EduCon 2027

What if the problem isn’t that students no longer want to play the game of school, but that they’ve begun to recognize that the game itself is built around a fallacy: the fallacy of arrival?

School has traditionally promised students that if they learn the right things, earn the right grades, and accumulate the right credentials, they will eventually arrive at some fixed destination: success, college, a career, adulthood, readiness. But in a chaotic and constantly changing world, there may be no such destination. The future will demand not just what students know, but their capacity to adapt, imagine, create, navigate uncertainty, and shape what comes next.

This workshop explores what it might mean to reimagine school as a site of becoming rather than a pathway to arrival. Together, we will explore three interconnected ideas: becoming, micro-agency, and thinking like an artist.

Becoming shifts our focus from what students have achieved to who they are becoming and what possibilities they are learning to imagine. Micro-agency asks how small, meaningful experiences of choice, action, experimentation, and influence can help students see themselves as people who can shape their learning and their world. Thinking like an artist offers a mindset for uncertainty: noticing closely, asking questions, experimenting, making, revising, and embracing ambiguity.

The goal is not to make school more engaging within the existing game, but to ask a more fundamental question: What if we redesigned the game around becoming?