There’s something powerful happening when you listen to two episodes of the same podcast back-to-back: Benjamin Freud’s conversation about Green School Bali’s biomimicry curriculum, and Mark Ingham’s exploration of “critical and nomadic pedagogies” on the Coconut Thinking podcast.
At first glance, they seem like different worlds. One is about bamboo classrooms in the Balinese jungle where students build water filters inspired by mangroves. The other is about rhizomatic education, artist-scholars and five decades of radical pedagogy bridging creative practice and critical theory.
But listen closer, and you’ll hear the same insurgency.
What If It’s Not School That Is the Problem?
Mark Ingham, an artist, scholar and educator asks a devastating question: What might a rhizomatic, nomadic education look like?
Not “how do we fix schools?” But “what if education doesn’t need walls, curricula, or the architecture of institutional learning at all?”
Three hundred miles away in Bali, Dr. Benjamin Freud is already living the answer. As Head of Upper School at Green School Bali, there exist programs where students “sketch ideas in the jungle, build with bamboo, or test water filters inspired by how mangroves purify saltwater”. The BiRD Lab isn’t a classroom—it’s “a design studio, science lab, and storytelling circle all in one”.
Ingham’s “nomadic pedagogy” isn’t theoretical here. It’s operational.
The Rhizome in the Jungle
In educational theory, “rhizomatic” refers to learning that spreads like plant roots—non-hierarchical, interconnected, adaptive, growing in multiple directions simultaneously. It’s the opposite of the tree model: one trunk (curriculum), branching out in predetermined ways.
Ingham asks: What if education works more like mycelium than oak trees?
Freud’s Greenstones (capstone projects) answer this as these aren’t assignments. They’re rhizomatic outputs—emerging from community need, connecting human and other-than-human systems, growing in directions no curriculum could predetermine.
The mycelium filtration system is especially poetic: students learning from fungal networks (nature’s original rhizome) to build water filtration. The medium is the message.
“Learning then Doing” ≠ “Learning Through Doing”
Here’s where both conversations converge on something I’ve been wrestling with in my own design practice.
Ingham’s critical pedagogy challenges the assumption that education happens before action—that you learn, then you do. Freud makes this explicit: “Learning through doing is not the same as learning and doing”.
The distinction matters profoundly.
“Learning through doing” still treats doing as a vehicle for learning predetermined content. You build a boat to understand physics. You grow tomatoes to understand biology. The content was decided before you started.
“Learning and doing” treats them as inseparable. You’re not learning about regeneration, instead you’re being regenerative, and the learning emerges from that practice. The physics, the biology, the ethics, they all emerge from the work itself.
I recall while working on a project for Eco-Schools, children didn’t learn “about nature” through watercolour activities. They’re embedded within nature’s patterns through design that makes ecological literacy joyful and accessible. The learning isn’t through the activity, it is the activity.
The Sixth Mass Extinction Is Education’s Missing Priority
Freud names something that hauntingly underlies Ingham’s critical pedagogy: “The sixth mass extinction - education’s missing priority”.
The children are not being taught what matters because we’re still operating within institutional frameworks designed for a world that no longer exists. Ingham’s “nomadic pedagogy” is the response: education that can move, adapt, and grow in the conditions we actually face, not the conditions we wish existed.
WHat I find most interesting is that in the BiRD Lab, students start by “listening to the environment and community” using the 4S approach: Sensing, Seeking, Shaping, Storytelling. This isn’t a curriculum but an orientation toward a world in crisis.
The Greenstone confirmation process makes this explicit where students engage with a panel of three (an educator, a community practitioner and an anchor panelist) in dialogue that’s “meant to be uncomfortable and challenging, but also supportive and encouraging. This is learning”.
Not comfortable. Not standardized. Not safe. Learning.
Outputs Are Dead, It’s All About Inputs Now
Freud’s most provocative claim: “AI, outputs are dead — it’s all about inputs now”.
In an AI-saturated world, generic outputs (text, images, code) are commoditized. What remains valuable is input quality: deep observation, careful sensing, rich research, embodied attention to place and community.
AI can generate images. It cannot sense the place. It cannot understand community dynamics with embodied attention. It cannot observe nature patterns while sketching in the jungle.
Ingham’s career bridging “creative practice and critical theory” points to the same truth: the input quality - the depth of engagement, the quality of observation, the richness of relationship, these determine the output’s value and not the other way around.
What Would It Take to Create the Conditions Conducive to Life?
The Coconut Thinking podcast asks: “What would it take to create the conditions conducive to life?”
This is Freud’s definition of regeneration (vs. sustainability, which merely maintains what exists). This is Ingham’s nomadic pedagogy: education that creates conditions for life to flourish, not systems that prepare students for jobs that may not exist.
Through my practice spanning early childhood education, climate-responsive projects, conscious food systems and design pedagogy operationalizes this same question across multiple domains.
The Design Future Is Already Here, It’s Just Not Evenly Distributed
Here’s what I hear when I listen to both episodes together:
Ingham’s nomadic pedagogy is the theory. Freud’s BiRD Lab is the practice. My portfolio is the transdisciplinary bridge.
The future of education isn’t coming. It’s already happening in bamboo classrooms in Bali, in community nurseries that integrate diverse populations, in climate-responsive concepts. I hope to bridge this myself through a transdisciplinary practice.
The question isn’t whether this future is possible. It’s whether we have the courage to abandon the tree model and grow like mycelium instead.
What This Means for Design Practice
As a designer in sustainable innovation with a transdisciplinary practice rooted in systems thinking, education and sustainability, listening to both conversations, I see my approach to work more clearly.
The BiRD Lab’s 4S process (Sensing, Seeking, Shaping, Storytelling) must map across different projects. The sustainability/regeneration distinction can manifest in every project. Most importantly, I see that regenerative design is not domain-specific. It’s domain-transcendent. It applies to education, architecture, food, community building and pedagogy alike.
The Invitation
The invitation is clear: Stop waiting for permission. Start practicing regeneration. Because learning and doing are inseparable. The practice itself is the education.
And the future we need is already here, we just need to recognize it, grow it and let it spread like mycelium through the cracks in the institutional concrete.
Further Listening: