+Futures talks with Blanaid White

Education provides us with the building blocks of a better future – to navigate the big challenges facing us as workers, communities and in society, and to do so in a way that works for the many. This is the third in a series of interviews, with people working at the forefront of change in this area, exploring the question – What do we need to do to unlock a more evolved future for education?

For our third interview exploring this question, we spoke to Blanaid White, currently Executive Dean, Faculty of Science and Health in DCU, she was previously Dean of Strategic Learning Innovation in DCU, with responsibility for DCU Futures, a project funded by the Human Capital Initiative with the ambitious aim to explore the question ‘what’s the transformative student experience for this century?’

We hear so often now the importance of transversal skills – creativity, communication, critical thinking, the ability to work things out and join the dots. In this discussion Blanaid shares what she learned from bringing these skills to students across DCU, the mindset shifts needed at both personal and systemic levels. She brings great insight and honesty to just how challenging that will be but makes a compelling case for the pressing need to do so.

Scott Burnett: The place to start, maybe, is just better context, like, what’s your what’s your route to here?

Blanaid White: I was always really interested in teaching, that idea of inspiring the next generation of people to think in a different way was always really exciting to me. And then I started to see the limitations of that, because if the next 3 lectures they get are all very traditional ‘sage on the stage’ I can only do so much.

So then, I started getting getting interested in the systems and the processes, I started thinking ‘How can we best create a system whereby students have the best education they can have?’ That line of questioning led me to be Associate Dean for teaching and learning, and then I moved to be head of the school of chemistry. At that point then there was an opportunity for funding via the Human Capital Investment scheme. The DCU senior leadership team wanted us to be bold, be big, be innovative, tasking us to explore the question ‘What’s the transformative student experience for this century?’ And that was what led us to develop DCU Futures. Myself and Professor Yseult Freeney developed the core thinking, with lots of input along the way from different colleagues. So when the funding was granted I got the opportunity to lead the project which was very exciting. To be tasked with being completely innovative, given a sandbox and told to push the boundaries, that it was okay to fail, and, in fact, if everything works, you haven’t been bold enough. But the piece that really unlocked it for me was when Ciaran Dunne was appointed as the transversal skills director. I had a project with Gantt charts and KPIs and Kieron came from humanities. When we started he said ‘What are our values?’ And I said ‘Well here’s my Gantt chart, here’s the different things I need this by this month.’ It was like he was speaking a different language to me.

I like change. I am hungry for change. I’m surprisingly comfortable with ambiguity for a scientist who likes numbers. And yet I hadn’t anticipated how most people like things to say the same, and the massive friction there would be around change management. At one point Ciaran likened us to root canal dentists, we were that popular. That’s where I really saw the importance of the values in those hard conversations, and that was revolutionary for me in terms of articulating strong drivers that support you when change gets hard. Having those values helped me navigate those challenges and the friction that is a necessary part of a project like this. They also allowed me to step back and see beyond the technologies as the building blocks for the future of education.

We have the technologies in this world right now to solve every global problem. Technology is not a problem, but we still have these global problems, so the missing piece is not the technology. It’s not that the science isn’t there. Every IPC report states the science every single time about climate change, but yet we’ve people denying it. The absolute criticality of transversal skills was like a light bulb for me – how we change the world is in this space!

That’s not to say that technology isn’t important, but we have to stop centring that as the most important thing. All our challenges are not around technology, they are around the leadership piece, they’re around social citizenship, they’re around the integrity of communications and ethical decision-making. Previously my mindset would have been – it’s my job as a scientist to come up with the science and its social sciences role to figure out what’s right for it to be used or not. But it’s not, it’s everybody’s. That whole space around individual responsibility versus social, collective responsibility. And that’s what the DCU Futures transversal skills framework gave us as an opportunity. To explore the idea that the future of education has to include those things. And in fact, if we don’t include those things. we are condemning ourselves to a world that cannot change.

Then AI happened which forces a hard question – what should we be teaching students now? And to push it even further – should everything we teach students, even in transgressive skills, be with AI as a partner? So education’s at an inflexion point, in a way that it wasn’t 2 years ago when we started on DCU futures. So that’s my smorgas board of thoughts.

Scott Burnett: That’s quite the smorgas board! Hearing them in that linear sequence, it actually helps me get a sense of change, of the shifts that that are happening. Both in the wider area of education, but also how those shifts impacted change on a personal level. You’re a scientist which is about objectivity, about how we understand the external objective world and what I call the ‘made models’, the things that we make and put into the world. Then you came into this world of what I would call the ‘mental models’, which deal with the more internal, subjective way that our brains work and make sense of the information that we see in the world. I think that’s also what you outlined in the bigger picture – we have the technologies, the ‘made models’, but so many of the challenges are actually about navigating the mental models around them – how do we get people to trust them? How do we translate them into societal value? How do we make sure they’re deployed ethically?

Your work on DCU futures, the thinking seemed to be that everybody is going to need to be able to deal with mental models, right? Creativity. critical thinking, understanding. Is that a shift that as a scientist you see in the wider science realm? That scientists have to embrace the kind of softer skills or the softer side, or the like. You kind of set it yourself. It’s not just the job of social science anymore. Do you think that’s a wider shift?

Blanaid White: I think there’s an increasing awareness of the need for it. So, for example, all our engineering degrees are accredited by the Institute of Engineers. They have a list of criteria that all engineering programs in the country must deliver or they don’t get accredited. And if you’re not accredited by the body, then you can still award your degree, but students won’t do it because it’s not got the accreditation. So it’s this industry-standard badge. And they have recently introduced ethical decision-making as one of their criteria. That’s a really positive thing, but I think there’s still a chasm there in the awareness and the understanding. In the idea that different disciplines can’t function in isolation, and that you must have an understanding and awareness, and spaces to practically apply and develop that understanding.

Most of the mental models you talk about for me are almost like muscles. You can know in your head that it sounds right and it makes sense, but it’s only if you actually try to apply them, try to flex that muscle that you get more comfortable with applying it, feeling what it’s like to be in that space. And you can build up. You could do 2 reps, and then you can do 5. So this space around applying and being challenged to apply those mental models is an area that I think education needs to go into. I have a fear that the social science that broader piece people are going to acknowledge it as a thing, but not engage with it fully because it’s challenging. It’s really hard, and it really challenges deeply established mindsets. DCU Futures was wonderful because it provided a platform where people could leave at the end of it, they could say ‘I don’t like it’, but they had to listen to it. The students who’ve come through the Futures program, you can see that they’re stronger. Mentally they have a greater agility, adaptability, and the concept of anti-fragility, which is one that I love, and you can see them putting that into practice. So now I have other colleagues coming to us asking ‘Can we pull some of what they do into our classes?’ So we made the space for driving the agenda on the challenging parts of it, but now we see the evidence of what it can achieve.

I think there’s the need to have a structure or a process that ensures that there’s a greater acceptance that we should do this, but it’s going to be hard. And I think this is a key thing education can do – you can push people into those uncomfortable places in a scaffolded way that creates safe spaces for them but forces them to feel, to experience, to work through it, and to see the benefit of it. However, I think that we’re in danger of not putting that on the agenda strongly enough.

Scott Burnett: The world is becoming more interwoven, for whatever reason, to my mind It’s the shift into the digital age and a much more interconnected, dynamic set of digital models. And I think Futures is a vehicle to be able to manage all these interwoven things – It’s not as simple as it used to be. You can’t just be that objective. You can’t just look at it in isolation. And then AI accelerates all that and makes it even harder.

I think what you’re getting to there is really interesting, as you said, it’s like going to the gym, and while I might have been going to that particular ‘mind gym’ for 20 years, it’s easy for me to forget that there are people who have never gone to that gym. And it’s a really scary thing. They don’t know what’s going to happen. And I love the way you’re describing it – that they can start by doing a rep, and then 2 reps, and then 5 reps. You described it earlier as you were the root canal people, nobody really wanted to do it, to go to this gym. So having gone through that process, having seen that 1st hand, and now, being in a position where you can see the positive impacts of it – what are the challenges of making that work and scale within education? Is there anything you saw that you felt was a good indicator of what the way forward is?

Blanaid White: The 1st piece, the really interesting learning for me – it’s the same conversation for staff and students. It’s not – we do this with staff, and we do that with students. If you’re bringing people into a space where they’re uncomfortable. They’re not going to like it, even if it’s the right thing to do for them. However, with time, they get much more comfortable with it, so you need them to keep showing up.

And for students in particular, when it gets to 3rd level you’re bringing them to a place that you’re telling them is uncomfortable. That is going to push them and challenge them. So there’s a piece around our understanding of what it should mean to go to university, because there’s a huge big piece around the value of place-based institutions around, being there in lectures, creating that collective safe space, peer learning from each other and all those benefits.

For a lot of students from sciences and engineering moving into this space can be really uncomfortable so there’s a piece around getting them to trust you enough, and to trust the process, enough that they’re prepared to go with the being uncomfortable bit. And that’s hard to build, that’s personal relations, that’s incentives, carrots, sticks, everything you can throw at it.

Another challenge is that fundamentally it takes time, effort and work for people to be bought into it. In many cases it’s more resource intensive because it’s not standing up, giving a lecture to 400 people who are all sitting there taking notes and using osmosis to learn. It’s breaking them into 10 classes of 50, where you are challenging them, engaging them and pushing them beyond their comfort boundary. So you need 10 lectures and not one.

And I think people struggle with the resources part because there’s an idea, an incorrect idea, that there’s an awful lot in universities that’s soft and fluffy and probably redundant, and we could cut a lot of it in the name of efficiency. But the truth is this ‘soft and fluffy’ stuff is possibly the most important stuff. Which again is I think part of what really makes a University education valuable.

Scott Burnett: Yes, the scourge of efficiency. This gets us back in some ways to the conversation around AI, right? The industrial age in some ways turned us all into robots – process engineering everything to the point of abstraction, to make everything more cost-effective and efficient. And the human factors are never factored into the cost basis. So looks great on paper in terms of how it works. But actually, the reality is, that there’s always ‘an inefficient human’ having to do something somewhere, right?

Maybe this gets us back to the conversation around the value of education, which is a fundamental and critical one. If the deep domain expertise is becoming more and more codable as you said, is it the soft and fluffy, the ability to navigate between it all and join it up that becomes more valuable?

It’s back to what you said at the start – the technology isn’t the problem to solve any more, we have loads of it, but the human factors still create a whole lot of problems. I wonder if the future generation might be much more focused on how to join it all up in new ways. More lateral approaches (transversal) as opposed to linear ones (specialism). Where does education need to focus in this particular changing context? Where’s the value of 3rd level education in this kind of changing context?

Blanaid White: It’s reductionist going back to assessment, but I think it’s a really useful place to begin because what assessment does is it tells students what’s important. If it’s not in the exam – you don’t study it. So assessment is one of our most useful levers in terms of identifying what’s important to students. There are lots of philosophical arguments around how students should want to learn for the love of learning, but we know that actually, that’s what they do. Anytime you’re learning something you go and you look at the exam, and you see what’s going to come up and you know what bits you need to prioritize and focus on.

So I think it goes back to – What type of things are we assessing? And what are the important things to assess now? If we want to assess our human competencies and human capabilities, we have to go back to the idea of competence-based assessment which they use a lot in medicine. It’s not necessarily about making all the logical decisions, but about being able to critically, and robustly defend why you made those decisions, and understand the impact and the consequences of those decisions.

The other approach is assessing around competencies and norms – saying that everybody who leaves college having done a degree needs to have hit these norms and understanding that different students can achieve the course criteria, while also having different competencies, or exceeding particular norms if they have a particular strength in something.

It’s about moving deliberately, explicitly away from this percentage thing, which actually is only about 100 years old anyway. And this distilling, because that’s what numerical grades do they distil down to granular increments, we’ve become increasingly reductionist assessment-wise by having these numbers. There’s a reassurance for us to be able to say this person is better than that person, so to move away from a more reductive approach, that’s quite a shift, actually. And it’s a vulnerable space to get into but I think that’s what AI challenges us to consider.

Scott Burnett: It’s back to the thematic space, and I think you summed up really beautifully, around the ‘sum of the parts’, the stuff in between that sometimes doesn’t get counted. For me, that was what I thought was really inspiring about the DCU Futures project is that it brought all that ‘soft and fluffy’ stuff, which is actually the stuff that glues everything together and makes it work, makes it valuable, and brings it all firmly into view and said ‘This is important’. From your experience, is this what are the students looking for now? Is it what the industry is looking for?

Blanaid White: This is where I think we have such a privilege in universities. For the most part, the stereotypical 18-year-old students and their parents trust us. They don’t challenge us around asking us, ‘Well, why are you teaching this?’ They trust us that we will give them the education that’s the best education for them in the world at this moment, and I think that’s a massive privilege. It’s when we see trust in institutions falling all around us, we’re one of the few sectors that are still well-trusted. I feel that huge responsibility to not invalidate that trust.

They also give you 3 or 4 years of their life, and their parents spend a lot of money, it’s a huge investment from their perspective, from their family’s perspective to get there. So we have this huge responsibility to respect that level of investment, too. They come to us from a simpler secondary school system that puts them on a particular pathway – making everyone the same, focusing on the same outcomes and that reductive ‘what’s on the test’ mindset. So we’ve got 3 to 4 years to challenge that to get students to trust us, and to create spaces where they feel they can lean into things that are different so that we can retain that trust and give them the best education for what’s coming next.

And then in terms of – what does industry want? What we learned from engaging with industry via DCU Futures is that while they don’t have a vocabulary around it, to a person they know transversal skills are good, that they want them, that they want more of them. We’re effectively in a situation where we’re in full employment. Our graduates are the 23rd most employable graduates in the world, but what industries are seeing is it’s not ‘the in’, it’s ‘the up’. It’s that thought leadership that moves you up through the ranks that helps. It’s people with skills to help them have new innovative ideas and be more ‘anti-fragile’ as organisations.

Industries are seeing the impact of the absence of innovation, creativity, and exploring different things and so they’re asking us for that. They don’t know exactly what that looks like. We asked them – what would you prefer in Futures? Option A, option B, option C, or option D? And they said – all of them. The other thing they said, which was fascinating, they said they wanted a way to be able to evidence these transversal skills. Everybody says I’m a team player, I’m a good communicator, I’m a good leader, but how do we know? They wanted, with some sort of objective evidence, to be able to identify – who are the people that they wanted to bring into teams to make specific teams work in particular ways or have particular skill sets and also people that can be honest about their gaps and weaknesses.

So the question for us is – how can we get to a place where we have graduates who are comfortable with excelling in some things, but not other things, and in a way that doesn’t devalue it?

Scott Burnett: Hearing you talk about this it’s making clear just how fractured the student journey through education and into employment is. There’s no real sense of a continuum or shared set of ideas, or how we help people understand that they’re on a much bigger pathway, and making sure they have what they need to navigate it.

The place I want to kind of go to for the last question – you mentioned that the reason that you were interested at the start was an interest in how the system can change and can be innovated. We’ve discussed that there are still a lot of challenges in this space and that AI is going to be a multiplier for a lot of those challenges. It’s an accelerator. It’s all speeded up. But how easy or hard is it to make that system change in an academic setting? Is there anything you learned? How do we start changing some of those systems?

Blanaid White: That’s a nice big last question. Part of it is for the people involved in making the change, you have to somehow de-risk things so that they can make change. Very little fails a hundred per cent, and failures are often the most valuable learning, but the people trying to make these kinds of systemic changes can often be judged for these ‘failures’ so there’s a piece around protecting the people doing the risks. DCU Futures on the whole was a massive success, but it wasn’t a ‘full success.’ And there’s no successful change without that understanding, and without support for the people taking the risks so one of the ways in which we create change is creating that risk space where if somebody takes a risk, and it doesn’t work out how it’s expected or things change, then that’s not a kiss of death on that person’s career.

The second piece is the capacity of people to come on the journey with you. People still have their full teaching load and their full everything else, and then you’re asking them to take mental energy to help drive this kind of change. Before you see any results it takes a year to fully build and validate quality assessment programs, all that boring stuff that means you de-risk it for students. During that time it’s just an empty resource for that year. You’re not taking on extra students. There’s no extra income from it. That’s where HCI was special because it gave that seed funding in to allow you to do that. Now we’ve got these really nice green shoots, but there’s they’re still babies. They’re they’re still really vulnerable and really delicate. And if we pull the money now we’re going to massively reduce the impact.

The last piece and this is the really hard piece to be fair to students and to their parents, to sign up to these new things can feel risky for them too. So we see people who already get it – the students who don’t see the risks as strongly, who just see the exciting opportunities, signing up. But we need to make sure that this doesn’t just become something for the students who feel they can take these risks for whatever reasons.

So from every aspect that you look at the system, you need to build in additional safeguards for students, for staff, for the resourcing, for the organisation, for the individuals leading it. It’s this weird antithesis that in order to take risks, you need to protect everybody in the system. And without that, I think you don’t have meaningful change.

Scott Burnett: That’s a really interesting one. It’s almost that concept of anti-fragility systemic level, right? For me, that feels like it connects with the shift of the times or the kind of societal shifts. We forget that the industrial age took a long time to work itself out. It’s been in operational mode for a couple of generations, so people forget it had to go through a ‘design phase’. Where everyone had to try things and work out how it all worked and now we’re going through this huge shift from that way of working to something new. From simpler industrial models to complex interwoven digital models, introducing huge new concepts like AI, a massive period of disruption.

We have to kind of lean into the fact that again we have to be able to test things. We have to trial things. We have to have the space to work things out, what they mean, how they work, how we make sure they’re net positive for our societies and people but we’ve lost all the systemic structures, systems, supports and mental models that actually help us navigate those things, that help us support the changes, that give us the shared language for new ways of working.

Again, this is what I find really inspiring about DCU Futures. It was doing the work in the way you describe it – actually trying to work out how do we implement these ideas into a student’s experience, their learning, and their lives but it also was doing the job of sticking a flag in the sand that unapologetically said – here are things we need to deal with, focus on and work out together. It’s about helping everybody see that and starting to find the common language, common thinking and common structures and systems to help us navigate what next. My feeling is that we’re heading into a period where it’s going to be harder to get to that societal ‘operational mode’, where we’re constantly going to be asking – What next? How do we deal with this?

Blanaid White: Yes, Ciaran had a phrase at the beginning, he said ‘You’ve got to remember the map is not the terrain. The map is not going to prepare me for how I get there.’ And the terrain is changing, so even how I got there last time, pre-AI, pre-COVID, I don’t think it’s the same terrain now.

Scott Burnett: I think ‘the map is not the terrain’ is a perfect place to tie all the knots together. Feels like it’s the it’s the coda to everything we’ve discussed.

This has been amazing. Thanks, so much Blanaid.