Tri Cosain Introduction

Tri Cosain: three pathways for learning and growth Scott Downs and Gerald Doyle As our education systems evolve to meet our future, we believe they must serve three interdependent pathways for growth ● Personal inspiration - personal growth and development: discovering what calls us forward at our best, our sense of who we are and what we want, and how we bring that inspiration to life - in community. ● Learning journeys - acquiring new knowledge, new skills, new insights, new practices, new experiences - and often “unlearning” what we thought we knew before. ● Career - understanding and manifesting what we offer to the world, in energetic and economic abundance - for the benefit of all. Gerald has Irish ancestry, so we speak of this weave of three elements with a name taken from Irish Gaelic - Tri Cosain, three pathways. We suggest that emergent institutions of education, especially including those disruptive models we have called the #noniversity, intentionally invest in an organic weave of all three paths - as a way of supporting and inviting all members of society to live abundant, creative lives. Why? Inspiration: too often, we unwittingly encourage ourselves and others to merely copy patterns established or “expected” of us. We can all - and education has a special role to play in this - help one another to discover our own uniqueness, our own creativity, our own special gifts. Education that expects and intends to support students and seekers to discover their own inspiration will ground them forever on a solid footing for growth, learning, creativity and abundance. “Education” that fails these tests sets its students up for being crushed or drowned when the inevitable storms of life arise. They may “succeed” by finding themselves at the top of a ladder that is leaning against the wrong wall.

Learning: Of course, learning is the traditional core of the educational mission. But learning what, how, and with whom? Learning that is not woven together with the other two strands risks being mechanical and wasteful. We just “teach” what we have always taught, in the ways we have always taught it. We encourage students to default to traditional paths with little real sense of where they might lead or curiosity about the possibilities. This approach to learning has left us today with huge, aggrieved populations who feel abandoned and betrayed by the trends in our economy and society. Their education has failed them. This crisis will get worse in the wake of Covid-19. We need to build on what we have learned, and can learn, about teaching and learning: how to make those endeavors “wildly human and humane”, vibrant, evolving, emergent - while collaboratively leveraging our best human skills and talents with great technology. We need education for citizenship, in the best sense of the word, fully embracing, celebrating and elaborating what we have historically called the liberal arts. Career: Our world is changing fast: it faces huge opportunities and huge challenges. We need people who will “make good art” today. People who will be builders and creators, who will generate massive value and invite and facilitate literally billions of their sisters and brothers to do the same. All of this for the benefit of society, their communities, their families, their loved ones and themselves. Education needs to be intimately engaged with how this art, this beautiful value, is created. It cannot exist only in an ivory tower of self-reflection, though of course that reflectiveness and dedication to “pure” research and learning for its own sake are also essential. Education needs to be about how to capture inspiration and bring it to life in the world, sharing very concrete knowledge of the opportunities the world creates and how to engage with those opportunities. Those opportunities might be rewarded financially or energetically, but engagement with those rewards and how to manifest them is essential. In the 21st century, we cannot conceive of an educational institution that does not integrally include an internal or a collaborative capacity to help its students bring forward great, abundant, generative careers. We are working actively in our networks to bring this vision about. We know we have many allies and fellow travellers on this journey, and we look forward to celebrating your triumphs and co-creating the future together. We’ll expand on our own ideas and share our travels and our learnings. We warmly invite you to

share yours, with us and with the world. We hope we’ve given some insight into our \"Why\" - we welcome partners to further develop the \"How\" and the \"What.\" Scott Downs is an Agile Coach with Expleo Group.. His recent work has included Agilist support for major development programmes at global asset management firms, international energy companies and global automotive manufacturers, as well as hosting development journeys for Agile leaders. An educator grounded in Chicago with extensive international experience, Gerald Doyle co-creates strategic approaches to student-centered learning, enrollment, and life/career success. His work embraces equity, inclusion, diversity and well-being as foundations for personal leadership. He advises several edtech companies and serves on the faculty of Wolcott College Preparatory High School. Scott and Gerald are co-authors of 9 Questions for Leadership in Life and Work. This essay was originally published on LinkedIn in May 2020.