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 A collective of educators and students engages in immersive productive practice to reimagine higher-education and primary-school teaching and learning at, and beyond, the University of Teacher Education. 

Rooted in curiosity, care and attentiveness to diverse histories and voices, the collective offers open-ended impulses that anyone can adapt, question or extend across a growing constellation of educational hubs.

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Dave Snowden — Cynefin & learning in complexity


In this TEDx conversation, Snowden outlines the Cynefin framework, which distinguishes between clear, complicated, complex, and chaotic contexts and argues that each calls for a different logic of action. In complex situations—where cause and effect are only obvious in hindsight—the right move isn’t to search for “best practice,” but to run small, safe-to-fail probes, sense the results, and respond adaptively (“probe–sense–respond”).

Why this matters for higher education

  • swap one-size-fits-all solutions for enabling constraints that guide exploration;
  • design courses as sequences of micro-experiments with rapid feedback;
  • differentiate pedagogy by domain (e.g., drill in clear contexts, expert analysis in complicated ones, exploratory inquiry in complex, stabilize first in chaotic);
  • integrate endographic (self-ethnographic) tasks—student-generated narratives with self-signification—to surface weak signals, support distributed sense-making, and let patterns emerge within cohorts.

Framed this way, classrooms become adaptive ecosystems where students and staff do distributed sense-making together—learning to notice weak signals, iterate responsibly, and let better practices emerge.