+Futures talks with Louise Allen

Education provides us 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 second 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 second interview pondering this question, we spoke to Louise Allen whose role as Director of the Creative Futures Academy allows her to actively explore the question on a daily basis. CFA plays a role as a sort of external catalyst, working with 3 third-level institutions to translate their knowledge and expertise into new courses delivered in innovative ways.

What I find particularly exciting about CFA is that while it does support the development and delivery of new accredited courses, I think it can also be viewed as an incubator running pilots for new ways of activating academia and exploring more agile ways of working. In the discussion we dig into these approaches, why they’re relevant, and where they might go, as well as the important role third-level education plays in a fast-changing ecology.

Scott Burnett: To start, maybe just give me a potted history so we can understand your route to here.

Louise Allen: I studied in NCAD. I did a joint degree, in fine art and art history. When I graduated I set up a company called paintworks, and had that for about 7, 8 years. It was successful and grew quickly but I was young and I wanted to explore the world, and it was pulling me out of my own artistic practice. I had made some money, so I decided to give it all up and become an artist.

I did that for a while and took a part-time job with the Butler Gallery in Kilkenny which grew into a full-time job focusing on developing the gallery’s education programme.

In 2008, I joined the Design and Crafts Council and worked in many different roles over 10 years. Many of my roles gave me exposure to different cultures, I was invited to be on the board of the World Crafts Council, Europe, and I eventually became President. I had incredible experiences leading the international programme for Irish Design 2015 which was hugely exciting. In 2021 I became the director of the Creative Futures Academy, which is where I am now.

Scott Burnett: So education is in there as a bit of a thread, was working in education something that motivated you, or that was on your radar?

Louise Allen: Yes, when I look back, it’s always been a thread. Early on in my career in the Butler Gallery, I set up an education curators network, at the time there wasn’t much emphasis on audience engagement in exhibitions or support for people doing that work. As a network, we secured funding from the Arts Council to research what was happening in different institutions in America and across Europe which really helped to shape and broaden our understanding.

I suppose I’ve always been looking for big ideas that might have a substantive impact or change how people learn, and that impacted the type of programming that I undertook. In the Design and Crafts Council, I started off in education. I set up the Future Makers program which I think had the largest fund (€20,000) in Europe to support and encourage young people to hone and develop their craft and design skills, to take risks, experiment and to make. I also initiated the Global Irish Design Challenge and the Irish Business Design Challenge around similar ideas of innovation, development and transformation.

Scott Burnett: Now in your role at CFA, what does that involve?

Louise Allen: It’s quite complex in one sense, because it involves coordinating and managing teams across three institutions – NCAD, IADT and UCD, and they’re quite different institutions in terms of their culture and their ethos. You have to remember that historically, those institutions are competitive. For me, it’s a lot about understanding the nuance of what that difference is while working to create an environment where people can come together to co-create, collaborate and exchange ideas.

CFA is enabling a significant level of adaptation and change, particularly in relation to teaching practice and pedagogy. Until recently, higher education has more or less worked within the constraints of a formal bachelors or masters degree. Of course, a level of modular programming and part-time options exist and there are opportunities for student exchange through things like Erasmus. But this kind of fundamental shift in terms of hybrid learning: online, offline, stacking modules through micro-credited learning, that’s a whole new landscape.

Going into it, I had little idea of the complexity within the education sector, the processes involved to ensure academic excellence, to maintain and assure the quality of learning. Many people don’t understand the qualitative difference between courses offered through higher education at level 8 (undergraduate) or 9 (masters) degrees and unaccredited courses offered. A focus of CFA has been on linking more closely to Industry, as in the creative and cultural sector, to bring experts into the academic space, and to bring academic expertise into the workplace.

Scott Burnett: Sounds complex?

Louise Allen: There’s a lot of complexity around that, and there’s a need to build understanding – people first and foremost, and their motivations. And having to harness those important interpersonal skills to navigate this kind of complexity.

It’s also really essential to look at the bigger picture, what is it that we’re trying to really achieve here? And how can we create the kind of higher education institutions of the future that are responsive? That are pre-empting the change that is coming, which is at such an accelerated pace. How can you actually, feasibly bring all of these people with so many skills – industry and academics along on that journey? That’s as much of a challenge as it is to bring learners to these new approaches to learning.

And for those learners, the challenge is how to make clear the value of this type of experience that this approach to teaching and education has to offer. There’s a huge proliferation of alternative approaches, which exploded during the Covid pandemic. The formats have changed as have the needs and expectations.

And as I mentioned for third-level education there’s a disconnect in understanding between what a level 8 or 9 certified course is, and how it differs from other learning offers. The difference is in the quality of learning, the fact that it’s credited, and what that means for people. This is a key challenge that we’re grappling with, and I’m trying to navigate it. How do we bring meaning and understanding of what’s on offer to those who have been outside of the learning environment for some time? How do we make it relevant?

Scott Burnett: It’s clear that there’s been a lot of change with these new approaches to learning, and it seems, from the outside, that Third Level Institutions have been slow to move. Very quickly, there are so many different things going on. I just saw that Spotify launched an ‘academy’ for people in the music industry. Teaching them how to design merch, or how to make a music video. Which in some ways makes so much sense, because that’s where that cohort lives and spends their time. So it’s almost an approach of ‘learning in place’, or learning coming to you.

I’ve wondered, in that massive, rapid change, how do you make the case for Third Level Education? I agree with you, nobody understands what level 9 means, or what the difference is.

So how would you synopsise the difference? Or explain why is it important that into the future the formalised, third-level approach to education grows stronger and more relevant.

Louise Allen: I think there are a couple of factors, primarily level 9 is giving you depth and breadth.

It allows a deep dive into a subject area or into a process, where you’re very much being guided and you’re being exposed to a lot of different lenses, and perspectives. I’m actually doing an MA in design for change at the moment. And it’s just incredible, to become hyper-aware of your own bias, and hyper-aware of what other people are researching and working on – there are worlds of richness, deep and considered thought and innovation in so many areas.

We can all become a bit blinkered and safe in our comfort zones. And it’s only really when you start getting into these learning experiences that it opens up a whole new world. And it’s very, very important because in the world we’re dealing with such significant challenges around climate, around diversity, around sustainability, around the digital transition. One of the only ways that we’re going to adapt, understand what our biases are, and understand how our thinking connects with what’s happening across the world, is actually through this more interrogative, immersive approach to education.

Scott Burnett: That’s a compelling case you make, it’s funny because traditional third-level education has been slower to move, it can feel quite conservative. But you’ve just painted a picture of what it delivers actually can be quite radical, and transformative.

That shift to ‘education in place’, getting what you need, when you need it – they’re nuggets, patches that get you over the next tiny hump. It does not open you up to that kind of self-enquiry, doesn’t challenge you to really go deeper, to challenge yourself, challenge your thinking, or be forced to connect it to bigger ideas and a wider world, and that feels critical, as you said, to tackling those bigger challenges.

I want to go back to what you’re doing at CFA, it seems like a radical approach in its own right. Ambitious and exciting. What’s the motivation? Why did CFA come about, and what’s it trying to achieve?

Louise Allen: Well, I suppose there’s a couple of layers of that. The funding was awarded through a competitive process under what’s known as the Human Capital Initiative through the Higher Education Authority. The funding is sourced from the National Training Fund, which every Irish employer and enterprise contributes to.

There are two key priorities. One is innovation, agility, and adaptability within higher education systems, and the other is to help build the bridge and relationships between academia and industry. It’s about joining the dots between those two aspects.

Creative Futures Academy is the only funded project that focuses exclusively on the cultural and creative sector. So that gives us a uniqueness in terms of what we offer, how we offer it and what we do. What’s really valuable about creative and cultural education is the role it can play in reimagining our future societies as we navigate just, digital and climate transitions in order to meet future skills and to imagine possible futures.

If we dig into some of those future challenges and the changing nature of work a bit. The biggest being how might we change systems that are in place that have caused the problems to begin with? How do we rethink those? Or support other ways of thinking and learning?

Our overwhelming exposure to digital contexts and environments has decreased our attention spans. This is shaping how we will learn in the future. We have to consider how we acquire new knowledge. There is a real risk and a real danger in the need for rapid acquisition, assimilation and application of knowledge. Students are being asked to hit the ground running, and assimilate all of the learning that they have, whether it’s coming out of Masters, or a Bachelor level programme. They are expected to be able to apply this in the workplace. But there is an experience gap, everything is moving so quickly, if you can’t keep up you might just get left behind.

We’re coming to this interesting place where we’re realising the importance of interconnectivity between different sectors and areas of research, and how they support each other to grow stronger. How do you actually protect that deep dive specialism while broadening it, actually bringing in those other components and elements that are really going to drive interconnectivity that could be game-changing?

So I think we’re potentially looking at a very different future model. But we need to be asking questions. What will the University of the future look like? Why is it important to consider the broader eco-system? How do we connect and create meaning? What is the role of future learning? Why is it important to develop inter-institutional models with much higher degrees of porosity and fluidity?

The CFA model allows us to explore, and test some of this. It takes some of the fear out of the competitive nature of higher education and what we’re finding is that it’s a much richer learning experience for academics and for learners when you allow that kind of convergence across and between learning experiences.

Scott Burnett: There’s so many interesting threads there for me that you’re pulling together. That sense of these deeper shifts, of key challenges – a just transition, a green transition, dealing with the continued digitisation of everything and what that means for business, but also our societies and lived experiences. And you’ve outlined clearly I think the kinds of questions that education can and should ask, and why it’s critical for the kind of education that demands space and time to think more deeply and in different ways.

Within that context, the idea of skills is one I find interesting. I hear a lot of talk about future skills. Thinking back to my own experience in University, I never felt I was there to learn skills, I was there to learn about the bigger picture that the skills sit in, how to make sense of the skills, apply them, and turn them into something. And I feel like I can learn the technical stuff more easily than ever from anywhere. Is there a need for us to kind of completely flip what we mean by skills that you learn in Third Level Education?

Louise Allen: At some level, I think skills and deep understanding of the value of skills is still really important. Because actually, that’s how systems change sometimes. But yes, there is a case for certain types of skills being very transactional and maybe reductive.

We need to be thinking a lot and talking a lot more about ethics, about cultural and global perspectives, about emotional intelligence, about empathy, about the true meaning of cooperation. We all need to be educated in the social systems and constructs that we have. And where the biases within those systems exist.

We’re not really conscious that many institutions have a very twentieth-century approach to the way that they teach and assess. One that excludes many ways of learning, acquiring and sharing knowledge. We need to become much more inclusive in relation to what are often called softer skills and of different ways of approaching learning.

Scott Burnett: We discussed already that CFA is quite a different, groundbreaking approach. It’s more open to risk, more open to trying things. Is it at the front of the curve? Do you see the kind of things that you’re doing in CFA coming to the rest of the Third Level sector?

Louise Allen: Yes for sure. The reality is that higher education is going through a change process, one that in time will allow learners to be much more self-directed in their learning choices. Because if it doesn’t change from what it is, it will never be able to be as responsive as it needs to be. That is not to say that there isn’t value in the current model, there is, but flexibility in delivery to enable much broader access, and providing the space and time to test new ideas is really important. CFA plays a significant part in this.

There are many fundamental systems that also need to change within the wider educational system. Our timetables are still based on the agrarian cycle of education – a 3-year degree with the summer off, two weeks at Easter, your Christmas holidays, and midterm breaks. If you removed two-thirds of the holidays we could be looking at much shorter degrees, allowing more time for workplace integration and assimilation. One of the systems that is changing across Europe is the introduction of digital credentials which will allow learners to add niche skills to a ‘skills passport’ building their expertise over a lifetime. This is one of the areas where the micro-credential model of learning can have a real impact. The whole system needs this agility to enable us to move around the world, and experience new cultures and new ways of learning.

Going forward, I imagine that universities will be the drivers of new forms of collaborative research, many of them already are, with a much higher degree of social, community and industry engagement. It amazes me that there are so many credible, insightful, bold ideas generated within the walls of academia that never see the light of day. We need to think more about how education can be activated and shared broadly to address the challenges that we have right now.

There are some amazing projects out there, one called ‘The Knowledge Society’ that’s working with a group of teenagers to reimagine what the world could be. And it’s looking at things like biomimetics to address climate challenges, synthetic biology and genomics around cancer. It’s looking at AI to solve poverty. CFA has given rise to a whole host of new courses and areas of exploration around story-telling and immersive tech, creative hospitality, arts as a driver for social action, the links between art, ecology, sustainability and much more.

Scott Burnett: Yeah, so not much needs to happen, just the complete redesign of local, national, and international systems and frameworks around education?

Louise Allen: That’s about it.

Scott Burnett: It strikes me when we’re talking about these bigger macro challenges that you’re kind of doing this on a smaller scale? Working with three universities, completely different systems, completely different identities, trying to bring them together, trying to be a catalyst to help develop agility.

What kind of tools, methods, and approaches are you using to navigate that space?

Louise Allen: There’s a couple of things. When I came in originally I had great expectations, I like things to move quite quickly, and I generally have a big-picture attitude, I think what I had to learn is that sometimes small things are big wins.

There’s an inter-institutional management committee across Creative Futures Academy, the calibre of people sitting at the table together, sharing information about education, the challenges, what needs to change, what can change, how they might collaborate, how they might cooperate – that’s a very big deal. As it is with academics from across different institutions, talking to each other, starting to think about co-developing programs, starting to mobilise students across institutions and for people to be okay about facilitating that. Even more so for people to get genuinely excited about what that experience is. That’s really, really significant.

So I think, first and foremost, it’s really important to understand what’s happening at the human level and where and how some of those fears or challenges can be addressed through simple human interaction, and allowing that interaction to take place is really important.

There are other things where you might look at systems which aren’t working terribly well. That’s really about bringing people together who are part of the system, and seeing if we can use a process like design thinking to navigate ways through the change. And being honest we’ve probably had equal success and failure when doing this.

But it’s also allowing yourself to be okay with things that haven’t worked so well and just learning from them and figuring out, okay, well, if we’re doing this again. how would we do it differently? You know.

Scott Burnett: Even that seems like a different approach, being able to embrace failure as a leader. Talking to people working in these new ways, and trying to build for a more enriching future, a fairer future, stuff like that which seems small is actually huge because it’s counter to the status quo, right? You’ve got to build that in as an expectation – we’re gonna get this wrong, and that’s okay.

Louise Allen: Yes, exactly. I suppose I was always guilty of looking for the big gesture, and my learning is that actually, the smaller things are building blocks and the foundations of what you need to do first before you can go any further.

Scott Burnett: The key things are smaller – the importance of human interactions, listening, and making space for people to fail.

The hype would have us believe we’re heading towards a world where AI runs everything. But it feels like AI only makes sense in very highly transactional interactions, and what you’re describing is the opposite of that. The need for space, depth, connection, and the human aspects that help people navigate just by being sound, caring and thoughtful.

AI maybe solves for business problems, but this other way is needed to solve all the other problems. Quite often we can talk about this stuff, and we can assume that it’s hard. We assume the systems are all quite technical or technocratic, but actually at the heart of it, it’s a bunch of people trying to work something out together.

Louise Allen: Yeah, I think it’s going back to what we were saying earlier. I remember one of my lecturers when I did my undergraduate degree saying to me, “These 4 years are about learning who you are.” Not necessarily about what it is that you want to do, or about acquiring all these skills, it’s more. It’s like a self-reflection, a redefinition or affirmation of who you are and what you are becoming. And I think learning is always about what we’re becoming. We never stop learning, we never stop changing, we never stop having challenges that are presented to us.

Reflecting on my own learning journey, before I joined Creative Futures Academy I did a couple of courses around leadership, and design thinking, and they gave me a little toolkit of skills I could apply and use in different contexts.

And now I’m doing the MA in design for change, and that’s applying those same tools. But I’m doing it from a very personal perspective. Learning, and relearning who I am at this point in my journey, and at this point in my life. it’s really important. And actually, that was something that I’d forgotten.

I’d forgotten how enriching that is as an experience. And you know, I think a lot of people, particularly when you get to my age are so consumed with getting through the day-to-day that they’re not making the time or space to learn something new, to engage in a new subject. Ironically I’ve taken on this MA to give myself space to learn something that I really wanted to learn that I couldn’t do otherwise because I didn’t have a frame to do it within.

Scott Burnett: This feels like the perfect place to wrap up the conversation. In some ways, it feels like we’ve completed the circle. Connecting that personal change and learning, with the bigger changes that you need to be part of. It feels like what you’re describing is almost like going to the gym to be fit, to be able to embody those changes at a personal level so that you can embody them at a bigger systemic level. Feels like a really nice visual for what it takes to shepherd in that change.

Louise Allen: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s exactly it.

Scott Burnett: That’s brilliant, Louise. This has been amazing.