"Predicament Based Learning"

Provocation #22: Because this moment is not a "problem to be solved."

Hey there,

Welcome to Provocation #22. Playing with the words can sometimes lead to new ways of thinking.

Just as a reminder, all of the posts on this site are now free. But a paid subscription will help keep my energy up for this work (5/10 today; like I said…tough month.) AND will support folks in need, as all proceeds from paid memberships will go to my local food pantry this year.

As always, thanks for reading. ~W

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I’m not usually one to promote new buzzwords for our work in education, but when it pokes at and scrambles the traditional lexicon, well, I’ll make an exception.

What if it’s time we retire “problem-” and “project-” based teaching approaches and reframed the work around how we best help our students navigate this ever complexifying predicament we find ourselves in, known as the “metacrisis”? In other words, a “predicament-based” approach instead.

I get that in recent years, many schools and educational innovators have promoted project-based and problem-based learning as antidotes to traditional, test-driven instruction and ways to give students a tad bit more agency over the work. But the problem is that the compounding challenges we’re facing really aren’t problems to be figured out. And a “problem-solving” approach to navigating the world is not going to fix what ails us, nor will it prepare our kids for whatever sense of thriving may be possible in their futures.

This distinction is more than semantic. Problems by their very nature have solutions. Predicaments do not. A problem implies that with enough ingenuity, effort, and resources, a resolution can be found. Problem-based learning still operates within a frame of mastery and control. It often assumes that young people can be equipped with the right skills and knowledge to "innovate" us out of crisis. But what if the very idea of innovation, untethered from ethics and ecology, is part of the crisis?

A predicament, on the other hand, demands response, adaptation, and, in the case of our current situation, mourning. Climate collapse, biodiversity loss, the extractive economy, the breakdown of meaning-making institutions—these are not puzzles to be solved, but conditions to be met with care, courage, and complexity. We (and our kids) are going to have to learn our way through all of that at the same time, not just one after another.

That’s a headshift for sure. Some might read that and suggest that it means giving up. On some level, I am suggesting that we are past the point of “fixing” the world. Which is why I see it as a necessary reframing of how we operate in this world now, how we accept the realities of this moment, and how we build the capacities necessary to take care of ourselves, our communities, and the planet with as much imagination, joy, and love as possible moving forward. When Margaret Wheatley asks “Who Do We Choose to Be?”, she’s asking how can we be our best selves in the face of a world increasingly in collapse. That’s what a “predicament-based” approach would center.

“Predicament-based” teaching and learning asks different questions. Instead of "What solution can we design?" it asks, "What does it mean to live well in the midst of this?" Instead of "How can we fix this?" it asks, "How can we grieve, adapt, and regenerate in response?" The shift is from doing to being, from fixing to tending, from progress to presence.

It’s important to note that we will not be prepared to deal with predicaments until we have fully centered relational repair (see Provocation #16) and acknowledged the limits of progress, human exceptionalism, and separability. Without confronting these dominant myths, our pedagogies risk replicating the very paradigms that brought us to this edge. Healing our relationships—with each other, with more-than-human life, and with the Earth—must become foundational to any serious educational effort aimed at resilience and regeneration.

To navigate predicaments, we all will need different capacities:

• Emotional literacy and resilience: to engage with grief, anxiety, and ambiguity.

• Futures literacy: to imagine and reimagine paths beyond inherited scripts, as Riel Miller suggests in his work with UNESCO's Futures Literacy Labs.

• Systems thinking and complexity competence: to understand interdependence and unintended consequences, and to develop what Nate Hagens (and others) calls a “wide-boundary” lens for evaluating our best moves forward.

• Relational intelligence: to prioritize connection, reciprocity, and mutual care, as emphasized by Robin Wall Kimmerer and Tyson Yunkaporta.

• Aesthetic and moral imagination: to find beauty and meaning amidst uncertainty, and to work toward futures that center justice, connection to the more-than-human world, and developing a sense of deep time (a la Phoebe Tickell)

For educators, this demands a profound shift in posture. We must become co-learners, not experts; stewards of inquiry, not dispensers of knowledge. We must be willing to hold space for what we do not know, to facilitate difficult conversations about collapse and complexity, and to help students cultivate the inner and communal resources to stay present with it all.

Obviously, none of this is easy. But the urgency to make this shift lies in our refusal to acknowledge (among other things) that the traditional approach to schooling was created for a time that no longer exists, that school cultures are more focused on teaching than learning, and that what we are asking kids to learn is increasingly irrelevant to our current reality. As I wrote in my manifesto:

“To put it bluntly, the vast majority of school communities around the world have been turning away from, ignoring, and/or actively denying the harsh realities of this moment. They have lacked the courage to fully unpack and interrogate the implications of these new realities on their legacy systems and practices. In doing so, they are leaving our students ill-prepared not just to negotiate what’s coming, but to be equipped to mitigate the impacts. Full stop.”

Perhaps our most radical task as educators today is not to empower students to solve the future, but to help them sense it, feel it, imagine it differently—and to be with them in the difficult, beautiful work of becoming human in a time between worlds. What if the real curriculum now is how to stay human—together—in the face of unraveling? What would it mean to teach toward that?

Thoughts?

As always, thanks for reading.

Will

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