WeAreFundamentals of Education || Jens Gijbels

In this episode of The Regenerative Education Podcast I chat with Jens Gijbels, director of the FundamentalsAcademy and WeAreFundamentals. Jens is powered by a mission to redesign education for meaningful and purposeful participation in the grand challenges of our times. In this conversations we discuss how they bring this into practice in collaboration at Utrecht University of Applied Sciences where he with his team leads the 30 ECTS Co-Design Studio minor. Jens makes a passionate case for a more transformative and curiosity-based education that uses design and redesign to intentionally change the systems around us. He also stresses that this form of education can and should be fun. 

In this discussion the following systemic barriers and opportunities emerged:  

1. The important of creating learning pathways that can be individual but also accreditated. Finding the magic between self-designed learning owners and guided learning.  
2. The importance of bringing in people that do not have habit-formed lenses for systemic change.  
3. The power of nurturing curiosity.  
4. The importance of challenging our personal and collective mindsets and fixed understandings of the world so that we can remain creative in the face of complexity.  
5. The power of short and intense bursts that focus on urgent and high impactful challenges in the lived-worlds of the learners.  
6. The importance of surrounding your biophysical space in the process of what you are working on.   
7. The flexibility of the current system, or more specifically the lack thereof, is one of the main barriers for connecting higher education to real world challenges.   

External Links:  

https://www.jensgijbels.nl/ 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jensgijbels/?originalSubdomain=nl 

https://www.fundamentalsacademy.nl/team