Podcast
Coconut Thinking
Hosted by Benjamin Freud, Ph.D. · EN
The Coconut Thinking podcast brings educational provocateurs and practitioners in the regenerative space together to ask: what would it take to create the conditions for all life to thrive? Conversations are as diverse as the guests, but each one participates in the ecosystem, and each one questions the dominant narrative. This is a show for those who are curious about learning, systems, and contributing to the bio-collective—all life that has an interest in the healthfulness of the planet.
11episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
Dr. Cat Ho: Critical Economic Literacy
Dec 1700:43:17Tap to summarizeWhat inherited economic assumptions does education quietly reproduce, even when it claims to be about justice?In this episode, I speak with Dr. Cat Ho. Cat was trained as an economist but left the field early in search of work that could genuinely make the world better. That path first took her into a Christian non-profit, and later back into economics through teaching IB Diploma Programme Economics. Through her work with teachers and Gen Z learners, Cat became interested in how education can help people question inherited economic assumptions and imagine alternative possibilities. She is currently developing Critical Economic Literacy as a key dimension of Global Citizenship Education. She says that the heart of her work is a simple but demanding question: what kind of education might actually help the world become a more just and peaceful place? We discuss: 🥥 Criticality as means of tearing down in order to build up; 🥥 How if we all spoke up, the possibility of change would be greater, though we still need networks and wisdom; 🥥 The creation of the precariat (that class of people afraid to lose the little it has) means we live on fear and don't always want to fight for change.Check us out: www.coconut-thinking.comCheck out Cat's site WONDER: https://wonder-educationreimagined.org/critical-econ-literacy
Transcribe →Mark Ingham, Ph.D.: Critical and nomadic pedagogies
Nov 1801:00:22Tap to summarizeWhat might a rhizomatic, nomadic education look like?In this episode, I speak with Mark Ingham, Ph.D. Mark is an artist, scholar, and radical educator whose five-decade career bridges creative practice, critical theory, and experimental pedagogy. Trained at Chelsea School of Art and the Slade, he became known early for bold, site-responsive installations His art has been exhibited at the Whitechapel, Kettle’s Yard, Riverside Studios, and internationally. Alongside his studio practice, Mark has a long history of socially engaged work in schools, galleries, prisons, and community settings, grounding his teaching in real-world questions of culture, power, and place. He is now Reader in Critical and Nomadic Pedagogies at University of the Arts London, Co-Chair of the Professoriate, and founder of the Experimental Pedagogies Research Group, a vibrant network of 500+ educators rethinking creative learning. We discuss:🥥 Questioning why we follow the rules we’ve inherited, and refusing to keep doing things just because “that’s how it’s always been;"🥥 Stripping away labels and boundaries so we can re-wild ourselves and the world into something more alive;🥥 Moving through de-territorialization and re-territorialization: the old pattern loosens, things shift, and a new pattern takes shape.Check us out: www.coconut-thinking.comFind out more about Mark and his upcoming book: https://markingham.org/
Transcribe →Becoming-Through-Loss: The Groundwork of Metabolic Ontology
Oct 2600:08:59Tap to summarizeWhat if life doesn’t fight decay, but feeds on it?In this episode, I explore metabolic ontology, a way of seeing being, learning, and ethics as continual re-organization. Entropy, loss, and transformation aren’t problems to fix; they’re the medium through which life keeps composing itself.Drawing from my work in regenerative education, I look at how this shift from stability to metabolism changes everything: how we understand learning&doing, assessment, and the role of institutions. Regeneration isn’t preservation; it’s participation: the willingness to let forms, including our own, decompose when vitality demands it.This episode is an invitation to see education, and life itself, as becoming-through-loss: coherence renewing through change, vitality re-organizing through decay.
Transcribe →School Isn’t Broken, It’s Working Exactly as Designed
Oct 1400:15:52Tap to summarizeIn this episode of the Coconut Thinking Podcast, I take a hard look at what school really does, and what it would cost to truly change it. We keep saying education needs fixing, but maybe it’s doing exactly what it was built to do: sort, rank, and hold the world in place.Drawing on Bourdieu, cultural capital, and the myth of meritocracy, I unpack why mastery and competency models only repaint the same house, why knowledge has to be understood as situated rather than transferable, and why real transformation demands letting go of the symbolic capital many of us depend on.From learning&doing in service of Life to the testimonies of humans and more-than-humans, this episode asks: if learning isn’t serving Life, what are we still schooling for?
Transcribe →Elspeth Hay: Feed us with trees
Sep 2100:44:10Tap to summarizeWhat if the way we eat could root us back into place, instead of tearing it apart?In this episode, I speak with Elspeth Hay. Elspeth is a writer, public radio host, and food systems advocate whose work explores what it means to live thoughtfully in place. Raised in Maine by birdwatcher parents, she grew up seeing how species adapt seamlessly to their ecosystems, while human communities eroded them, often just to feed ourselves.For more than 15 years, Elspeth has interviewed farmers, harvesters, cooks, policymakers, and visionaries, asking how we might eat and live without extraction. Her work reveals a paradox: humans are highly adaptable to ecosystems everywhere, yet we’ve forgotten how to belong to them. Based in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, she co-founded the Wellfleet Farmers Market and Commons Keepers, and works on community food initiatives like the Wicked Oyster restaurant.We discuss:🥥 How food connects us to place and to all the living beings we share it with.🥥 The flow state that comes from engaging with what grows around us.🥥 How disconnection from story shows up materially, and why storytellers must tell stories of what we are for to nurture imagination and possibility.Check us out: www.coconut-thinking.comCheck out Elspeth's website: https://elspethhay.com/
Transcribe →Josh Dorfman: The Lazy Environmentalist (not really)
Sep 700:45:36Tap to summarizeWhat if sustainability’s future was driven by passion, shaped with youth, and told through real stories?In this episode, I speak with Josh Dorfman. Josh is a climate entrepreneur, author, and media voice at the intersection of sustainability, innovation, and culture. He is the co-founder, CEO, and host of Supercool, the climate-tech podcast and media brand spotlighting the bold founders, investors, and policymakers designing a low-carbon future. His interviews reveal the business models, technologies, and cultural shifts redefining prosperity in an age of ecological disruption. A serial entrepreneur, Josh launched Plantd, a carbon-negative building-materials company recognized by Fast Company in 2024 as one of the world’s most innovative ventures. Before that, he created Vine.com, Amazon’s first natural and organic e-commerce store, and Vivavi, an award-winning sustainable furniture company honored on Inc.’s “Green 50” for leading eco-design. Josh first captured attention as The Lazy Environmentalist, a blog that grew into a SiriusXM radio show, a Sundance Channel TV series, and two books blending wit with pragmatic eco-living. His work consistently challenges the status quo, reframing climate response as an opportunity for creativity, commerce, and cultural transformation. We discuss: 🥥 Influencing through interests and passions, appealing to the heart, not just cognitive spaces (with all the data we already know);🥥 How industry might collaborate with young people on projects relating to sustainability, to develop careers; 🥥 The importance of telling great stories of sustainability, with successes and failures, which can influence and inspire others and not just virtue signal.Check us out www.coconut-thinking.comAnd check out Supercool: https://getsuper.cool/
Transcribe →Maya Frost: Collapse
Aug 2400:45:42Tap to summarizeHow might we consider collapse as a a transformative process that brings us together through loss and renewal?In this episode, I speak with Maya Frost. Maya is a creative adaptation strategist, grief worker, and trauma‑informed facilitator who specializes in what she calls “creative adaptation": helping collapse‑aware individuals disrupt their despair and cultivate joy even as systems erode. As the founder of Collapse Forward and the Doom to Bloom™ process, she works with clients across more than 20 countries to transform “despairalysis” into grounded gratitude, rewilded imagination, and enlivened engagement. Maya's roots lie in alternative education and creativity‑based healing: she began by teaching mindfulness and creative play to thousands online. She’s also the author of The New Global Student, a playful guide to global education alternatives. In recent years, she has gained recognition for her “post‑doom optimism”—a refusal to flatten complexity into despair and instead engage collapse with creative resistance and realistic hope. We discuss: 🥥 How glossing over the truth around collapse risks giving a false sense of reality that eventually leads to greater despair; 🥥 The importance of having hard conversations, out in the open, so that we might respond, not in spite of, but thanks to the struggle; 🥥 How there is much we. can do right now to adapt, refusing paralysis even faced against tremendous odds.Check us out: www.coconut-thinking.com
Transcribe →Jennifer D. Klein: Leadership as resistance and risk
Aug 1000:55:56Tap to summarizeHow do you lead with courage and love for every child when the culture around you is demanding you do the opposite?Jennifer D. Klein is an educator, author, and global learning advocate with over 30 years in student-centered, project-based education. A product of the very pedagogies she champions, Jennifer has taught and led in diverse contexts—from all-girls education in the U.S. to heading an innovative school in Colombia. She has worked with educators in over 20 countries, helping them design equitable, inquiry-driven learning that amplifies student voice, embraces cultural inclusion, and transforms school culture.The author of The Global Education Guidebook, The Landscape Model of Learning, and the forthcoming Taming the Turbulence in Educational Leadership, Jennifer blends classroom experience, leadership insight, and a passion for equity to inspire meaningful change. She partners with schools to tackle equity, engage in brave conversations, and empower young people as agents of change in their communities and beyond. Based in Denver, she continues to connect educators worldwide through workshops, coaching, and keynote talks.We discuss: 🥥 Having a North Star and knowing what we are willing to to stand up for, in the face of risk; 🥥 How no one can give you the gift of liberation, we have to strive for it (Freire). This is true in leadership of all sorts; 🥥 Students as protagonists of their own stories and these of others.You can purchase Jennifer's book here: https://www.principledlearning.org/taming-the-turbulence-in-educational-leadership.Check out Coconut Thinking on www.coconut-thinking. com.
Transcribe →Charlotte Hankin: Where are the animals?
Jun 1500:52:48Tap to summarizeHow might our relationships other-than-human animals help us consider sustainability and regenerative education in more life-centered ways?In this episode, I speak with Charlotte Hankin. Charlotte is an educator, sustainability consultant, and PhD researcher in the Department of Education at the University of Bath. Her doctoral work explores how relationships between children and animals in international schools can help shift education away from human-exceptionalism toward more regenerative, relational ways of learning. Guided by posthumanist and feminist materialist theory, Charlotte uses arts-based, post-qualitative methods, including poetry, photography, sound, and craft, to attend to spontaneous, everyday encounters between human and other-than-human beings. These ‘multispecies moments’ offer insight into power, care, and co-existence, inviting schools to reimagine pedagogy as something co-created in the spaces between species. And, of course, Charlotte is the co-founder of Coconut Thinking. We discuss:🥥 How schools often portray animals in ways that separate us from the natural world and contribute to extractive practices;🥥 How school curricula might embrace an ethic of care, beyond what serves humans;🥥 The importance of cultivating relationality in schools over content mastery.Check us out, www.coconut-thinking.com
Transcribe →Special Episode: Learning is a means, not an end
May 25, 202500:31:28Tap to summarizeHow can learning&doing help us become good participants in the web of life?In this special episode, I speak about how systems change won’t happen if we replace names and labels but continue to do the same old thing. I propose that we move beyond assessing learning, competencies, soft skills for their own sake. Rather, what if we collected the voices of the community (human and other-than-human) and had that be the measure of quality of learning? Emphasis placed on testimonials of how the learning and specifically the application of the learning contributed to a more positive world. And if we really want to go nuts, we can answer the question at the top of these show notes.This takes us beyond the individualization of student achievement because it becomes about how we use our learning for good. It de-centers the student and centers life.This episode is inspired by a post I put up a couple weeks ago, that you can find below. Please listen to this one-take, uncut episode, with a guest appearance by Clementine the cat.To access the post, click here.
Transcribe →