Each project and initiative rests on a foundation shaped by a transdisciplinary perspective. My work draws on the principles of the ecological university (Barnett, 2018) and an ethical commitment to the intellectual emancipation of students (Rancière, 1991), the idea that learners are already capable and that my task is to trust and provoke their will (strength-based framing) rather than through a deficit-framing. This emancipatory commitment is also a commitment to equity around the capacities I hope to cultivate (to experiment, make, imagine otherwise) are unevenly distributed. I therefore treat the design of learning as a question of ethics as much as of pedagogy, asking whose knowledge counts, whose futures are imagined, and who is invited to shape them.

At its core, my approach is about continually creating opportunities for students to connect knowledge across different contexts. I lean heavily on the creative arts, play-based learning, making and prototyping, speculative design, and storytelling as serious ways of knowing and sensemaking. These pedagogies build the confidence to question the boundaries of what one knows and to act thoughtfully when situations are complex or contested. My role is to create spaces that are inclusive and safe enough for risk: milieus where students can experiment, encounter difficulty, make mistakes, and remain meaningfully engaged with complex or contested ideas.

I’m also drawn to Vygotsky’s (1987) concept of obuchenie and to the idea that teaching, learning and inquiry form one continuous process. While I would not want to romanticise the Humboldtian university, I am interested in how that older aspiration might be reimagined ecologically, democratically, and transdisciplinarily for contemporary higher education, in ways that resist rather than reproduce the inequalities of the neoliberal university.

Over the years I’ve designed and led many professional development programmes introducing new approaches to pedagogy, educational technology, and curriculum design. Increasingly I’ve come to see teacher development itself as a creative and improvisational practice, learning to design unique experiences rather than deliver standardised ones, to move fluently across different spaces and milieus, and to model the self-regulated, emancipated learning we hope to cultivate in students. The teacher’s role is steadily transforming, from instructor to facilitator, curator, and meta-creator of learning. I’m still figuring out what that means. That, in a way, is the point.