College of Technology was similar. I think these were terrible. I’ve been going through lots of thinking recently in my head about education—my own sort of things. Should you do something and then go back and learn the theory, or should you do the theory and then do the practical?

 

The Debate on Education Methodologies

What have you found with that? Sorry, people coming back after learning the theory after they’ve had the experience. I think it’s interesting. I think it’s quite good to have the experience and then consolidate it with theory. I would have—I was going to say actually in terms of impermanence, I brought a few copies of this. I photocopied some stuff on it if you’re interested in reading about impermanence. You can help yourselves to that, actually, just a wee present.

 

The Importance of Contextualized Learning

When you started the talk, you were talking about some educational models, and one of the ones you mentioned—the view—I was just thinking about

 

how we come to navigate uncertainty and the construction of identity. You talked about children coming with higher values, and then, in a way, education imposes other values, which are less valuable, like play, exploration, and learning from failure. Who was it that represented? You mentioned someone’s name.

I mentioned Foucault, yeah. Who basically says that society’s values permeate how we educate our children and what we educate them with. Actually, you can look at various curricula and analyze it that way; you can see that. I mean, I was terribly conscious; I mean, I suppose I have always been a bit subversive, you know, because I always felt that there was a middle-class value system running through educational establishments. I think it’s still the case, actually. Well, I’ve been out of it for a while, obviously, but I think what we hold dear as things that we think are worth learning are questionable, actually.

 

Rethinking Educational Values

I mean, it was A.S. Neill at Summerhill, wasn’t it, that basically said you form a curriculum according to what the young people want, which I think is a very interesting model, actually, as opposed to saying, “This is the French syllabus for the year; we’re all going to learn about how you say the word for Hoover and the word for inclusion.” I mean, it’s a very interesting study, and I don’t know if there’s enough been done about it, really.

Do you think there’s too much comfort in the sort of learning system and not enough of this embracing the discomfort and the uncertainty and the sort of unknown elements? Actually, to improve learning, it’s about making this discomfort comfortable so that people are curious and exploratory. How would you think you go about that—making the uncomfortable comfortable?

 

Strategies for Embracing Discomfort in Learning

I think one of the main things to do is to let people understand that if they fall flat on their face, you’ll help them get up again. My wife is Chinese, and one of the things that fascinates me is the differences between the Chinese education system and the education system here. Because you’re talking to her about what life was like for her when she was being educated, it was about learning to say the right thing. There are set things you are supposed to say or are set facts you’re supposed to accept, and your job is to learn and repeat these, which was, you know, very limiting. In fact, China has suffered a bit as a result of that because it’s lacked innovation in terms of industrial development and theoretical development because people only learned what they were told to learn, and that was it.

It reminded me of my own school days. I was at school in Glasgow in the 1950s, and I went to a very authoritarian school. I learned two major things: one was to be very suspicious of authority, and the other one was how to beat the system. It was a selective school, and what a grand school it was—halfway between being a public school and a private school, a grant-aided school. The result was that a lot of the kids there were actually pretty

intelligent kids because they had been selected, and the major education took place when we were waiting for school assembly in the morning. We would all sit discussing world affairs, what had been in the news, what we had been doing, and what was going on around us. The main thing we learned there was to think, and that was perhaps actually the most valuable lesson at the end of the day.

 

The Complexities of Identity and Education

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, privilege when it comes to self-actualization. You think of that as a higher need. If you’re more fundamentally, we see in the news now London trying to remove tents from homeless people, etc. If you’re in a situation where you’re worried about where you’re going to be sleeping, it’s going to be a different degree of actualization, isn’t it? Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, you have to look at the need to question the freedom there is in that.

Actually, I like what I read about Maria Montessori. Yeah, yeah. She made her point in emphasizing that her schools were “child-centered” homes. They’re not buildings in which children are being educated. They needed to be environments where people felt they belonged. Part of her impulse, yeah, was to nurture a lot of the latchkey children who didn’t have a place and were effectively running, you know, homeless for the day.

 

The Importance of Belonging in Educational Spaces

That’s really flavored how I think about the structures we’re creating in our world because I do feel we’re a society here, you know, by my cultural context, a lot of people are struggling with depersonalized structures—structures that don’t allow people to really have the social interactions that are really ancient. And that’s a big reason why food is at the center of our—you know, we realize, “Oh well, since the dawn of time, people have come together.” You know, there’s a particular we belong with food, and it’s a sharing place. So I like to have that potlatch idea; you’re talking my language, of course.

In the early days, you know, humans had to learn to communicate so they could organize themselves to chase the mammoth off the cliff, and when it fell, when it was dead at the bottom, they all got together to carve it up. Italian homes—I mean, I say that you know food is central; the kitchen table is the center of the home.

 

The Role of Social Interaction in Learning

I was actually going to say, though, Alex, that I’ve done a lot of staff development for lecturers and teachers, and the message I’ve always tried to put over is that as a lecturer or teacher, you’re one of a community; you’re in partnership with your learners. I mean, to kind of deconstruct that whole notion of “I am the subject expert in this room,” actually, just sit down alongside your learners and work with them. They find that very hard, actually, but there was a great missionary called Jean Ruch, who started all that kind of thinking for me. She was dead now. She was a superwoman; she was teaching at Cambridge University, and she quoted a wee girl of eight who said, “My teacher has the courage to sit down beside me.” I thought that was terribly, terribly important; you’re not the subject expert. You’re the expert in terms of communication; you should be the expert communicator, the expert enabler, the expert facilitator. But in terms of subject expert, knowledge changes so fast, actually.

 

Redefining Educational Roles

The other thing is to admit you don’t know—just say you don’t know it. Tell the kids to go and look it up; you look it up too, and then come back and say, “This is what we found.” But in some ways, you’ve got to sort of understand the reason why you’re learning something. Say you tell them; say that education is about teaching people how to look but not telling them what to see. Exactly, exactly.

Throwing like inverting what I experienced as the formal educational system and going, “Well, okay, what happens when you just invite the world into a room?” The world presents you with the curriculum, and you don’t say, “Well, right, you have to speak for this long, and you’ve got to do it this way,” and, you know, create a series of prescriptions and rules, and that empties a space of all of these parts of us. And what filled me with joy, you know, reconstituted me, was discovering lots and lots and lots of people throughout life who are interested in a friendly way. It makes me think, I puzzle over utopia. The root of that word is not a place.

 

The Concept of Utopia in Community

I have come—I sort of meditated. Well, it’s not a place; it’s people. It’s relationships. Rendor spoke about how all I need is the shade of a tree to start my schooling. That’s another thing that made me go, “Oh, yeah.” Which people? You know, as a sort of half-feral C dog myself, being adopted at one point by a group of… that sounds interesting. I think also at a peak level, this entire idea of question—you know, like the way we’re grown up is that your question should be crisp, and your question should be clear, and that’s like an oxymoron because it’s a question. I mean, I understand there are time constraints and you know this X, Y, Z is working, but it’s just this entire practice of making children practice how to question in itself is so regimental because if I knew, I wouldn’t be asking.

 

The Importance of Questioning in Learning

And it’s about, like, because I go back to my school days and my university days; it’s more like, you know, questions should be like 30 seconds; it should be clear. I was like, “That’s not a question!” No, I mean, it is. On the other side, like you were saying for teaching, when you do have a group and you’re learning from your learners, it broadens the entire topic you’re enthused. I mean, there’s nothing more valuable in a group that you’re teaching than a student who has noticed a hole in something.

 

The Value of Critical Engagement in Learning

Yeah. Oh, that’s just—that’s a gem, absolutely, because they’re not just receiving; they’re actually moving the teachers ahead. That’s right. They’re driving it. It’s great. Another thing I’ve learned is that I’ve learned a nice way of learning is learning through helping. So putting it out into the world can be helpful even with a pair of hands. You know, so putting out chairs, sweeping up, helping. A lovely gent called Roy, I just—I help people on events, and I learned so much through helping, and I got a friendship to boot. Somebody taught me how to create websites, and he said, “Well, I’ll build you a website that’s for the community, and it’s a provisor. You share what I’ve given to you.” Since doing that, it’s a pleasant and gentle way to be in the world.

 

Building Community Through Collaboration

And you end up doing something constructive because you’re adding an ingredient to a collective recipe; you know, you end up, “All right, this is how they—all the world of experience they’re bringing to what they’re doing.” Okay, I mean, they may not do web development; I can do that. It removes a really exclusionary principle, which is finance; finance really upsets all these dynamic realities. A fixed—it has to put a fixed value on it as well. So you know, there is kind of relative—it’s not based on need anymore; it’s kind of, “I need this; you need that.” “Ah, but my thing’s more expensive.” So, you know, that kind of—that’s right; it’s market value, and it’s trying to define it and define about—

 

The Challenge of Defining Value in Community

Yeah. How do you define an emergent reality? Well, well, what’s outside of the shoebox? And you find everything else. I think going back to one of the terms that I used that I love so much, which was the play, delight, and uncertainty is a value—going back again to what children are very good at. You know, inexpensive uncertainty, that plays a fantastic means of navigation where there’s no map.

Yes, and I mean, children, children playing—going back to your idea of remaking and, you know, reinventing your reality or your identity all the time. If you look at children playing, they’re inventing; they’re taking bits and pieces of what they’ve learned, what they’ve seen on TV, you know, what somebody’s—what they’ve overheard, and they’re making a reality out of it. It changes all the time, and somebody goes, “No, I don’t want it to be that; I don’t want that to be reality.” “Okay, okay, we’ll change it!” And the use of imagination is really important, actually, to allow that to flourish.

 

The Role of Imagination in Learning

One of the things that the people I did a case study on came up with, actually, I thought was very interesting; you know, “What’s the most valuable thing you’ve got from your learning experience?” It wasn’t the qualification that came from the qualification. What was the most valuable thing was the relationships that they built during the learning experience. And I thought that was very interesting, actually, and also going to identity. I mean, the cynical one is you learn the attitude that, you know, depending on what kind of school you go to, what was the most valuable thing you came out with? Attitude. But it’s also—it’s the confidence.

 

The Interplay of Relationships and Identity

Yeah, that’s right, self-confidence. Who was it? It was from one of the RSA talks, one of your friends, who was a Glasgow-based organization that was based on that kind of inner voice that you have an idea, and then this inner voice says, “No, you can’t do that.” But it was a very Scottish thing as well that he was encountering so many creative young people, and he created the organization based on voice. It’s not Ken Robinson, is it? No, no, it was a friend from your RSA friends who was based in Glasgow. But it was that kind of reminded me a little bit of what you were saying before about having the courage to put an idea out, and then there’s a cultural Scottish way of thinking, which is just like, “Oh, that will never work,” and then you’re getting above yourself.

 

The Courage to Challenge Cultural Norms

Yeah, standing above your station, something like that. So how do you—so his whole thing was supporting more modalized or underprivileged communities to have that confidence to express a belief or the courage to fail through testing or whatever that might be. But just that. It was really catchy. I wonder if it was Roxan P. Was it? She does lots of really great stuff on learning through failure, and she sort of goes, “Well, we’re saying if you’ve not got something wrong, you’re not trying hard enough.” One of her things was, “Well, yeah, it’s problematic to penalize people.” You’ve got this one shot, and this is the grade that will determine all these opportunities.

 

The Impact of Failure on Identity

That’s right. These dominoes start toppling in people’s lives, and then suddenly, like algorithms are reading TV sets, and what’s happened to the culture of people being told, “All right, well, come on, have a shot, and we’ll work with you.” Like in learning and training—seeing this in training, doing a role play or something, you know, for adults in a professional context. Training should be a safe place for them to fail, like school is a safe place for you to fail because it’s going to have much greater consequences outside. So this is the time to try it. I mean, the abomination is league tables—an absolute abomination. And I mean, you know, unthinking head teachers work to them, you know, and impose that on their staff because you know that’s the way success is recognized, actually. They impose working to get, you know, to like children. If you think a child’s going to fail a public exam, then don’t present them because if you present them, it’ll impact badly on the league tables, and that’s our position and that’s our status in the world and all of that. You know, they’re an abomination, and what they don’t do is measure—and this is a very important concept in education—distance traveled.

 

The Need for Measuring Progress in Education

And that’s really important because you—it’s not everybody getting to that point; it’s about where people start from, actually. So this guy starts there and gets to there, fine. This guy starts from there; he might not get to there; he might get just to there. And that’s important; he’s made progress; that’s success. But that’s not measured. No, it must be horrible. You know, talk about the influence of culture on identity for the children coming out from the schools who are at the bottom. What that’s going to do to their self-image? Well, you’ve got kids; I mean, being on the children’s panel, I mean, they’re terrible. Some children are born in terrible, terrible circumstances—drug dealers at the door, children—there’s abuse going on there, sexual abuse, domestic abuse, you know, and they emerge from that, and they’re lucky to get to school, even to make it to school. You know, so that’s in a sense, it’s on an even playing field. You’ve got the other guy coming from a nice place like Bruntsfield in the morning side with a clean uniform, and he comes nicely to school, having had his breakfast.

 

The Inequities of Educational Systems

You know, so it’s about trying to—everyone’s entitled to education, but it’s about allowing for me to measure the success or recognizing the success of the other kids, actually, who’ve come from quite a different scenario. Together, that was one positive outcome, I think, for the independent care review in higher education. It was a different dialogue happening around the difference between equity and equality when it comes to access requirements and education in the first place. I mean, I had a friend who did very badly at school. He was never very academic at all, seen as being to some extent an academic failure because that was the criterion by which he decided whether he was educated or not—whether he passed the exams, whether he’d done well at school. But he decided, actually, going to drop out of school early, and he became a plumber’s apprentice. Thirty years later, he was running a very successful plumbing business, making more than I did, and really enjoying life. He said, “Well, you know, which was his education? Was it what happened in the school or was it learning to be a…?”

 

Redefining Success in Education

Absolutely. Absolutely, Jacob Riis would say, “You’re not educated if you can read Latin or speak Latin.” Not at all. Skills. Can someone do a work with these people, please? What’s interesting, I find, is that children start off being incredibly interested in learning—learning everything—but they get to about 10 years old, and suddenly, they sort of rebel against learning. I’ve sort of tried to work out for myself. They come home from school with homework on arithmetic, and they show it to Daddy, and Daddy says, “Sorry, I would worry about this. I never did any of that, and look where it’s got me.” And mention that, you know, there are all these things talked about, about poverty areas—children in poverty. Yes, I don’t really know what poverty is. I was brought up in the countryside; we never had a television. We only got a television when my mom said, “If you pass all your O-levels, we’ll get a TV.”

 

The Influence of Socioeconomic Factors on Education

I think poverty is for children who can’t get a meal—a square meal, actually—which is very, very… I mean, Scotland’s got very, very high poverty levels, which is very, very bad. Because the parents can’t cook because they went to school. It’s a number of factors; it’s a number of factors. It’s housing, it’s crime rates, it’s index multiple deprivation. Yes, that’s right. At one point, I was living in the high-rise blocks in Oxgangs to the south of the city, and personally, I felt it was one of the richest moments of my life because I found so many lovely and brilliant minds. I remember being asked, “Oh, Alex, would you—I’ve got this great idea for a local enterprise token system, a local currency, and, you know, build these machines, and people can get cards and build up credits, and if you can install it in your local part of the community.” I had to say, “You don’t get it; there’s nowhere to install this. There’s a bookies, there’s a chippy, there’s a pump, there’s a post office, there’s a corner shop, there are a few beauty salons.” Well, at the time, you know, there was nothing. Everything had been… I’m looking at the planning documents that go back to the 1920s—Craigmillar and Niddrie—and they were described as these visions of Patrick Geddes.

 

Revisiting Urban Planning and Community Structures

Yes, Geddes is famous as a town planner and quite a holistic thinker. I’ve been tuning into academics who really know the vision of Geddes and asking them, “Could you look at Craigmillar and tell me what you think? Is this the vision?” And they said, “No, this is entirely denuded—economically denuded spaces.” Yeah, right. And also, the work of Professor Ray Oldenburg is really interesting, who works in the States. He was looking at what makes a local habitat, if you like, and he spoke about the great good places—cafés, pubs, small businesses—also group shops, but they can take lots of different forms. They’re places where people meet and chew the cud and swap stories. You meet old friends; you discover new friends. There’s often cheap, affordable food involved, and his work, yeah, really, I think it’s only becoming more relevant.

 

The Importance of Community Spaces

Places where people linger, beauty salons, barber shops, cafés, as opposed to like the corner shop. You go in, buy out, you know, that kind of thing. Yeah, Edinburgh is a city made up of lots of villages, which were connected together by a railway station on a line or a tram line. The trams were all ripped up because they were considered old-fashioned, but each of these villages had a heart. You had a baker, a candlestick maker. Most of them actually had what was called a manufactury, which was a factory producing something. Making things— we don’t have that nowadays. I’m just wondering whether that neighborhood thing is coming back as an intention because they talk about the 15-minute city and the idea is that everything you want should be within 15 minutes’ walk of where you live. Part of that is cutting down things like car transport as well, but whether that’s going to work or not remains to be seen.

 

The Intersection of Urban Planning and Community Wellbeing

There was an enormous move backwards in lifestyle. There’s so much that you can control. I mean, I’ve seen it in my neighborhood. You could have introduced it there, but then this shop goes under, and the people, you know, what do I have now? The pub closed, and now there’s somewhere that makes dentures. You don’t linger there; you don’t meet your friends there. I’ve never thought about when they close and something else comes in.

 

The Challenges of Community Resilience

So the planning only goes so far. Is there any examples of those micro currencies functioning and working? I’ve heard that the Bristol pound is still pretty strong. It had a short, sharp blast in the sun, but I don’t think it’s potentially big anymore. I know that there was one example which really made it quite strong to the point where the treasury got involved and went, “Well, if we can’t tax it, you’re not letting us do it,” which was—I would have to check it out.

 

The Future of Alternative Currencies

Bitcoin? Well, yeah. I have friends of mine in Findhorn. They were trying it, and the trouble is with that is you don’t get the breadth of services and trade. There are lots of massage places, no plumbing. It’s basic. There were lots of people putting things up, but the services that they might have needed and wanted to trade for would have been on the ground. I spent some time in an off-grid community. No roads, no electrical infrastructure, no pumps, no shops. Before I went, I conceptually couldn’t understand, “So how do people live? How does…?” I went there for four weeks and wound up staying nine months because people were so, “Oh, you’re being helpful; why don’t you come over and help over here? We do biodynamics.” It was just being helpful.

 

The Power of Community in Off-Grid Living

What was really interesting was that when one place had a glut of something, they would just go around and say, “Well, I’ve got loads of tomatoes here,” and a friend Bill described it as fairly self-organizing. “Right, we’re doing a beach cleanup,” so everybody would be invited. It would go, “Right, okay, some people would gravitate towards the wood; some people would pick up the plastic.” And then, you know, everybody gravitated, and people then saw what was left to be done. And even if they weren’t close-knit friends or didn’t have a strong friendship bond, there was just this understanding, “Well, you know, we do it; live and let live.”

 

Understanding Human Coordination

And that really reconfigured my understanding of how humans, as social beings, can do naturally coordinate. There are groups called “men’s sheds” around which do a lot of that, where people with various skills come together and do things in the community, just encouraging men to talk to one another. Yes, it is, yeah, which they don’t do so easily.

 

Engaging in Community Support

I remember shocking an audience at a bar event at the British Educational Research Association. My part in this panel was I just addressed the audience and said, “Look, I’m flat broke, but what I can do is maybe be helpful. Let’s remove the paperwork; remove the money. I’ll just—if you’ve got a website that you need to build, I’ll do it for free.” The shock that met was completely outside the frame of reference of such a highly regulated space where you’ve got internal currencies going on in universities.

 

Navigating Educational Structures

I’ve been finding, “Well, you know, educators have to budget to rent rooms in their own institutions. They have the budget to get tea and coffee,” and you know, and I learned to not try to speak to the institution, but to talk to the individual educators. And that’s interesting because we’re sometimes caught in administrative structures. Yes.

 

The Impact of Politicization and Commercialization

That’s true. I mean, the trouble is that education has become politicized and commercialized. Universities are particularly bad at that. I was interested in some of the statistics this week that were saying a quarter of all the new housing that’s been built in Edinburgh has been built for students. Yeah, that doesn’t surprise me at all, despite the fact that Edinburgh has a housing crisis because there are international students paying 30 grand a year for their education, actually, and you can rent it out as an Airbnb for the festival in between terms. Sorry, that’s cynical, but that’s what I’ve heard of—a cynical grand plan. You get a tax break for building student accommodation, and after ten years, you can actually sell it on as proper accommodation for profit.

 

Reflections on the Evolution of Higher Education

But you know when I think back to universities when I went to university, it was a very different institution. Oh, completely. It was very much about education. It was about understanding things; it was about creating new ideas. Now it’s about turning out people with a degree because if you don’t turn them out with a degree, they’re going to complain they didn’t get their money’s worth. Well, I’ve never—I mean, I always had a vision of, you know, when I was at university, you know, impoverished students, you know, kind of living, you know, in some kind of damp, smelly attic, you know, and you know, kind of really struggling for money. But actually, I go to But actually, I go to the university library very often, and I see really well-dressed students—actually, very, very well dressed—lots of money, because you know the university. You’re really happy; you’re producing all these bloody accountants and lawyers who produce.

 

The Cycle of Knowledge and Resources

Sort of, I’ve thrived from the… so in Edinburgh, of course, you’ve got these big influxes, and I love the interculturalism—it’s very important. But what I really realized was, as intakes of students came and then went, all of these textbooks would either be put into the bin or given to charity shops, and the charity shops would dump them because they wouldn’t have resale value. So I clocked this, and I just started “spin diving.” Oh, I’ll have a bit of pharmacology, a bit of law, a bit of history. You know some of these things— they’re extortionate to buy! Yeah, I’ve got a room in my house which has every single book I’ve bought in my life in it, and I’ve still got my university notes.

 

The Value of Knowledge Preservation

My sister had said, “You know, Andrew, you keep hoarding your stuff; your house is junk.” I said, “No, it’s actually valuable.” She says, “All these bloody books! Just put them in the charity shop! Is it not all on the internet?” I say, “But you can’t go and get this book which talks about, um, Internet Protocol in one book. This is a first edition of it. When I graduated from university in 1977, the internet didn’t exist, and the idea of having a mobile phone the size that it is just now, with about five or six radios, was pie in the sky—something you might see in Star Trek. It was on TV then because radios were the size of a backpack.”

 

The Challenge of Archiving Knowledge

It’s interesting because, uh, just recently I was trying to clear out what rubbish I’ve got—journals from my profession going back to 1975. I thought, “What else do you do with these?” Somebody said, “You know, why don’t we give them to a university library?” So I approached the university library and said, “Are you interested?” He said, “Oh God, no, we don’t want books.” It’s true, it’s true. I mean, the Edinburgh University Library is just full of computers. Absolutely every room has computers.

 

The Shift in Information Consumption

Well, it was Harvard, actually, in association with Harvard. I said, “Are you interested?” “Oh God, no, books! What about the national library?” Same thing—nobody’s interested in actually having hands-on copies of stuff anymore. That’s right, and I mean, the things that—I mean, knowledge changes so quickly anyway. Actually, they say three years, three years—you know, that’s the life of it. Then it’s moved on to something else. Actually, so probably all I’ve said about culturalism and constructivism this evening is probably no longer relevant. You know, I mean, that was then. That’s okay, wait a while, it’ll come back.

 

Embracing Change in Education

Then I quite enjoy change, actually. I think change is one of the things that’s essential in education for me. If everything stayed the same, I wouldn’t learn as much. That’s one of the reasons why I enjoy coming to meetings like this. Earlier on today, I was on an online meeting with an international group, meeting people from Spain, Brazil, and so on, and I learn so much from all that. You know, I think that that’s a challenge I never want to give up. Education is not something that you do at university, and that’s it. It’s about how you live your life from then on.

 

Lifelong Learning and Mental Maintenance

The other thing I’m interested in, particularly for personal reasons as well, is how you maintain your mind in older age. One of the classic things that you have to do is keep learning. That’s right—learning a musical instrument, learning something absolutely. Yeah, yeah. Is your wife in China? Just in Hong Kong just now? Oh, she’s back now. She’s back now. My granddaughter is in Hong Kong. Good to see her granddaughter.

 

The Value of Travel and Cultural Engagement

But yeah, uh, and travel is one of the other things. I’ve done a fair bit of traveling in my life as well, and meeting different people in different circumstances. A lot of it has not been touristy travel; it’s been about engaging with local people and seeing things the way that they saw them. One of my great things about China is I always avoided China because my experience in China was during the Cultural Revolution when we used to get Chinese students coming over to Strathclyde University. That was up at the time, but they weren’t just any Chinese students; they were the children of the political leaders and came with minders—cultural minders who were watching everything they did. They used to hand out Mao’s Little Red Book, and they had some really weird ideas about how the world worked. They were amazed, for example, by the Glasgow underground systems. “Oh gosh, we didn’t think anywhere else but China had underground systems!” I said, “And the Glasgow one standing here? Wait till you go to London!”

 

Overcoming Preconceptions about Cultures

That’s right. But, uh, so I always avoided China having had that experience. But then when I married my wife, and, uh, well, actually before we got married, I went to China and was living in the local community with her family, seeing how things worked. That’s a wonderful education, completely different in many ways from what you get from that early political experience. And I think that openness is really important, actually—that openness to different cultures and learning from those cultures. Actually, again, that’s about changing the way we are. Exactly. You know, making a new person, actually.

 

The Importance of Diverse Experiences

You know, I mean, I lived in France for a year, I’ve lived in Italy for a while. I mean, these are all important, you know? And I—when I travel, I don’t go as a tourist, actually. I go because I want to go under the radar. I don’t want to dress like a tourist. I want to learn—I want to learn about how people live. I want to see them interact with one another. You know, how they deal in a bar, where they go shopping—these are important things that influence me, actually. I think it does two things. It’s not just about learning what you see out there; it’s about making it. You stepping out of where you were. That’s right, exactly.

 

Breaking Free from Initial Mindsets

So it’s the—it’s the two. Um, whether it’s this culture or that culture, you’re always going to get that. You’re not locked in your own initial mindset. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Now, you’ve got copies of all three books? Got them there? I mean, uh, but um, and very kindly, uh, she shared a link to her doctoral thesis. Okay, so, uh, it’s a—I know it would be a great accompaniment to—and yeah, thank you very much. Not all—it’s not that old. I got my doctorate in 2008, so it’s not that old. I mean, it’s not 1965, you know? But me—how many years did it take you to do your PhD? I did it part-time, so I did it in five years. I think that was the minimum time to do it. My—your bucket? Great! Well, thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Nice to meet you. Thanks for organizing that, Alex. That was really good of you. I’m going to back up now. Well, very—it’s mana, and this is, uh, interested people—the space. Yeah, it’s a space. It’s a place to be in the world, and, uh, that’s why it’s never—it’s more precious than money. Absolutely. Absolutely. Money is not the issue.