Future Serious Resources for March 22, 02026
Miserable Pedagogies ⊗ Old Thinking ⊗ The End of Doomscrolling
Hey,
Happy Spring! (Or Fall, if you’re in the Global South…)
Slowly but surely, it’s warming up in my space. Not like other spots in the U.S. where the temps have shifted 50°F in one day. (A town in Arizona recorded the hottest day on record in March in that state. 111°F!) Yesterday was in the 50s, and it was a rare chance to get outside and take a long walk (4.5 miles) in the sunshine. My favorite route includes a mown path through a wheat field, and when I got there, I took off my shoes and socks and decided to walk it barefoot (which is what I usually do, btw.) Anyway, it was wet and cold and muddy from recent snow melt, and for a split second, I thought about getting my feet back in my shoes. But I didn’t. I cold-mucked my way through and actually enjoyed just getting my feet grounded in the Earth for the first time in a very long time. And it lightened my mood, made me feel more connected, and gave me more of a sense of being attuned to all the life around me. Highly recommend it.
SUMMER REGISTRATION OPEN!: Reminder: My Confronting Education Workshop is now open for registration. I hope you’ll consider joining us for Cohort 5 of the workshop, which starts on June 26. If you’re feeling all the world craziness and the struggles education is having to deal with it, you’d be in the right place. Early Bird pricing through May 15. Reach out with questions.
FINALLY: As always, thanks for reading. As a reminder, all posts here are free, but if you want to show your support for my work in general, a paid subscription is always an option. Remember: I’m donating all proceeds from paid subscriptions to my local food pantry ($264.50 so far for 2026…) at the end of the year.
With gratitude,
~Will
“Miserable Pedagogies”
It’s hard to argue that much of what we do in schools is unhealthy (if not violent?) to kids, and I’ve been arguing that here and elsewhere for a long time now. And the thing is, we know it. We know that closeting kids inside for most of the day isn’t good for them, mentally or physically. (See the short links below if you don’t believe that.) We know that giving them little agency over their own learning isn’t really good for learning. Desks in rows, 50-minute blocks, “handing it in.” No one argues that any of those (and others) are ideal classroom conditions. And we stress kids out about grades and college and compliance. The list goes on.
So it’s interesting to see this research framing from a trio of New Zealand professors who did a dive into why higher ed students are reporting increased levels of anxiety, sadness, and depression, and tied it to classroom practice. There’s a whole other part of this report that focuses on “Anthropocene intelligence” that I want to dive into at another time, but for now, here’s a snip and a short list of what we might want to reconsider, even in our K12 practice.
As the planet confronts an interconnected meta-crisis linked to natural, political, social, and psychological challenges, there are some pedagogical tendencies that should be challenged within university education. Drawing on the philosophical literature of the Ecological University, this article uses an eco-philosophical framework for considering mainstream university pedagogy. We emphasise that the increasing mental health challenges of so many young people at university is both a symptom and a feature of the meta-crisis and a key consideration for how we might respond as university educators. We argue that many of the existing neoliberal and liberal tendencies in university can be interpreted as “Miserable Pedagogies” — which typically fail to engage with the meta-crisis as a threat to the planet’s psychological, social, political, or natural ecosystems. We suggest that our “pedagogies of misery” need to be disrupted and radically contested with an ecological world-view we describe as “Anthropocene Intelligence.” After setting out the key features of Anthropocene Intelligence, we consider how an alternative teaching approach, used by one of the authors, reflects such an ecological worldview and potentially provides a basis for more meaningful and active ways of being and learning on this finite planet.I absolutely love that “love” part. What my two recent “journeys” have shown me is that, at the core, love is what drives all of this.
So, what are those pedagogies? Here, briefly, are the four they identify:
Active Contributors – Pedagogies that develop knowledge, skills and attitudes for further destroying natural, psychological, and/or social ecologies.
Ignore the Issues – Pedagogies that carry on their traditional disciplinary focus despite the challenges posed by the meta-crisis and Anthropocene.
Overly Optimistic – Pedagogies that focus on narrow and/or technological answers to the interconnected crises of the meta-crisis.
Describe Realities – Pedagogies that provide an accurate picture of the meta-crisis and its causes, but struggle to support students to take action.
A lot to digest in this piece, but I found it fascinating and useful in terms of thinking about what directions forward our interactions with students need to take.
Old Thinking is Dangerous
While I usually try to stick to articles and links that are more recent, this piece by Alex Steffan from four years ago is too relevant not to mention. You need to read the whole thing, but in a few words, the thesis is that we are not ready for what’s coming. Given recent events, this feels more true than ever.
We all have limited time and energy. Building up an insightful mental model of how the world works takes a lot of both. The pay-off is in the profit and sense of purpose gained from one’s expertise. It is very common, when you’re highly rewarded for a given set of working insights, to commit more to those insights as your career unfolds, to begin even to defend those insights from challenging new perspectives (ones you fear might devalue your intellectual stock in trade). This “sunk-cost expertise” can easily become a set of shackles.
Not getting chained to outdated expertise is harder than it used to be. A century ago, an expert could learn a way of looking at things and build a lifelong stable career off that platform. (Max Planck joked that science advanced one funeral at a time). Even 30 years ago, working thinkers could easily balance career and the pace of professional development needed to stay current. One good set of insights, steadily updated through inquiry and learning, could easily last the three or four decades of a normal career.
Not anymore. For most of us, it’s no longer enough to take a training now and then, to pick up a few new perspectives at a conference, to scan to the news in our field, to read the occasional provocative book. The speed and scale of the changes around us mean that the shortcomings in our worldview are themselves systemic. They are failures to see the pattern right, and new information can’t by itself correct those failures. We have to not only “think in systems” but learn to see new ones, with new interconnections.
All this is to say that the very process of worldview-building is undergoing an unprecedented shift. The planetary crisis is swallowing the world we thought we knew, whole, in one great gulp.
Some days are better than others in terms of leaving my old ontologies behind and seeing the world as it is, not what I remember it to be. For those of us with a certain amount of privilege, it doesn’t feel that bad yet. As Nate Hagens put it in a recent podcast, we see the lightning coming from the storm on the horizon, and we’re counting the seconds until we hear the thunder in the distance to see how far away it is, to see how much time we have. But we know the storm is coming. (Right?)
(Btw, if you’re feeling this uncertainty in your bones, the workshop community we’re building is all about that feeling and how to process it. Just sayin’.)
Doomscrolling is Over
That title is a bit misleading. It’s not that we’ve stopped diving into the doom. It’s just that now we don’t need to scroll any longer. Now, we can just feast on all the doom in one place.
This bit by Charlie Warzel in the Atlantic was interesting on its face, but the subject of the essay, World Monitor, kinda blew my mind when I first saw it. You want live shots from Tehran and Tel Aviv? Check. You want to see where every cargo ship is at this moment and how fast it’s going? Check. Every military action currently happening anywhere in the world? Check. Watch Al Jazeera? Sure.
And apparently, “monitoring the situation” is something a lot of people want to do:
World Monitor was built over a single weekend in January by Elie Habib, an engineer based in the United Arab Emirates whose day job is as CEO of Anghami, one of the Middle East’s largest music-streaming services. “I wanted to extract the signal from the noise,” he told me recently. But what he really built, by his own admission, is a noise machine. Right now, the site pulls in more than 100 different streams of data, including stock prices, prediction markets, satellite movements, weather alerts, major-airport flight data, fire outbreaks, and the operational status of cloud services such as Cloudflare and AWS. The information is all real, but what exactly a person ought to do with it is unclear.
When Habib posted about the project on X, he was shocked by the response. At one point, tens of thousands of people were using the site at the same time; more than 2 million people accessed it in the first 20 days. Habib’s inbox filled with requests for new features as well as messages from venture capitalists looking to spin up World Monitor into a full-time business. Via GitHub, where Habib has made the code for World Monitor open-source and accessible to all, developers have made thousands of customized tweaks to the site and have translated it into more than 20 languages.
I offer this not as a must-addition to your information intake, though I do urge you to take a peek. But it’s a data point, for sure. As more and more shit hits the fan, we’re going to see more and sites and streams that compile the shit in real time. And honestly, I don’t know if this is a good idea or not. (You?) But it’s coming, regardless.
Thoughts / Reflections / Questions / Shorts
Benefit of physical activity initiatives for climate change mitigation and adaptation - Shocker! Personal health is actually Earth health as well!
‘Massive boost of serotonin!’: How a dose of nature is treating mental illness - Shocker #2! Getting outside makes you healthier, which makes the Earth healthier, which makes us all healthier!
Thinking: Traditional, unconscious assumptions about what it means to be human are now problematic. We need to change the very idea of what it means to be a human on this planet. The implications of that for education are massive.
Why refusing AI is a fight for the soul - Does humanity hang in the balance?
Why Finland is the happiest - Shocker #3! It helps when governments actually take care of their people.
As always, let me know what you’d like to see more (or less) of in these newsletters. I’m always open to learning and evolving in ways that help you make better sense of this interesting moment.
With gratitude,
~Will