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.


^{A close friend of Isidore I. Rabi (1898), Nobel-prize winner for physics, once asked him: “Why did you become a scientist, rather than a doctor, or laywer or businessman, like the other immigrant kids in the neighborhood?” Isidore’s answer was profoud, another friend, Donald Sheff, wrote to the New York Times:  ''My mother made me a scientist without ever intending it. Every other mother in Brooklyn would ask her child after school: 'So? Did you learn anything today?' But not my mother. She always asked me a different question. 'Izzy,' she would say, 'did you ask a good question today?' That difference - asking good questions - made me become a scientist'.}

Anecdote largely copied from Sheff (1988) himself, as sent in to the newspaper in memory of Rabi, who had passed away that month. In: Breimer 2014, p. 490



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

Image: “Architectural Sketch by Cazú Zegers © Cazú Zegers – all rights reserved.”

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. We dare to innovate - which to us means, leading the co-creation and selection of a bespoke deep pedagogy that resonates with your unique setting and content. We help you make the tough decisions that lead to simplicity.

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 Suma 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. Education is as much about becoming a critical thinker - more autonomous in thinking and acting, conveying social norms and values - and becoming part of society, as it is about qualification with knowledge transmission and gaining skills.

Gert Biesta (2025) uses the historical example of Rosa Parks who entered a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1953, to illustrate a crucial educational point. The bus had signs at the entry indicating "White forward, colored rear". Even so, Rosa Parks, takes a seat in the front of the bus. Can she not read? Gert Biesta writes (2025):
‘Now, if your educational mind is completely colonised by (...) ‘basic skills’, then you might say, ‘Here we have a big problem because there is a very clear message, but Rosa Parks is not decoding the message, so she needs to go back to school—this is a case of educational failure’.
Biesta emphasizes that Rosa Parks was "perfectly able to read the message". Her action was not due to a lack of cognitive skill, but rather an act of judgment and resistance. She made up her own mind and decided to say "no" to a societal norm she found unacceptable, despite knowing the potential consequences. That, is what distinguishes knowledge, from really good knowledge. And a machine cannot assess this.

The world is confronted with the consequences of ecological tipping points, the intensification of conflict, rising economic inequalities, concentration of wealth and major technological changes. We see new approaches to curricula, such as so-called regenerative education (see i.e. Cardozo, Wessels & Van den Berg 2025). They strongly emphasise the skill sets needed for system change. But, as Taveras-Dalmau et al. (2025) write ‘Regeneration holds great promise, but without reflexivity, it risks becoming an ideology that replicates the very paradigm blindness it seeks to overcome.‘ 

To us at StudioBlended, we believe we should always strike a balance between education for life (of the student) and actual technical subject knowledge to be able to make a living later on upon graduation. Or as Max Ehrmann wrote in Desiderata in 1927: ‘Keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.’ And whilst the world of work is changing rapidly, so that it’s hard to predict what jobs will hold future, we do see a strong relevance for a robust knowledge domain, coupled with skills and capabilities. It’s all about the balance (see techical resilience).

Our pedagogy - by design, mainly centers around dialogue, asking really good questions, and listening as a disruptive practice. However, based on your unique course or degree, we can also source a bespoke pedagogy that resonates best with your content. Let’s explore dialogue though first.

"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.

We must move away from the default theory, the so-called transmission model of education. Consciously, or unconsciously, it remains quite a strong model at universities and beyond when the knowledge domain comes in. Or, in Wegerif words (2025, p. 18): ‘The story that facts found first outside of students in books move inside their brains, perhaps stored in neuronal assemblies of some kind and are then expressed outside again on an exam page’. (Read more on our page on neuroscience).

Building on Freire (1970), Wegerif (2025, p. 18) argues, ‘the growth in education is not the storing of facts as one may store money in a bank, but a process of transformation whereby that which is originally encountered as external becomes internal and available for use in creative thoughts and actions that can change the world’. Dialogue is not about getting the learner to see things the way you do, but to both transform through the act of the dialogue.

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 into short-term dialogues in the classroom. This teaches how to ask 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, experiments, and reasons why people changed their minds. Overall, it is the story of a slowly expanding shared space of dialogue in which evidence and reasoning are inseparable from a range of voices arguing together about what it all means’. (Wegerif 2025, p. 28).

Pedagogy is what is going to ground AI. In educational design, we don’t follow novelty, we follow pedagogy.

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 - by design. 

Key projects

StudioBlended is currently partnering with an institute for capacity building within a European University, to co-create an impactful MOOC for this client (2025-mrch 2026).

In this assignment, we found a pedagogy that resonates deeply with the content, centered on dialogue.

European funded program.

More information follows soon.

Our Audio Podcast

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Release spring ‘25

Further Readings

At StudioBlended 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.

<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.

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 resilience
Big ideas
Paradigm shifts/decade strong
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
Designed to be green (and technological simplicity)
Nature and aspirations
Flexibilisation and personalisation
Simplicity and decluttering
Artificial Intelligence



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

References

Cardozo, M.L., Wessels, K. and Van den Berg, B. (2025) The Art of Regenerative Educatorship. London: Routledge. Available: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-edit/10.4324/9781003705321/art-regenerative-educatorship-mieke-lopes-cardozo-koen-wessels-bas-van-den-berg(Accessed: October 27, 2025)


Freire, P. (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. 

Surma, T. et al. (2025). Developing Curriculum for Deep Thinking. The knowledge revival. Cham: Springer. Available: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-74661-1 [Accessed: October 27, 2025)

Taveras-Dalmau, V., Becken, S. and Westoby, R. (2025) ‘From paradigm blindness to paradigm shift? An integrative review and critical analysis of the regenerative paradigm.’ Ambio (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-025-02232-7Available: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13280-025-02232-7#citeas(Accessed: October 27, 2025).


Wegerif, R. (2025) Rethinking Education Theory; Education as Expanding Dialogue. Chantelham, Northhampton: Edward Elgar Publishing.

Innovative and deep pedagogy and resilient education that stands the test of time - by design.