A script and slideset prepared for the TEDxUWASalon event "Symbiosis" held at UWA eZone July 12, 2021

1. Event: TEDxUWASalon
Date: July 12, 2021
Speaker: Kim Flintoff
Title: Learning with purpose
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Good evening.
I want to talk to you tonight about learning with purpose.
There’s nothing especially radical about the idea, but somewhere
along the way education and schooling have become quite different
social undertakings than meaningful, connected learning.
[SLIDE] - Seedling
Many of us will remember a time in our first few years of school
when we are asked to plant and observe the germination and growth
of a seed. In most classrooms, the teacher made all the decisions
about how and why the seed would be planted, and the students
were directed to take measurements, make observations, and keep a
record of it all.
Students then considered a range of factors about how seeds
germinate, what factors influence their growth, and what might be
the optimal conditions for growth. It was very simple teacher-
directed inquiry learning.
In many classrooms today, that experience is still being played out,
except some teachers have fallen into a habit of making some small
but significant adjustments to the method.

2. For a variety of well-meaning reasons, teachers will often front load
the experience with a lot of talk and information about how plants
need water, nutrients, air, and sunshine to grow. Then the
experience of planting a seed is simply a confirmatory follow-up.
It has become transmission with experiential confirmation.
This model of practice often ends up replicating the factory model of
schooling – dictating single pathways // and prioritising the
topic/test approach that is more concerned with “coverage” and
“results” than emphasising the capabilities that encourage learning.
Front-loading curriculum often removes relevance and purpose, and
we sometimes see students trapped in a cycle of topic – test –
forget.
[SLIDE] – I forget
But, I read a story about a teacher who took a different approach.
She entered her Year 2 classroom and told her students about
something very upsetting that she’d learned. She’d learned that
there were millions of people in the world who had too little to eat,
that there were people all over the world who were starving.
She asked the class what they thought about that.
They reported they felt sad // that it didn’t seem fair, // and that
they would like to share some of what they had with those hungry
people.
To cut the tale short, she engaged the students in thinking about
solutions to a wicked problem.

3. It didn’t take long before the children started suggesting that
perhaps they could teach people how to grow food in their gardens.
At this point, the students had a purpose for planting a seed.
At this point // they became active global citizens.
Now it was very important to understand how plants grew and what
could be done to help them grow well. Students had a responsibility
to the starving people of the world to be able to teach others how to
grow food producing plants.
The shift was subtle, but profound.
The teacher still had all the evidence that her students had
addressed the curriculum requirements in understanding the basics
of plant germination and growth // there were still artefacts she
could use to assess writing, recording data, taking measurements,
etc.
But she also had a wealth of other evidence that related to problem-
solving, communication, collaboration, global awareness, critical and
creative thinking, and personal learning.
And even more importantly, her students were engaged because
they cared, // they were acting to make a difference, // and they
were discovering their connection and responsibility for other people
in the world.
[SLIDE] – Dewey - problems
Real world learning usually confronts us with a problem or a need
before we have to search for the knowledge to solve it.

4. In fact, John Dewey said “We only think when we are confronted with
problems.”
Real learning is messy – iterative – ad hoc – non-linear – sometimes
social, sometime solo – its partial and imperfect –not packaged –
relevant to our lives and the lives of those we care about –reactive
and responsive.
Learning to learn focusses on capabilities before content.
PAUSE
In recent years, it’s all about STEM learning.
As a former Drama teacher I probably taught more STEM than I
realised – we engaged with human anatomy, biomechanics, human
movement, voice production, sound, light, set design and
construction, materials science, electronics, programming,
mathematics, and more. And that was before we took into account
the themes of the creative works we developed and the scripts we
worked with.
One of my educational heroes was Professor John Carroll; John
studied with Dorothy Heathcote in the UK and brought his learning
back to Australia. Dorothy and John were both Drama teachers too,
// they had a vision about how to make learners the experts as they
learned.
Dorothy translated her concept of the Mantle of the Expert into real-
world engagement in the Commission Model of Learning.
[SLIDE] John and Dorothy
John refined and recontextualized a lot of this work and developed
his own approach to Situated Role.

5. You won’t be surprised when I tell you had the opportunity to meet
and learn from both of these wonderful people.
The connections between the Arts and other disciplines are well
established –
Drama is a way of knowing, and Dorothy and John showed me it is
also a vehicle for meaningful engagement with real-world concerns.
When it came to thinking about STEM it’s not surprising to these
ideas came flooding back.
[SLIDE]Dorothy Heathcote /John Carroll
STEM is all about the tools for solving problems – the other parts of
our school learning provide the insights and the context that let us
focus on problems worth solving.
[SLIDE] HASS V STEM
STEM makes sure you solve problems right – but HASS and the
ARTS make sure you solve the right problems.
Without the ethical and moral frameworks, the critical and creative
application of philosophy, politics, culture and diversity STEM is often
driven exclusively as a servant of industry and economics.
[SLIDE] SDGs
As Global Sustainability becomes more front of mind, it is my belief
that all learning must be connected – // that achievement without
feeding back or paying forward is not sustainable, and may even be
unethical.
[SLIDE] Future Ready Learning

6. Professor David Gibson and I proposed a framework for student
learning based upon some attributes that foster learning.
We drew on well-established and research informed categories and
came up with the Future Ready Attributes
These five key capabilities can be mapped to all the major
frameworks in use in education around the world.
They need some explanation and expansion but they frame a skill
set, and a mindset, that are about inclusion and connection.
They incorporate the need to work with others, the expectation that
communication is essential, that personal learning happens
alongside, and because of the need to work with and for others.
Real-world problem solving creates a need and a context for learning
with critical thinking and creativity at its core.
[SLIDE] Coronavirus
As the COVID-19 pandemic began to influence our lives in early 2020,
my colleague, Tim Rowberry, and I were contemplating the impacts
on the work we were doing in schools.
Tim is a Design and Technology teacher at a prominent arts high
school in Fremantle, and at the time I was the Learning Futures
Advisor for a major Western Australian university.
For the previous few years we had been working to bring a different
mindset to STEM education.
One of the projects Tim and I had been working on drew together
school students, the Leeuwin sail training ship, university academics,
industry experts, and Masters-level university students to design and

7. create Virtual Reality assets that could be used for awareness,
training and orientation experiences relating to the STS Leeuwin.
[SLIDE] iThink
Suddenly, we all found ourselves working from home, // and it was
in that early window of working from home that the WA State
Government opened up an online platform called iThink to allow the
entire population of Western Australia to have a voice in the
response to the pandemic.
Tim and I suggested something quite simple – that we also listen to
the voices of young people in schools.
We suggested that we use this opportunity to generate authentic
learning experiences for WA school students to apply STEM-inspired,
curriculum-linked, design-thinking processes to solving real-world
problems relating to the immediate and future impacts of COVID-19
and other community-related needs in Western Australia.
[SLIDE] iThink Activity
Within days it became the most discussed and most up-voted idea
on the platform.
[SLIDE] STEM4Innovation was born.
Tim and I found ourselves talking with Professor Fiona Wood about
how this idea could be realised.
In the course of our discussions, back-dropped by the COVID crisis,
Fiona explained how her work place, // one of Perth’s major
hospitals, was preparing for and being impacted by the threat of
thousands of COVID patients.

8. She described the concerns about how to deal with the possibility
COVID-positive patients requiring surgery – //
for her burns unit this was a real challenge.
It soon dawned on us all that this was exactly the sort of challenge
that could be offered to students and teachers around WA.
Soon after, Fiona was Zoom meeting a group of Tim’s students from
her operating theatre at the hospital.
She was able to show the situation she was dealing with and walk
students through the very spaces she and her colleagues worked in
each day. She was able to show the complexities and difficulties that
they faced in trying to perform their life-saving work // with the
added layer of an out of control contagion.
Students in that experience learned a lot about the realities of the
health system, health care and working as a health professional.
They learned that the operating theatre is heated to 34oC because
the human body with severe burn trauma cannot regulate itself, //
that there are many layers of PPE and precise protocols for
sterilisation and hygiene, // that burns patients are regularly
manoeuvred on the operating table to allow Fiona to harvest tissue
to be used in skin grafts that assist with repair and healing of burned
flesh, and // that with the growing obesity crisis in Australia
sometimes her patients can be so large that there are increased risks
to the patient, and hospital staff when a patient has to be moved.
The students had the opportunity to ask questions, to clarify gaps or
misunderstandings, and to develop real empathetic insights into the
lived experience of those affected by the problems they were
starting to identify.

9. The students present were also charged with being representative of
all other students who would come to the Hospital Immersion
Challenge.
Students were offered the challenge to find solutions for the
difficulties that Fiona had described.
[SLIDE] Fiona – Hospital Immersion
A video of the event was made available and Tim and I
communicated with more than 150 schools that we had connections
with through the Learning Futures Network.
More than 60 schools expressed an interest in being involved, and
eventually we piloted the challenge-based learning experience with
22 schools and more than 700 students around the state.
This was no mere “hackathon”, this was the first instance of a
responsive, adaptable, contributory, community-linked, and future-
focussed mode of learning built on STEM priorities and collaborative
design-thinking processes.
Three weeks later we had a collection of solution proposals to offer
Fiona.
We selected about a dozen interesting proposals and invited the
student creators to pitch their ideas at an event at Tim’s school.
[SLIDE] Showcase lineup
The pitches were offered to an audience made up of representatives
from government, industry, the health sector, higher education, //
and of course, some very proud families and teachers of the students
presenting.
[SLIDE] John Dewey

10. The students added some evidence to John Dewey’s assertion that
when we
“Give the pupils something to do, not something to learn; And the
doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking; Learning naturally
results”
[SLIDE] VUCA
STEM4Innovation is built upon this idea of purposeful learning, // as
well as enabling student voice so that there are opportunities for
learners to begin shape the future they will have to deal with.
Young people:
• contributing to new Visions of the future that appear so
volatile,
• developing Understanding of the systems and dynamics that
seem so uncertain,
• participating in the Communication that unpacks the
complexity, and
• applying the requisite Agility to pivot when they encounter
ambiguity.
[SLIDE] Stem4innovation tracks
Since our first deep dive into STEM4Innovation we have evolved and
grown – STEM priorities around our next Health Challenge have
become embedded across virtually all learning areas in Tim’s school.
As Tim says, “Look for STEM in your subject, not your subject in
STEM” – the acrimony of trying to modify the acronym to reflect it all
has started to abate.
In my school, the first early steps towards interdisciplinarity are
underway.

11. The scope of STEM4Innovation has grown to invite all manner of
industry and community challenges under the broad umbrella of six
program tracks.
[SLIDE] Takeaways
As our next Health and Wellbeing challenge gets underway //
the issue brought to us by a team of Upper GI and Bariatric surgeons
who have become frustrated with trying to address the challenges of
lifestyle diseases //
our students are once again encouraged to learn with purpose.
Our students are examining the problem, understanding the issues
and the effects, and developing real outputs that will contribute to
the efforts of the doctors involved.
Our students are producing a variety of work that have a positive
impact in many different ways.
They are sharing the responsibility for improving health outcomes for
all West Australians, // they are still providing the evidence to enable
assessment, // but it’s on their terms.
There is no single pathway being followed.
Teachers are allies and supporters of the deep the learning that’s
occurring, // and our communities are seeing that young people
aren’t learning to prepare for life, // they are deeply engrossed in
living their life through the learning experiences that enable them to
be active and compassionate citizens with growing awareness of the
futures they want to create.
Our students are active agents in their own learning.
They rely on each other to achieve high order outcomes.

12. They connect and contribute to the world beyond the school gate.
They are networking with real stakeholders.
Our students lead the learning and curriculum follows.
Our students are learning with purpose.
[SLIDE] Watch it grow.
And remember that seed – there’s a metaphor in there – watch it
grow.

13. Learning with purpose
Kim Flintoff

14. PLANT A SEED

16. “WE ONLY THINK
WHEN WE ARE
CONFRONTED
WITH PROBLEMS”
JOHN DEWEY

18. “I have a dream that has not yet been realized; I
would like students, not to learn what their
teachers teach them, but to be people who solve
problems in the outside world that their teachers
bring to them…
This is actually a radical way of learning, I want
students to be citizens of the world.
– Dorothy Heathcote

19. STEM MAKES
SURE YOU DO THE
PROJECT RIGHT,
HASS MAKES
SURE YOU DO THE
RIGHT PROJECT.

21. • COLLABORATION
• CREATIVITY
• PROBLEM-SOLVING
• PERSONAL LEARNING
• GLOBAL AWARENESS

25. STEM4INNOVATION.ORG

28. “GIVE THE PUPILS SOMETHING TO DO,
NOT SOMETHING TO LEARN;
AND THE DOING IS OF SUCH A NATURE AS
TO DEMAND THINKING;
LEARNING NATURALLY RESULTS”
JOHN DEWEY

30. • Health and Wellbeing
• Technology and Exploration
• Food security, Primary
Production, Agriculture
• Life on Earth
• Education, Culture, Community,
Peace and Harmony
• Industry, Infrastructure, Smart
Cities, and the World of Work
STEM4INNOVATION PROGRAM TRACKS

31. • STUDENT AGENCY
• POSITIVE INTERDEPENDENCE
• CONNECT BEYOND THE SCHOOL GATE
• REAL STAKEHOLDERS
• CONTEXT FOR LEARNING
• LEARN WITH PURPOSE
• LEARNING LEADS AND CURRICULUM FOLLOWS

32. WATCH IT GROW