Kristina Hoeppner: 0:05

Welcome to'Create. Share. Engage.' This is the podcast about portfolios for learning and more for educators, learning designers, and managers keen on integrating portfolios with their education and professional development practices. 'Create. Share. Engage.' is brought to you by the Mahara team at Catalyst IT. My name is Kristina Hoeppner. My guest today is Assistant Research Professor in Principled Innovation Dr Bea Rodriguez-Fransen from Arizona State University. Dr Kevin Kelly, a fellow member of the AAEEBL Digital Ethics Task Force, recommended Bea because she recently published the book'Education and decolonial

futures in the Philippines: 0:51

Perspectives for educators and practitioners' which extends our thinking about diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging, and decolonisation, one of the AAEEBL Digital Ethics in ePortfolios Principles. Thank you for sharing what you have learned from your research, Bea. I'm really excited about our chat today.

Bea Rodriguez-Fransen: 1:13

Me, too. I'm really excited and honoured to be here with you today.

Kristina Hoeppner: 1:18

Bea, what do you do at Arizona State please?

Bea Rodriguez-Fransen: 1:21

I am Assistant Research Professor in Principled Innovation at ASU's College of Global Futures. I'm also a senior global future scholar. In this role as Assistant Research Professor, I will be focusing on anticipatory governance as well as interdisciplinary collaboration and public engagement as we unite public interest technologies across ASU, and we're also going to be engaging partners, different stakeholders that are interested in advancing our ninth design aspiration of the university, which is called'Principled innovation', which basically asks, just because we can, should we, especially as new emerging technology such as AI and VR and climate tech, for example, are just proliferating right now. That is our goal.

Kristina Hoeppner: 2:19

Can I understand principled innovation as you're wanting to innovate using foundational or basic principles that you've agreed on and innovate within that framework?

Bea Rodriguez-Fransen: 2:32

Yes, the principled innovation framework was originally created by Mary Lou Fulton College for Teaching and Learning Innovation. There are four components to the practices of principled innovation, or PI. It's moral, civic, performance, and intellectual. 'Moral' is all about utilising ethical decision making whenever we're innovating. 'Civic' is about understanding culture and context, engaging multiple and diverse perspectives.'Performance' is about designing creative solutions and then navigating uncertainty and mitigating any consequences. And then finally, 'intellectual' is developing the habits of an informed systems thinker to be able to reflect critically and compassionately. In a nutshell, it's answering whenever we're creating or innovating a new product or experience or system that we ask the question, just because we can, should we? It's asking a lot of questions and leaning on many values, including compassion, humility, and a host of other values that we need to embody as we work with our community.

Kristina Hoeppner: 3:49

Yeah, that is really incredibly important, I find, especially in the current times where everybody is looking towards AI for one thing or the other because, of course, lots of experiments are being made, not always considering the impact on peoples and all of that, so that having those principles part of the innovation is really good because you can't put the genie back into the bottle. Once a model is out there and has a training data set, you can't remove things easily, only because afterwards you realise, well, we shouldn't have put that stuff in in the first place. So if we are having that there are from the get to go, knowing what sensible guardrails there are to protect peoples, not just Indigenous peoples, but other minorities and also everybody else in the world, then that is very important.

Bea Rodriguez-Fransen: 4:38

Yes, and not to mention that billions of people are still not connected to the internet. For example, there are many forms of knowledge that are not written down, that are not represented in any of these data sets. It's also important to think about the potential long-term consequences of anything that we create because it seems that we're still, as a society, trapped in this short-termism, that there's the notions of race, racing towards something and competing against one another to race towards what I question and to what end. That's what I encourage, is for us to really think through what are the potential harms and benefits on humanity and the planet generations from now, which is difficult to do, but that's the beauty of working in an interdisciplinary community, working with different domains. That's why I'm really excited about this new opportunity of focusing on bringing together different perspectives as we innovate.

Kristina Hoeppner: 5:43

That's also why we are talking today because you have already done research in that area of how to bring in different perspectives. In your recent book 'Education and decolonial futures in the Philippines', you take a look at how the western view of education and being has influenced educators in the Philippines and also what can be done to bring in learning and teaching scenarios that are rooted in Philippine culture and traditions. Can you share with us why you've researched this topic?

Bea Rodriguez-Fransen: 6:17

This is going way back in my doctoral coursework, in my educational theory class. I remember noticing that all of the theories we were studying came from Europe or North America. When I asked my professor in the classroom if there are other theories that we can look at, he mentioned a word that I was not familiar with at the time, and that was 'Decoloniality'. That's when I started really digging deeper and encountered this rich scholarship of decoloniality. That's when I decided to shift my dissertation idea of using design thinking to help transform universities to a decolonising education. To do that, I just went back to one of the deepest questions in my soul, which is, why do we still have colonial mentality among Filipinos and Filipino Americans all over the world, which is basically this automatic rejection of anything Filipino, and automatic preference for anything white American. I started with that question, and then that led to my research among Filipino educators in the Philippines.

Kristina Hoeppner: 7:32

You mentioned that you were initially trying to use the design thinking framework to improve education, but then through your research and also the storytelling that you have been engaged with using traditional methods of understanding, gaining knowledge, and engaging with people that you've created the decolonial design futures framework. Bea, what are the components of it, and how does it extend the design thinking framework? Why, then, is it actually important for us to look into that and consider that as an alternative?

Bea Rodriguez-Fransen: 8:10

This was an unexpected finding from the research. I didn't realise I was going to create this framework, but it just made sense to fuse decoloniality and futures thinking and human centred design because that is exactly the journey or the process that I experienced with the participants. It's basically a six-phase, iterative, collective design futures framework. How it departs from design thinking is that there's a time horizon component that encourages you to look way, way back in order to look forward. Typically, in traditional design thinking, you tend to speak or interview the end users, whether you're designing a product or service or experience or system, and asking for their pain points in the present and then quickly designing to address that pain point. Often, we don't contextualise that pain point with the larger story or the larger history of that community. The first phase is Kuwentuhan, and I use my native language of Tagalog. But when I present this to different communities, I encourage them to plug in their own languages. For example, when I went to Africa to facilitate a design charrette for establishing the Young African Leaders Initiative, which is a continent wide initiative, when we were talking about the values that underpin this framework, one of them is 'kapwa', which is expressing the Filipino value of relationality, they came up with'ubuntu', which means 'I am because we are'. That's what I encourage, is that we are not ashamed of using our own languages whenever we're designing with folks. So the first is Kuwentuhan or storytelling. And the key here, it's a group storytelling session instead of an individual interview. This is because there's this notion of relationality that when you share your inner self with one another, you recognise each other, and then you make connections with one another's stories. It helps you remember. It helps you feel certain emotions as you listen to other people's stories. There's also this step of contextualising the individual stories within the larger story of that community. That was when you as a researcher or as a facilitator, you go off and also dig deeper on what's the larger story of this community, and then you compare their stories with the larger story. Then you'll see that you can actually revise the meanings of these stories. That method is called hermeneutic circle, where you constantly compare these stories with one another. The second step is Pagmumuni-muni or reflection, and this is when I encourage the participants to identify specific emotions that they felt while they were listening to each other, and then from there, glean insights based on their emotions about the particular topic or problem or issue. From there, we move on to the third step, which is Hiraya or imagination. We did a rapid ideation thinking about imagining the future of education in the Philippines ten years from now. Ten years is a magic number for futurists because a lot can happen in a decade. So when we think about our own lives, for example, when you think about your own life 10 years ago, there's probably dramatic changes from then to now. We also mark our lives in a decade, like you're in your 20s, 30s, 40s, right? And then music and fashion and culture, there's very distinctive differences. After you've imagined that you would create an artefact from the future, which is basically something, a tangible thing that you create, rapidly prototype or a digital format. In this case, they had digital flyers communicating their ideas of five-year PhD programme and also an intergenerational school. They created a mock-up of that. And then from there, the fifth phase is Disenyong Makatarungang, which is design justice. This is a concept by a global community of practice that I am a member of, Design Justice Network. I encourage everybody to look at the ten principles that we have. There's also a great book by Sasha Costanza-Chock, called 'Design justice' that I encourage people to read. Basically, it's about asking three questions when you're designing something. First is, who's included in the design process? Typically, Indigenous and marginalised groups are not included, so how do we represent their voices? Number two is, what are the potential benefits? And then finally, what are the potential harms of this design process? I've added this component of sustainability or thinking about not just harms and benefits to people, but also the planet. That's the ethical layer that traditional design thinking does not typically have. If an end user wants something, yes, you can address it, you can design for it, but is it ethical? That's where the principled innovation comes in, just because we can should we? Then finally, Paulit-ulit na pagsubok is called testing and iteration. That's when you collaborate with the community, you co-design with them, how do you feel about this artefact, for example, from the future, and then engage in dialogue after that. I purposely did not put a scaling phase. In design thinking the instinct is to scale, but not every solution should be scaled. It has to be contextualised. The six values that underpin it are what I described earlier, Kapwa, which is relationality. There's also the non-linearity and synchronicity of time, multiple futurities, bold imagination, hyperlocality, and transdisciplinary collaboration.

Kristina Hoeppner: 14:29

Thank you for sharing your framework, Bea. I find there's lots of touch points and ideas that can be found in other Indigenous cultures, and thinking also very much about where I'm located, in Aotearoa New Zealand, where also relationships, storytelling are very important, also looking to the past in order to go forward and look into the future, and also thinking about not just your current position or the next few years, but what would the solution or the idea that we are thinking about mean in 100 years? So the seven generations that you also talk about in your book as part of that, and then, of course, also design justice. How does it benefit, but also, how does it harm people? And should we be doing it, or should we not be doing it? Could we be doing that somehow differently to also ensure that cultural values are incorporated and not just the coloniser lens put on top and what everybody else is saying who's not from the culture, so really also respecting that, respecting sustainability. Then sometimes a solution might really only be for a particular community and not applicable to everybody, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be done. One of your components of the decolonial design futures framework is reflection. That of course, in portfolio work is one of the big components that we have. Do you have any reflective question or set of questions that helped the participants of your study or that helped you to start reflecting and getting beyond summarising?

Bea Rodriguez-Fransen: 16:11

For me, the only prompt was, "How did you feel?" This is actually in line with Paulo Freire's notion of praxis, reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it. The reflection part is really honing in on feelings. In academia, sometimes feelings are de-emphasised. The logic or rationality is deemed more important sometimes. But I would argue that paying attention to how you feel, and sometimes there are very physiologic changes that happen that indicate how you feel, sometimes we don't pay enough attention when we're listening to others and we're experiencing things. But to me, that is your body telling you something, and that we need to listen to that. There's also that notion of intuition, paying attention to your intuition. In Tagalog, we call it 'Kutob'. It's like a hyper-intuition. Sometimes that's dismissed in academia or in research, even, but in reality, and a lot of even not just social scientists, but people who are in what we call the hard sciences, they actually rely a lot on intuition, but they kind of downplay it. So we've suppressed it, I think, in academia, and I feel like that needs to be resurfaced and not be ashamed that we use it in our research, and we use it when we're navigating the workplace or different knowledges, different knowledge systems. So that's the only prompt, really, that I gave my participants, is,"How did you feel when you were listening to one another?" It naturally leads to light bulb moments that they were surprised to arrive at. One of the participants said, "It's only now that I'm actually realising so and so." That's another good prompt. What surprised you? For example, if you're thinking about your portfolio projects, what was one of the most surprising moments for you?

Kristina Hoeppner: 18:12

Because it does get you out of this 'Oh, I need to describe something, describe something and just talk about that.' It gets you to that emotional level and the level of where you need to think for yourself how it impacted you and not how has it impacted somebody else, or what was the outcome of it, so that you also get into that storytelling that is so, so important for your practice and also for portfolio practice, so that we contextualise what we have learned and make it our own, so that we can go forward and see, well, how do I want that to impact my future?

Bea Rodriguez-Fransen: 18:52

Yes, you got it. Portfolio, to me is not just about compiling artefacts. It's not just about text and media. It's really all about using the artefacts to tell that story that you're talking about, and also these stories, these works that learners are creating, they hold emotion and memory and subjectivity and what I also call ancestral dialogue, meaning that whatever we create now, it's really a dialogue between scholars that are long gone now and even recent interactions with your peers and your professors or your community members or even family members. So being able to tell that story in a way that infuses all these things, it's basically telling a story of who you're becoming. That's where the reflection and then action comes in. It's like, what was the process? What did I go through? What was my journey like? And where am I going with this?

Kristina Hoeppner: 19:53

Yeah, and that's also why, when we started developing the AAEEBL Digital Ethics in ePortfolios Principles, we did want to create one about diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. Kevin and I did the research together. So Kevin Kelly, whom I had mentioned earlier, I was very privileged to work with him, because he has done a lot of work in that area at his university and also his consulting work. During that research phase, when we talked to a diverse group of people, so not just academics or portfolio practitioners, but also colleagues of mine, whom we wanted to include in the interview, we realised that there are specific questions and circumstances when we engaged with Indigenous communities that we shouldn't really subsume under diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. What we did then was advocating to include decolonisation as part of the principle to make these questions that you're raising in your book looking back if we had the decolonial design futures framework available that would have been a wonderful resource to include because I think we still need to call out decolonisation and put the finger on it, in order to ensure that we support Indigenous peoples and their ways of learning, knowledge sharing, knowledge creation, and also being so that we can learn these ways, reflect on them, and make sure that they are part of the community.

Bea Rodriguez-Fransen: 21:22

Yes, yeah. It's really difficult to think beyond our own lifetimes. That's one dimension of decolonisation is really encouraging you to expand your time horizons. I went, you know, 500 years back when I started thinking about the problem of colonial mentality [laughs]. So I appreciate you really taking the initiative to delineate that and to emphasise it.

Kristina Hoeppner: 21:47

What I found fascinating, and that's something that I had not really thought of before when hearing your country's name, the Philippines, that it actually means people are Philip. Therefore, it is already in the name itself, the coloniser being represented right there.

Bea Rodriguez-Fransen: 22:04

There's actually a Filipino scholar who wrote an article about how it might be impossible to really decolonise simply because we haven't changed our country's name. That name itself says a lot about our story as a nation.

Kristina Hoeppner: 22:20

Have there been any suggestions of what the country could be called?

Bea Rodriguez-Fransen: 22:25

Yes, that same author talked about there were some suggestions that were ultimately not implemented. So for example, Rizal, he's our Philippine national hero, that was one of the suggestions. Another one, I believe, is Maharlika. There are several, but that conversation died down. I think the official reason was that name is already part of our history. That's part of who we are, so we shouldn't change it. That's when decolonial imagination comes in, right? That's when you can imagine a different name, a different way forward, just because something has been embedded for centuries doesn't mean that it has to be that way moving forward. The ability to imagine new names, new words, new stories, that's part of decolonising our mindsets.

Kristina Hoeppner: 23:14

Yeah, we've already touched on storytelling a couple of times, and that that is important to Indigenous communities, as is also reflected in your research of the book that you employed storytelling techniques. You've developed the decolonial portals framework that you also introduce in the book to support that work. Portfolios are prime examples, where learners can tell their story in their own works and reflect on their journey up to now, as well as then, if you're employing the decolonial design futures framework also looking into the future. How do you employ these techniques in your own teaching and your own learning? Because in the book, you did talk about the prototypes that people are creating for imagining the future, that these can be digital prototypes, so they can be multimedia, but they could also be more physical prototypes. Have you already had the chance to employ some of those techniques that you've talked about in the book, outside of your research context?

Bea Rodriguez-Fransen: 24:20

Decolonial portals, and you can look at my website, beafuturist.com for a short video explaining the topology. Currently, there are five types, mentor led, history, indigeneity, transdisciplinary, collaboration and art. To me, for example, history, it's an ongoing practice of interrogating the official stories that are currently in textbooks, for example, or now even AI. Many times we, especially if it's an official textbook, it's taken at face value and seen as authority, as the official story. But that decolonial portal is really about encouraging learners and yourself to interrogate and challenge existing assumptions. The intensify and downplay framework by Hugh Rank, created in the 1970s and published by the National Council for Teachers in English, is a great framework that we can all use in K-12, in higher ed, in our daily lives as professionals that can help us interrogate history and any political stories that we see or any ads, social media, all of that. To me, that's a portal that anybody can open, and it's a practice, really. It's a lifelong practice. Just really quickly, intensify, downplay. There are three techniques that are used for each of those categories. The first for the 'Intensify' is repetition. So if you hear a lot of repeated words and phrases, pay attention to those and then question the assumptions. There's also composition, for example, in political cartoons or even ads, how is the message and the images and even the music, how are they composed? What kinds of feelings are they eliciting? What messages like, subliminal messages? The last one is 'Association', meaning that you tend to create a binary category, basically, associating what the story, what that particular message is aligning with as good or as representing love or it's better, basically versus fear, light versus dark, love versus fear, things like that. That is a technique that we all should be able to identify because in reality, almost everything has nuances. That's what I think we lack in today's conversations is to be able to detect and identify these nuances, not only in history, but also in everyday public discourse. That's, I think, a key thing that we all need to pay attention to and to hone as a society, is to be able to go beyond this binary thinking and think more non-binary. In downplay, there are also three techniques. There's'Omission', basically omitting, completely omitting, maybe even lying. There's the jargon or'Confusion', where you use a lot of jargon to confuse people, euphemisms too. And then the third is 'Distraction', where you basically deflect from the issue that you're talking about and redirecting to a peripheral issue so that you don't talk about what you want to talk about. These are things that are still at play, not just in history, but in everyday discourse.

Kristina Hoeppner: 27:53

That history portal is a fascinating one, and you can see the downplay and also the intensifying so many times. When I've read about that, I was reminded very much of my history classes very early on after the wall came down because, of course, in former East Germany, different books were available in the library. And so for one class, I can't even remember why I was researching it. I was in the library and reading old newspapers about a topic, and that was the early 1900s, then reading books from the late 50s or 60s, where the language had changed entirely and was differently flowery, and of course, talking very much about the accomplishments of the Soviet Union in helping the GDR become what it was. And then looking at the books from the 90s, realising, well, the language differs so so much. In the 90s, it felt like the language had been a bit more objective than before when it was very emotional. However, I suspect if I were to read books from the 2000s or 2010s on the same topic, I would have a very different opinion about what was said in the 90s because those books were also written from the perspective more of West Germany, downplaying a lot of things that happened in East Germany. Oftentimes you don't notice that something has been omitted or downplayed if you don't see that other perspective, if you don't know through a different resource, 'Oh, actually this happened,' or 'Hmm, hold on a minute. They are talking about this event like this, and in this book, it is like this. Why are these descriptions so different? Do we need to dig deeper?' Where do we accept that it is storytelling and we need to present those different perspectives in order to let people make their own opinions about it and look to both sides. It was fascinating having that as part of your portal, and realizing, yes, this is a particular lens to look at something.

Bea Rodriguez-Fransen: 30:01

Yeah, you were already doing it, right. So I just named it. I just named it as decolonial portal. But you already tracing it. You went through this journey and understanding your own colonial subjectivity because that's what it is, it is reflecting on your own subjectivity, growing up in that environment, in that culture, and then imagining different perspectives, different stories, imagining what are the potential stories that can liberate us from this one way of thinking. Many people are already doing it.

Kristina Hoeppner: 30:35

At some point, somebody else might come up with yet another portal to extend your framework.

Bea Rodriguez-Fransen: 30:41

Yes, and that's actually what I would love for people to do, is to add to the different types, experiment, and also supplement the curriculum. In art, an example would be to ask your learners to consider, let's say, a colonial artwork and think about that story that's being told. What is the gaze that you see in this painting? And then encourage them to revise or recreate that same painting, but this time from the colonised perspective. Shift the gaze, basically. That's one way of supplementing the curriculum using the art portal, and there are many other ways.

Kristina Hoeppner: 31:21

Bea, earlier, you mentioned that you have been using your decolonial design framework in Africa with a community, and that you do want people to localise the framework, use their own language, maybe also add some different components to it, so that it really becomes their own. Do you then actually have any plans of adding those localised frameworks to your website so that you can eventually have a gallery of those available to show how the framework has been applied across the world?

Bea Rodriguez-Fransen: 31:56

That's the dream. I would love to connect with folks that are going to use this and modify it to their own communities. I'm very open to hearing from them and to publish it on my website. The book is new, so I'm hoping that more people will read it and that more people will use the framework over time. I'd love to hear how other communities are using it and how helpful they find it.

Kristina Hoeppner: 32:24

I think it could be a great exercise then in the classroom to take the framework and for students to localise it to their own contexts, even if it is just the translation into a language that they prefer to communicate in, or maybe even as a class project so that they agree on the elements of what is important for them as a group. I do hope that a lot of people are going to read your book and see that as an invitation to think further, to use it as a basis, knowing that they can extend on it, that they can make their own version of it, that they can localise it, or what you say, hyperlocalise it.

Bea Rodriguez-Fransen: 33:04

The goal is really to basically just spark their imaginations or help them amplify what's already there. Sometimes all we need to do is name it, and actually that's one of the frameworks that has guided the study, is naming, reflecting, acting. First you name, once you've named it, you can reflect on it, and then once you've reflected, then you can act on it. I'm sure that's the process that we go through every day when we're making decisions. In fact, there's a facilitation method called ORID - objective, reflective, interpretive, and decisional, which is, I believe, based in Kolb's learning theory and experiential learning, where every day, this is what we go through, this ORID process, where we recall, we remember, or sense through our five senses, whatever topic it is, whatever we observe, and then reflect, that's the heart. How do we feel about what we just saw or experienced, and then interpret is the insights, and then decision is, what do we do with this insight? It's all connected the ways we all process our experiences. This one just has a bent towards Indigenous and marginalised communities.

Kristina Hoeppner: 34:20

You're right. We are reflecting all day long, just in our heads and with the storytelling that you're doing and encourage educators to do or also students and the reflection that is often done in portfolios is that we are externalising that reflection, kind of pull it out of our brains, talk about it or write it down or use a different medium to make it more visible so that it is then easier to talk about it and see, okay, these are the things that we have reflected on, and these are actions that we are taking, but yes, we are doing that on very trivial things every single day, not just using reflection within an educational setting.

Bea Rodriguez-Fransen: 35:00

This basically just slows down our thought process. In that way, it makes it more clear.

Kristina Hoeppner: 35:07

We could talk much, much longer about your book. So hopefully at some point, we'll also be able to have an AAEEBL webinar on it, where we can in an interactive workshop, look at your ideas and then localising them for the participants, encouraging them to work with a framework and see what they are already doing and where they might like to be encouraged or might like to explore something new. So for the time being, let's finish off with our three quick answer round questions, and I've slightly adjusted them because today we talked more about storytelling in general and your framework, rather than necessarily specifically for portfolio practice. So Bea, which words do you use to describe storytelling that respects Indigenous ways of knowing, learning, and teaching?

Bea Rodriguez-Fransen: 35:59

Three words would be relational, contextual, and intergenerational. Relational meaning that you focus on the connections between self and community and nature and even the universe, the cosmos. Contextual is being rooted in your culture, your community, your history, and being able to situate yourself, locate yourself within the larger story and also the larger cosmos. Finally, intergenerational is not just passing down knowledge or learning from generations before, but also learning from younger generations. I come from positive youth development, and sometimes there's what we call'adultism' or this idea that adults know more, are more wise than young people. But in fact[laughs], we can learn a lot from young people, and often they're not in positions of power, but they have so much insights, especially because they're going to be living in the futures that we're not going to be inhabiting. So it's really important to consider their stories now and not relegate them as, 'Oh, you're not wise enough.'

Kristina Hoeppner: 37:15

Yeah, and that mirrors what in Māori culture is called'tuakana-teina' that you have the mentor and mentee relationship with one person being the more knowledgeable to the other. But that can be reversed in that relationship. It is not one way of transmitting knowledge, but one day you might be the one who teaches something, and the next day, you are the one who is learning from the other person.

Bea Rodriguez-Fransen: 37:40

I love that.

Kristina Hoeppner: 37:41

Next question, what tip do you have for learning designers or instructors who want to use your framework with students?

Bea Rodriguez-Fransen: 37:50

Co-designing with learners instead of being prescriptive about the portals. Encourage the students to explore and create their own portals. Sometimes in the process of exploring, you stumble upon a portal. These portals don't have to exist now. They can be co-created. For the design futures, I would encourage learning designers, instructors for their learners to participate and conduct story circles because that practice is, for me, really liberating, and it helps you build rapport and also recognise the human soul that we don't often talk about in academia or in the classroom and really emphasises relationality, your relationships with one another. We want to be able to connect with one another more through story.

Kristina Hoeppner: 38:45

Thank you. What advice do you have for learners who use one of your frameworks?

Bea Rodriguez-Fransen: 38:51

Use your imagination and then also challenge yourself to look as far back as you can and as far forward as you can, beyond your own lifetime. It's like stretching your muscles way beyond you thought you are capable of. People who practice yoga or people who do strength training, that kind of thinking, where you train yourself and you practice to the point that you reach a place where you can actually move in a way that you've never moved before. Using that as a metaphor to think about time and encouraging yourself to think beyond linear timelines and really expanding your horizons.

Kristina Hoeppner: 39:38

Thank you so much, Bea, for this advice, the other tips that you have given also learning designers and instructors and overall this conversation because I've really enjoyed having you bring your book to life, talking about how we can support Indigenous communities in their learning today, and how we can also respect those cultures, what we can do in order for everybody to feel included in the education, to be heard, and then have a better future for them because they can bring in themselves. Thank you so much, Bea.

Bea Rodriguez-Fransen: 40:12

Maraming salamat. That means many thanks in Tagalog.

Kristina Hoeppner: 40:17

Now over to our listeners. What do you want to try in your own portfolio practice? This was 'Create. Share. Engage.' with Assistant Professor Dr Bea Rodriguez-Fransen. Head to our website, podcast.mahara.org, where you can find resources and the transcript for this episode. This podcast is produced by Catalyst IT. Our next episode will air in two weeks. I'd love it if you shared this episode with a colleague of yours so they can subscribe to our podcast and support us that way. Until then, create, share, and engage.