#66 – Futurist Bryan Alexander: Stories of Change

All this month in the community we're talking about the theme of story, how the story of school and education is changing, and what we need to do to help create a new story for teaching and learning moving forward. And so along those lines, in this week's podcast I interview long time blogger, author, and futurist Bryan Alexander to help provide some larger contexts for how life stories are changing in general and how we educators might help our students navigate the next 20 or 30 years of transition.

I first met Bryan about 15 years ago at Middlebury College, and since then he's been one of my most respected resources for tracking how the world is changing and what those changes mean for education. Bryan is currently a senior scholar at Georgetown University and teaches graduate seminars in their Learning, Design, and Technology program. He recently finished Academia Next: The Futures of Higher Education for Johns Hopkins University Press (forthcoming fall 2019).

As you heard in that opening snip and as you'll hear throughout this conversation, we are in and are heading into some challenging times on a lot of levels. But despite the obvious headwinds, what I appreciated more than anything about this conversation is Bryan's unyielding faith in "Generation Z", that group of late teen and early twenty somethings in which he and I both have two children. Our question now is how do we prepare them to flourish in this moment, and how do we prepare the next generation of students that are coming after them.

Don't forget, at the end of the podcast I offer up three things that you can do right now to get your brain and your practice more deeply wrapped around the ideas that Bryan discusses in this podcast. And for more resources related to this episode, head on over to the Modern Learners Community and click on the "Podcast" topic.