INNOVATIVE AND DEEP PEDAGOGY (IN ITS SIMPLEST FORM)
—‘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
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.
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.
Our pedagogy also - by design, mainly centers around dialogue, and listening as a disruptive practice.
"Only dialogue truly communicates" wrote Paolo Freire in the 1970s. Dialogue is fascinating. Perhaps it's the only way in which true learning and teaching happens.
Rethinking educational theory, also brings in a so-called double dialogic (after Wegerif 2025, p. 28).
The first loop of dialogic education is the induction students into short-term dialogues in the classroom. This teaches how to for good questions, how to listen well, and how to think both critically and creatively. The second loop is the induction into the much longer-term dialogue of culture.
Long-term dialogues of culture, such as history, maths, art and science, are strands in a single evolving, unbounded dialogue.
While dialogic education is normally understood only in terms of the first loop, (...) it should also be understood in terms of the second loop, inducting learners into participation in a cultural tradition understood as itself a dialogue; a long-term collective dialogue. It is not possible to participate usefully in a long-term cultural dialogue without already knowing things. Induction of students into long-term dialogue requires teaching the dialogue so far the scientific canon, for example-the best of what our ancestors have done and said up to now. But this must not be taught as dead, fixed, final knowledge but as a living tradition that the students can themselves participate in, question and take further. Rather than a fixed body of knowledge, it is better thought of as the story of the dialogue up to this point: a history of challenges, debates, about-turns, false paths, experi-ments, and reasons why people changed their minds. Overall, it is the story of a slowly expanding shared space of dialogue in which evidence and reason-ing are inseparable from a range of voices arguing together about what it all means.
This is also where technology comes in. For example, we can reinvision AI beautifully as a discussant peer, that allows the student to dialogue with the second loop - the long term collective dialogue. Read more about our experimentation with AI in this light on our page Dialogue AI.
We love teachers. We love teaching. We explicitly partner with your teaching team, to make your teaching really great. It is your content and experience with students/your audience that infuses the really good knowledge and the ability for judgement and (double) dialogue 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 -and then envisioning pedagogy for your unique course or degree.
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Prefer to read? Transcript
Listen on: Acast Spotify Apple
Release spring ‘25
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’.
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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.
‘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.’
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.
“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.”
Paulo Freire, Brazilian Pedagogue. To “meet” him saying these words, watch the 1997 video clip.
Observation of a key lecture by a senior researcher and teacher at TU/Delft, an exchange with IHS Rotterdam [spring 2025, update follows soon].
1. one way is, a revival of the knowledge domain - but still, a view of education as transmission, the teacher as a lecturer, an expert. You recognize it also by a tendency for a strong focus on optimising the performance of the learning brain to take in this knowledge.
2. And another way is education as merely facilitating the learner, the student as central, and the teacher as a 'guide' (constructivism).
3. The third way is dialogical education. A way that combines both, the outside world, and the inside world.
‘Dialogical education unites transmission and construction.’ The first, is about ‘the ‘dialogue so far’ in your domain, generations of teachers. The second, ‘is reformulated as teaching students how to participate in learning through dialogue and thus how to create new knowledge together with others’ (Wegerif 2025).
‘Double dialogic is the recognition that dialogues do not only involve specific speakers (...) they also involve a dialogic interaction with the cultural context (Phillipso & Wegerif, 2016). A dialogue about a science question in a classroom is not only between the different views of the students; it also has to invoke and react to the slowly changing views of the relevant community of scientists represented by the teacher, the textbook or the Al-edubot. This concept of the double dialogic can enable us to understand how direct teaching can be compatible with dialogic education.
Human resilience
Modular
Time dimension
Evidence-based design
Financial health and resilience by (re)design
Innovative and deep pedagogy
Assesment / evaluation
Multi- Inter- and transdisciplinary
Blended
Bichronous
MOOC
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
Freire, Paulo 1970 (2000) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc.
Wegerif, Rupert 2025. Rethinking Education Theory; Education as Expanding Dialogue. Edward Elgar Publishing, Chantelham, Northhampton, USA. [Available as Google Ebook]
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.
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.
Our pedagogy also - by design, mainly centers around dialogue, and listening as a disruptive practice.
"Only dialogue truly communicates" wrote Paolo Freire in the 1970s. Dialogue is fascinating. Perhaps it's the only way in which true learning and teaching happens.
Rethinking educational theory, also brings in a so-called double dialogic (after Wegerif 2025, p. 28).
The first loop of dialogic education is the induction students into short-term dialogues in the classroom. This teaches how to for good questions, how to listen well, and how to think both critically and creatively. The second loop is the induction into the much longer-term dialogue of culture.
Long-term dialogues of culture, such as history, maths, art and science, are strands in a single evolving, unbounded dialogue.
While dialogic education is normally understood only in terms of the first loop, (...) it should also be understood in terms of the second loop, inducting learners into participation in a cultural tradition understood as itself a dialogue; a long-term collective dialogue. It is not possible to participate usefully in a long-term cultural dialogue without already knowing things. Induction of students into long-term dialogue requires teaching the dialogue so far the scientific canon, for example-the best of what our ancestors have done and said up to now. But this must not be taught as dead, fixed, final knowledge but as a living tradition that the students can themselves participate in, question and take further. Rather than a fixed body of knowledge, it is better thought of as the story of the dialogue up to this point: a history of challenges, debates, about-turns, false paths, experi-ments, and reasons why people changed their minds. Overall, it is the story of a slowly expanding shared space of dialogue in which evidence and reason-ing are inseparable from a range of voices arguing together about what it all means.
This is also where technology comes in. For example, we can reinvision AI beautifully as a discussant peer, that allows the student to dialogue with the second loop - the long term collective dialogue. Read more about our experimentation with AI in this light on our page Dialogue AI.
We love teachers. We love teaching. We explicitly partner with your teaching team, to make your teaching really great. It is your content and experience with students/your audience that infuses the really good knowledge and the ability for judgement and (double) dialogue 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 -and then envisioning pedagogy for your unique course or degree.
Our Audio Podcast
Prefer to read? Transcript
Listen on: Acast Spotify Apple
Release spring ‘25
Key projects
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.
‘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.’
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.
“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.”
Paulo Freire, Brazilian Pedagogue. To “meet” him saying these words, watch the 1997 video clip.
Observation of a key lecture by a senior researcher and teacher at TU/Delft, an exchange with IHS Rotterdam [spring 2025, update follows soon].
Relevant Publications
When it comes to educational theory, prof. Wegerif (2025) shows a third way. So if:1. one way is, a revival of the knowledge domain - but still, a view of education as transmission, the teacher as a lecturer, an expert. You recognize it also by a tendency for a strong focus on optimising the performance of the learning brain to take in this knowledge.
2. And another way is education as merely facilitating the learner, the student as central, and the teacher as a 'guide' (constructivism).
3. The third way is dialogical education. A way that combines both, the outside world, and the inside world.
‘Dialogical education unites transmission and construction.’ The first, is about ‘the ‘dialogue so far’ in your domain, generations of teachers. The second, ‘is reformulated as teaching students how to participate in learning through dialogue and thus how to create new knowledge together with others’ (Wegerif 2025).
‘Double dialogic is the recognition that dialogues do not only involve specific speakers (...) they also involve a dialogic interaction with the cultural context (Phillipso & Wegerif, 2016). A dialogue about a science question in a classroom is not only between the different views of the students; it also has to invoke and react to the slowly changing views of the relevant community of scientists represented by the teacher, the textbook or the Al-edubot. This concept of the double dialogic can enable us to understand how direct teaching can be compatible with dialogic education.
More design angles we use
Technical resilienceHuman resilience
Modular
Time dimension
Evidence-based design
Financial health and resilience by (re)design
Innovative and deep pedagogy
Assesment / evaluation
Multi- Inter- and transdisciplinary
Blended
Bichronous
MOOC
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.
Wegerif, Rupert 2025. Rethinking Education Theory; Education as Expanding Dialogue. Edward Elgar Publishing, Chantelham, Northhampton, USA. [Available as Google Ebook]
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.
StudioBlended Foundation 2025
Prefer to have direct contact?
Feel free:
Tikvah Breimer (MSc MAEd MSc)
Independent senior advisor, teacher trainer, lead
tikvah@studioblended.com
+31 6 42 47 29 69
Non Profit Foundation
Registration Chamber of Commerce
KvK-number 86242598 (Dutch)
VAT identification number
NL 86 39 07 29 5 B01
Bankaccount
NL40 INGB 0709 6156 04
SWIFT/BIC: INGBNL2A
StudioBlended Foundation
Prefer to have direct contact?
Feel free:
Tikvah Breimer (MSc MAEd MSc)
Independent senior advisor, teacher trainer, lead
tikvah@studioblended.com
+31 6 42 47 29 69
Non Profit Foundation
Registration Chamber of Commerce
KvK-number 86242598 (Dutch)
VAT identification number
NL 86 39 07 29 5 B01
Bankaccount
NL40 INGB 0709 6156 04
SWIFT/BIC: INGBNL2A
StudioBlended Foundation
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Our work
About us
We are here especially for you as unique course/training coordinator, 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.