STUDIOBLENDED

INNOVATIVE AND DEEP PEDAGOGY (IN ITS SIMPLEST FORM)

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^{‘Only dialogue truly communicates.’} 
Paulo Freire, Brazilian Pedagogue in his book, Education for critical consciousness 1974 (2013, p. 43).

^{‘Listening is a disruptive practice’}
Pauline Oliveros (2005) in Deep listening: A composer’s Sound practice

^{"Teach just the essence of what the learner must understand to be able to apply in the real world"}
Paulo Sandroni, Brazilian Economist.

^{“If you can’t explain it simply,
you don’t understand it well enough”}
Albert Einstein

^{‘Curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment - in that order’}
Dylan Wiliam, 2023.

^{“And in all of this, there is an even bigger question, which is whether human life is just a matter of ongoing adjustment to a changing world around us, or whether the dignity of our human existence also requires that we are able to judge whether the situation we find ourselves in is worth adjusting to or actu- ally needs to be resisted. Human life is not a matter of just saying ‘yes’ to everything that happens around us. Sometimes it is of crucial importance to say ‘no’ and refuse to adapt and adjust. And for that, we need really useful knowledge, not just the useful knowledge that only allows us to ‘go along’ with the situation.”} Prof. Gert Biesta, Taking the Angle of the Teacher, 2024.



Are you curious for more? Would you like to get in touch? Feel free to contact our lead directly for any questions or inquiries you may have. tikvah@studioblended.com +31 6 42 47 29 69

Pedagogy goes beyond instruction and didactics. It involves theory, philosophy, context, culture, values, language and history. At our Studio, we distinguish world-class pedagogy from what we consider evidence-based design. Our Studio stands out for its love for simple and deep pedagogy.

You can include deep pedagogy as a leading thread throughout your curriculum. ‘Curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment - in that order’ (Dylan Wiliam).

Pedagogies is what - in the word of William Lovett (19th century Britain in Gert Biesta 2024)- distinguishes useful knowledge, from really good knowledge. We need our students to gain robust domain-knowledge (see i.e. the knowledge revival by Kirschner et al. 2025). But we also need them to aquire the kind of knowledge that allows them and us to not just adapt to the world as it is, but dare to make sound judgements and act upon that.

You probably have a sense of the pedagogy for your subject; but activities, technology and communication may clutter this sense. Our Studio comes alongside to ensure your ideas, philosophies and experiments in pedagogy lead to effective education. We ensure a simple pedagogy that resonates with your own philosophy and method and deepens it.

Our pedagogy - by design, main centers around dialogue, and listening as a disruptive practice. It is your content that infuses the really good knowledge and ability for judgement into the curriculum, and we can come alongside you and partner with you to bring it to the surface and articulate it for you. We do that through ourselves deeply listening and dialoguing with you as a teacher.

We love teachers. We love teaching. We come alongside you and partner with you to make your teaching really great. Time matters. We never see time as a straightjacket though, but approach is technically sound and playfully. We don’t go by stardardised rules of educational design (i.e. a rigid technocratic 45 min time-slot and cramping your big ideas in it) but dialogue with you from within the content, and advise you how to best optimise your pedagogy and content within the time given. This greatly enhances your own human resilience as a lecturer as well. As always, we don’t advise on didactics and how you should teach - this we leave up to your unique personality and experience. We simply look with you at how you can include pedagogy, coupled with relevant neuroscience/cognitive learning such as transfer of ‘understanding’, and be time-smart - by design.

If you feel, that you are a researcher first and foremost, already swamped in projects and trying to get funding in, publishing - and that you don’t know where to find the time to even get some traditional teacher training, keep an eye on our resilience portal - we are currently designing, developing and test-running agile ways to offer teacher training.

Our Audio Podcast

Expect a release of our next Audio Podcast episode with a dialogue interview on the time-dimension and pedagogues/teachers versus and together with educational designers/experts, organically in spring 2025.

Key projects

Observation of a key lectur by a senior researcher and teacher at TU/Delft, an exchange with IHS Rotterdam [spring 2025, update follows soon].

We excel in Paolo Freire’s approach to pedagogy, coupled with cognitive psychology/neuroscience on deep learning and the so-called ‘transfer of understanding’. Freire is perhaps the most important educator of the 20th century and his legacy still grows strong in new interpretations. These pedagogics infuse our work, including deep listening, and dialogues. We can combine our advice work with bespoke training for you as coordinator in conducting dialogues to ensure deep learning and transfer of understanding to new contexts.

Freire stubbornly refused to be cast in the role of charismatic guru dispensing wisdom to unwilling disciples. How to integrate dialogue in curriculum design? How can it enrich your teaching - by design?

2015 Our lead and independent senior advisor, spent time in North East Brazil to better understand, in an anthropological way, the context in which Freire lived and worked. Find a storyboard for students on Instagram ‘Urban Beyond the City’.

Photo: the far periphery of a sattelite city of Recife, North East Brazil. The world in which Paolo Freire grew up and developed his thinking and pedagogics. Read more about the fieldwork by Tikvah Breimer in the Erasmus Magazine, p. 20-21.

^{‘No contemporary writer explores the many dimensions of critical consciousness than Paulo Freire. A multi-cultural educator with the whole world as his classroom, notwithstanding the totally Brazilian flavor of his emotions, his language, and his universe of thought’} (Goulet in Freire 2013).

Therefore, to truly do justice to his message, it is pivotal to understand that universe. The North East was and is the poorest region of Brazil. Our independent senior advisor’s stay infused and inspired her understanding of his writings, and the application thereof in advice to course and training coordinators today. 

<sup>‘Only dialogue, which requires critical thinking, is also capable of generating critical thinking. Without dialogue there is no communication, and without communication there can be no true education.’ 

(...) Only through communication can human life hold meaning. The teacher’s thinking is authenticated only by the authenticity of the student’s thinking. The teacher cannot think for her students, nor can she impose her thought on them. Authentic thinking, thinking that is concerned about reality, does not take place in ivory tower isolation, but only in communication.

If it is true that thought has meaning only when generated by action upon the world, the subordination of students to teachers becomes impossible.’</sup>
Paulo Freire, Brazilian Pedagogue in his book, Pedagogy of the oppressed 1970 (2008, p. 92-93, 77). It inspires our Studio to speak not of capacity building, but capacity development - a two way direction.

Freire still is a great inspiration to young movements. More than anyone he demonstrated that education is the foundation of all freedoms, that it alone can give people mastry over their destiny. Find here a detailed historical account of his life and work.

Photo: Azienda Agricola AgrituristicaDeep pedagogues can also be found in the ordinary. Meet the architect and Florence university teacher Battista Mino who together with his wife Rina Sciumbata set up an Agriturismo - an Italian bed and breakfast which includes growing the vegetables and fruit that are served daily. He specialises in biodynamic agriculture, and can explain how to grow a zucchini like no one can - including the skies, and the soil. You should be there, face to face, with him, in his field, to deeply understand it. His work resonates with the 1970s thinkers such as Paolo Freire.

<sup>“Eu gostaria de ser lembrado como alguem que amou o mundo, as pessoas, os bichos, as arvores, a terra, a agua, a vida.“

“I would like to be remembered as someone who loves the world, people, animals, the trees, the land, the water, life.”</sup>

Paulo Freire, Brazilian Pedagogue. To “meet” him saying these words, watch the 1997 video clip.


Click to expand and explore an example of our work in innovating pedagogy on dialogue. Here we facilitated deep dialogue with deep listening in an event in the Conference on the Future of Europe. In the ANNEX you will find our exploration of the use of audio for deep listening remotely in education.

More design angles we use

Technical resilience
Human resilience
Modular
Time dimension
Evidence-based design
Financial health and resilience by (re)design
Innovative and deep pedagogy
Multi- Inter- and transdisciplinary
Blended
Bichronous
Designed to be green (and technological simplicity)
Nature and aspirations
Flexibilisation and personalisation
Simplicity and decluttering



Curios? Feel free to contact our independent senior advisor directly:
tikvah@studioblended.com

References

Freire, Paulo 1974 (2013) Education for critical consciousness. London New York: Bloomsbury Academic.

Freire, Paulo 1970 (2000) Pedagogy of the Oppressed.  New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc. 

We are here especially for you as unique professional, to come alongside you and partner with you, as you work on a (architecture / urban / development / policy / land / water / climate) curriculum, so that you can offer effective and resilient education in its simplest form.