Transcript: Exploring Xperiential Learning

[00:00:00] Intro: The Inside Learning Podcast is brought to you by the Lernovate Center. Lernovate’s research explores the power of learning to unlock human potential. Find out more about Lernovate’s research on the science of learning and the future of work at LernovateCenter. org.

[00:00:15] Aidan: For a long time, we’ve known that education has fallen short in preparing people for the jobs of today and tomorrow. With college tuition and loans becoming more unattainable for families, students are turning to alternative programs to launch their careers.

[00:00:32] Aidan: That means demand for high quality, affordable project based virtual apprenticeships is at an all time high. In the time that Story Experiential has been available, we’ve seen doors open for participants who have completed our course and developed a portfolio piece. And while the program has obvious advantages for students, companies will be the ultimate beneficiaries of exceptional, well [00:01:00] prepared talent.

[00:01:01] Aidan: They are the wise words of today’s guest she is an artist, an educator, a passionate leader about inspiring and developing generations of diverse problem solvers, artists, innovators and storytellers through experiential learning. After twenty two years at Pixar as a leader creative director and founder of exhibitions and educational programs like Pixar university she co founded x in a box and has recently launched story experiential. it is a great pleasure to welcome to inside learning Elyse Klaidman welcome to the show. It 

[00:01:39] Elyse Klaidman: is an honor and a pleasure to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

[00:01:43] Aidan: It’s so good to have you. I’ve been so looking forward to having you on the show. I’ve been doing loads of research, listen to loads of podcasts. You’ve been on reading articles, to understand your background. And one of the things that I taught was so interesting about your background was the diversity of [00:02:00] skills, different things you’ve done and how they’ve all led to this diversity of thought that you have.

[00:02:06] Aidan: And, I’m planting that seed about diversity of thought now because it’s something that you’re unleashing on other people then in work that you did today, and in lots of the roles you’ve done along the way including Pixar university but let’s give a context of your background, your origin story essentially and how that has led to all the skills that you now provide for others today.

[00:02:30] Elyse Klaidman: Thank you. That’s a great place to start. And for me, I think it always starts with my family. I feel really lucky to have had two parents who not only loved each other, but , loved us and in an unconditional way and supported Learning and thinking and trying and failing, making mistakes and discovering , and really , I was able [00:03:00] to learn from the people who were a part of our lives in their lives, artists and writers and politicians and thinkers and innovators , and And people who are willing to take a risk and try different things.

[00:03:13] Elyse Klaidman: And so the exposure that I had and the support that I had really allowed me to explore and not to be afraid of delving into the world and trying things. And so my mother is a painter. My father’s a writer. I grew up on the studio floor and I knew pretty young that I wanted to be an artist, that I was drawn , to, to painting and drawing and creating.

[00:03:39] Elyse Klaidman: And so I started doing that quite young. I also realized pretty soon that it’s pretty difficult to make a living and pay your rent as an artist. And another thing I loved and started doing quite young was teaching. I’ve always thought about Teaching from the earliest time as , a give and take a back and forth that [00:04:00] the teacher is learning as much as the students and vice versa.

[00:04:04] Elyse Klaidman: And the first time that I ever taught, I was 11 years old and my best friend and I wanted to go on a trip to visit her grandparents. And our parents said we could go, but we had to pay for the airline ticket. And so we decided that we were going to offer summer course in, in art for younger students. Luckily our parents had many friends with little kids.

[00:04:28] Elyse Klaidman: And so we offered our art classes and succeeded and went on the trip. And pretty much from then on, I taught and loved teaching. I, I was a teaching assistant all through college. And right out of college, I had the amazing great fortune of working at a school called the Lab School of Washington, which was started by Sally Smith who was one of the, One of the great education innovators and Sally’s school, the lab [00:05:00] school was really A school that focused on project based learning, experiential learning, multidisciplinary learning.

[00:05:10] Elyse Klaidman: She started it because she had a son with severe learning disabilities and was told by many that he would never learn and he couldn’t go to regular schools. And she didn’t believe that. And she created this school that was about again, experiencing. So I’ll describe it by talking about the first class.

[00:05:29] Elyse Klaidman: that I taught there, which was called the Museum Club and the Museum Club was essentially a history course. And I had a space, a classroom, which was our museum and our job as a small group of students and myself were to research different periods of history and create a museum exhibition in the classroom.

[00:05:51] Elyse Klaidman: So we started with prehistoric times and went through the Renaissance and for each period of time. We delved into [00:06:00] it and , we made artifacts and we thought about how to share those. It was brilliant, right? It used visual thinking and auditory and problem solving and collaboration and critical thinking and communication.

[00:06:14] Elyse Klaidman: It involved everything that we know is critical and most importantly, the students were passionate about it. They cared not because they were learning history, but because they were making something cool that they were going to teach other people. So that was one of, probably the most influential experiences working at that school.

[00:06:38] Elyse Klaidman: I then went on to work in a gallery for many years. It’s funny to, to think back at all the different things. I, Had the great fortune of working with another mentor a woman named Betty Edwards, who wrote the book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. And Betty knew me as an artist and [00:07:00] being an artist and a teacher, asked me if I would be interested in working with her small team teaching this extraordinary approach to drawing.

[00:07:09] Elyse Klaidman: And I think this is important because so many people think of drawing and the arts is something they can’t do. Right? You have to have talent to do it. That sort of elusive thing, talent. What is that? And Betty, what she did was she came up with a way to take brain research and apply it to learning the skills of drafting of drawing , and really what that, is the skills of seeing.

[00:07:39] Elyse Klaidman: And so in this extraordinary step by step process, she brings people through, and we as teachers, through a process of seeing the world and then being able to translate the three dimension into two dimension. And I’ve never, I’ve taught Thousands and thousands of students and never seen someone who [00:08:00] didn’t, who wasn’t able to learn to draw. 

[00:08:03] Elyse Klaidman: And then that actually led me ultimately to Pixar. So I was teaching drawing on the right side of the brain out of my own studio. And I had a student. And I remember her saying, she was introducing herself and I remember her saying, I’m an artist and I actually work at a company and I have health insurance.

[00:08:27] Elyse Klaidman: And , in the United States, being an artist and having health insurance is a big deal. And she said it was called Pixar. At that point, Toy Story hadn’t come out yet, so I didn’t know what Pixar was. I had a child, but he was nine months old, so we weren’t watching movies together. So, I didn’t know until about a year later when I got a call from , that student who said, look, I’ve just mentioned you to this geeky engineer guy and recommended you as a drawing teacher.

[00:08:58] Elyse Klaidman: And it was perfect timing. [00:09:00] We had just thought about buying a house and neither my husband nor I had like regular jobs. We were both freelancing. And so this was a great thing to have come. And so that geeky engineer guy was Ed Catmull, who was, and founder and president of Pixar and later Disney as well.

[00:09:25] Elyse Klaidman: And so yeah, I was introduced to Ed and we made a date and I came to Pixar. I really knew very little about Pixar. In fact, I, even though Toy Story was out, I hadn’t seen it yet. And. Ed was the most charming, brilliant person who spent an hour taking this artist person around Pixar and talking about it and asking questions and being curious and really just opening up [00:10:00] his whole philosophy.

[00:10:01] Elyse Klaidman: About what was being done at Pixar. And that was the beginning of an extraordinary, magical 22 years. 

[00:10:10] Aidan: I love the story and I’m so glad you told it I think it gives so much context what would i loved about your story is that most people don’t see how all these things connect and can form into something later on, because it’s very hard to unravel it backwards but when you hear your story and you hear about the teaching you know teaching in order to get the plane ticket trying to figure out a way the freedom to failure all these things manifest in good cultures of organizations like Pixar later on also when i thought about even your museum class that the creativity to create a template of ok what would i do here to create a template of a museum in a box. [00:11:00] Will pay off then later on in your story and did as well get to in a moment that’s why i really wanted to share that cause when you hear it.

[00:11:07] Aidan: Can you hear where we’re going now it will make sense to people because these ideas don’t just come outta your head head on in the moment there a collection of all the things you’ve done to get you to that moment in time if you can unlock for somebody like your family did for you so where i’m going with that is, I loved how you were a teacher this was inside you. How you could spot patterns how you could impart education or learning to other people and then you landed in Pixar, i was like this perfect environment to do that so i’d love you to share the next part of the story you’re in Pixar.

[00:11:45] Aidan: You’re teaching your enabling other people on this is why i planted the seed of the diversity of your skill set. What are the stories great stories are here by Pixar and i’d love to hear from you was the famous [00:12:00] building design in order to bring people together in the foyer so, you would literally create these water cooler moments where ideas would be shared this kind of crucible of creativity , and one of the things i thought was so interesting about what you were trying to do with Pixar university was, get people outside the silos so they cross pollinate ideas with each other and that was one of the key things that you were trying to release in people.

[00:12:29] Elyse Klaidman: A number of people were responsible for Pixar University. It was really, The brainchild of Ed Catmull with deep support from John Lasseter and Steve Jobs. This extraordinary trio of creative geniuses , there’s occasional times in the world where a kind of chemistry happens that’s very special. 

[00:12:53] Elyse Klaidman: So the, the, I was hired to teach drawing by Ed to begin with. And that was, [00:13:00] at that point, what existed for Pixar University was more, in some ways, more of a traditional training program. It was a 10 week boot camp, because back in the day, the computer science and what was being done at Pixar was, It’s completely brand new and innovative.

[00:13:18] Elyse Klaidman: So you couldn’t hire people from schools to just come in and start the job. So that 10 week boot camp was a training, really a technical training. And that was the earliest manifestation of Pixar University. I was already teaching there and teaching drawing when Randy Nelson was hired to be the first dean of Pixar University.

[00:13:43] Elyse Klaidman: And Randy and I worked really closely together for many years. Randy had been at Apple really talented, so many different kinds of talents, and we had a wonderful time in the early days working together. [00:14:00] I was the next director of Pixar University. And I think Randy and I both together and separately added to what it became. 

[00:14:12] Elyse Klaidman: So I, I’ll talk a little bit about what Pixar University became. It became this really extraordinary part of the culture, which was both a learning organization and a cultural organization. So to begin with, we had technical training classes. That continued, right? Because Pixar has proprietary software, it uses off the shelf software, but it always changes it.

[00:14:41] Elyse Klaidman: No matter what, if you are a technical artist at Pixar, you are always adding to your skill set and learning. Then we started what we called the Art and Film Program. And that was really because Pixar thinks of everybody at the studio as a human being. as a [00:15:00] filmmaker and a storyteller. And so whether you’re in HR or legal or in the learning organization or in marketing, everybody’s input is, is valuable.

[00:15:11] Elyse Klaidman: And so if we could teach the skills that are critical to storytelling, visual storytelling to anyone and everyone and create an atmosphere and a culture where a leader from the executive team, a lawyer a technical artist, a story artist, someone from marketing and PR are all in a room together creating, thinking, solving problems.

[00:15:43] Elyse Klaidman: We are benefiting the culture, right? We are creating a place where you are learning from each other and each other’s different backgrounds and perspectives, right? Which is that’s ideal for the world, isn’t it? [00:16:00] So after the art and film program and in the art and film program, we had drawing and painting.

[00:16:06] Elyse Klaidman: screenwriting. The film program actually started because at some, at one point, John Lasseter said I wish we could put everybody through a live action filmmaking bootcamp because the foundations of animation and what we’re doing here are the same as live action. And so at that point, I don’t remember how many people were at the studio, probably five, six hundred people.

[00:16:27] Elyse Klaidman: And it was, it was too hard to put everybody through a bootcamp. 10 week boot camp. But that’s when I suggested we have a filmmaking program and that we have screenwriting classes and cinematography classes and directing classes and production classes and then actually add to it a live action show.

[00:16:47] Elyse Klaidman: short filmmaking program. So we did all of that and made that available to everyone in the studio. I would say a next big and important part of Pixar University was adding [00:17:00] a leadership development. And that came also from a moment where Ed, Ed came to me and said, look, we, we really need to start thinking about how we can support.

[00:17:12] Elyse Klaidman: the growth of leaders in the next generation of leaders. And I definitely knew that wasn’t my area of expertise and was fortunate to hire Jamie Wolfe, who ran leadership development and eventually, after I left, ran Pixar University. And so that I would say technical Art and film and leadership are the foundations of Pixar University.

[00:17:37] Elyse Klaidman: For a while, we also had the wellness and the health and recreation that eventually moved to HR. But those, those are kind of the key, the key areas.

[00:17:49] Aidan: One of the things we talked about before we came on air was the, what’s known as the Peter principle. The more tenure you have inside an organization, the [00:18:00] organization. And I’m doing air quotes here, rewards you by giving you management role. You get so far removed from the thing that you’re so passionate about and you start to surround yourself with tasks that you’re not skilled at which is okay if you’re gonna get training and that’s why i thought about the leadership development so many companies won’t invest in.

[00:18:23] Aidan: One of my jobs is executive coaching they want to invest in their own people and those people then reach out to the world and have to pay for themselves i think that is so short sighted, where organization so i was delighted to hear how it came from the top it came from you guys can you can’t mad about investing in people from a leadership perspective because people don’t know what they don’t know and, They can fail and they can feel like they’re failing and they can actually have an awful impact terrible impact on people around them and sometimes not even know that you’re doing it you know so it’s that lack [00:19:00] of education which is why, i thought that was such a wise move by maybe you have some thoughts on that

[00:19:07] Elyse Klaidman: Yeah, I could, I could talk about that for, for weeks. It’s such an interesting, such an important and such a complex topic. And it actually ties really well to, to the education system and, and, and to more of what we’re, what I’m focused on today. So while it did come from the top, I will say there, there was always a tension between how.

[00:19:32] Elyse Klaidman: Much time and energy to spend on training people versus just having them do the work, right? And figure it out on their own, right? Because it’s very hard to see the, and I’m doing air quotes now, the ROI, the return on investment from that kind of investment in people and trust in people. I know that the return on [00:20:00] investment is massive, right?

[00:20:01] Elyse Klaidman: We see it when it’s happening, but it’s very difficult to measure and it takes time and companies and executives and leaders are being held accountable often by boards or by parent company. And they have to be able to, they have to be able to answer to that. So I don’t. I, I wish that there was a way that we could all be more comfortable with the intangible, right?

[00:20:31] Elyse Klaidman: The, the measuring the unknown, right? And, and I’m going to segue to, to education today there because In some ways, what we’re trying to do with our company, with X and Box and with our experiential platform is really transform and and make a shift in education and help educators bring experiential learning and make that the norm [00:21:00] into their classrooms.

[00:21:01] Elyse Klaidman: But that also. Is much harder to measure, right? So we have this ridiculous abundance of testing in our schools and testing of rote knowledge, which by the way, now with with the innovations of AI that that’s going to be meaningless, right? So that kind of testing is what is relied on for all kinds of data that kind of testing fails.

[00:21:28] Elyse Klaidman: The majority of our students. And when you think about experiential learning, right, learning by doing, which is much, which is multidisciplinary, that is, how do you test that exactly? And when do you test that? There are ways of assessing it, but it’s not the way we’ve done it there thus far. So this, I’m going back to this idea of the intangible, right, or the, the unknown and, and how you can have faith [00:22:00] in and trust.

[00:22:02] Elyse Klaidman: And you do have to know that it’s working, right? You can’t just be doing random things and not supporting deep learning. But you have to be willing to think outside of the box about how you do that.

[00:22:18] Aidan: perfect segway for the box and this is where it all comes together nicely about your background as an educator, about being able to spot patterns this is the idea of X in a box. So let’s explain the segue that you had from pixar university over to x in a box because there is still a very much a thread between both of those and what x in a box does and the experiential work then that comes out of that.

[00:22:47] Elyse Klaidman: . When I was running Pixar University, I would get calls from educators pretty much at every level, from preschool through post grad, and they were curious about how they could bring [00:23:00] What happens at Pixar to their students?

[00:23:04] Elyse Klaidman: And so, while many people at Pixar love to go into classrooms and give talks and support whatever kinds of learning was happening, that doesn’t scale, and it was very difficult to bring it anywhere outside of kind of the region where Pixar is. And so, I started thinking about what can I do? How could I help all of these educators?

[00:23:30] Elyse Klaidman: And I, one day, I think I just jokingly said, I wish I could just put Pixar in a box and mail it out. Right. And so that was the beginnings of what became Pixar in a box, which was a collaboration with Khan Academy and a creation of content that we think of as a window into Pixar. A way to, at scale, share information that would be inspiring that would [00:24:00] hopefully start to bring in the next generations and generations of innovators and artists and storytellers that could be who Pixar was going to be hiring over the years, right?

[00:24:14] Elyse Klaidman: It was investing in the future of talent by opening up the a window into what happens, right? Most companies are these walled off gardens that nobody gets to go inside. And people know very little. And imagine you’re growing up in a rural part of the United States or a rural part of Ireland, and you’re not, you don’t get to see and, and learn from.

[00:24:43] Elyse Klaidman: The creators of a studio in either one of those places, right in the city. So how do you, how do you spread that and find the talent and, and, and nurture the talent all over, right? So most companies are also talking about diversity and how critical and important it is [00:25:00] for them as businesses to have a wide range of talents and backgrounds coming together.

[00:25:07] Elyse Klaidman: So how do you do that? Right? So Khan Academy. was a great first step for us to do that. And we created Pixona Box, which was and continues to be massively successful. Then we were actually asked by Bob Iger the CEO of the Walt Disney company to create another one focused on, on Imagineering which is the Imagineers at Disney are really an extraordinary group.

[00:25:33] Elyse Klaidman: So that was a really fun thing to get to do. So Pixar in a box, Imagineering in a box. And there was a long period at Pixar where we really were supported in doing this work. But we would often come up against budget issues naturally. And, and leaders at Pixar and Disney saying, look we love what you’re doing, but we’re an entertainment company.

[00:25:58] Elyse Klaidman: We’re not an education company. So we have to [00:26:00] put that first. So that was kind of the, the. The impetus for, you know what? Let’s become an education company. So a lot of the work that I was doing at Pixar was with Tony DeRose brilliant computer scientist who ran the research department at Pixar for 23 years.

[00:26:21] Elyse Klaidman: And also a passionate educator. Tony had come from being a professor and, And he gave a talk for many years called Math in the Movies, which is a fantastic talk showing how that stuff you learn in math class, which sometimes seems irrelevant, is actually an incredible creative tool. And Artists at Pixar make Pixar characters and Pixar films with math.

[00:26:51] Elyse Klaidman: Right? So he was doing that. We came together on a couple of projects, Pixar in a Box and also one of the exhibitions, one of the large traveling [00:27:00] exhibitions called thee science behind Pixar, which is still traveling, I believe, internationally and nationally. So we worked on those projects together.

[00:27:08] Elyse Klaidman: , and while we were working on Pixar in a Box with Khan Academy, we met Britt Cruz and Britt and Tony are my co founders. And the three of us have been working together for about 10 or 12 years with a shared passion for hands on, experiential, relevant learning. And so that led to The Leap. And we started our company, X in a Box, and in March of 2020, along with the pandemic.

[00:27:42] Elyse Klaidman: And you’re right, X in a box is what is X in a box? It was based on Pixar in a box and Imagineering in a box. , and Adobe in a box, as you point out, our original thinking was that we were going to work with companies, [00:28:00] And help them put what they do into a learning box to share globally, so that they could be investing in the talent for their companies for the future.

[00:28:13] Elyse Klaidman: , and we did that with a couple of companies, our earliest, Jobs were working with Adobe, Epic Games. We did some wonderful work with Epic Games around Unreal Engine. And while that was really satisfying , and we created together in collaboration with those companies, some wonderful content that’s out in the world.

[00:28:32] Elyse Klaidman: It wasn’t going as deep as we want it to go. And so that led to building our experiential platform. 

[00:28:41] Aidan: , do you know, the funny thing is , when people look at a company like Pixar, I was thinking about how you came together, which mentioned driven from the top ed about the education and Steve jobs as well, and John Lasseter and their desire [00:29:00] for education, then move on to the future and the organization is more reliable has recurring revenue is answerable to board, et cetera. And this pattern always happens inside organizations where , the very things that has got you successful, including the education of people comes under pressure because it’s seen as a loss leader, even though, and this is the problem of the ROI problem of this work, it’s seen as a cost center.

[00:29:33] Aidan: And that is just something that always confounds me i never understand how it’s like a sports team not having an academy not growing future talent. Not enabling you people not finding that people from diverse areas otherwise you’re on the end of hiring the same type of people over and over and over with the same background and you’re not getting this beautiful coming together of all these different mindsets that’s just something i don’t know if there’s a [00:30:00] solution for that but it’s just something that, even a company as successful as Pixar you run into that problem and then you have to spin out as your own entity in order to, To go deeper and the thing i see in that and why i wanted to share your story was that your authenticity is why you were willing to go deeper some people would have been happy with, we have a nice set of products here let’s go and sell the heck out of those and you’re like it’s not deep enough it’s not.

[00:30:30] Aidan: Real in innovation we call it sheep dip innovation it’s sheeo dip we want to go deep we want to actually have transformative experiences for people i just wanted to comment on that cause i thought that was so interesting

[00:30:42] Elyse Klaidman: so I’m really glad you’re raising that. I think another thing that fuels our passion is equity and equity in education and providing opportunity opportunities [00:31:00] for anyone really to develop explore their own potential and see where that potential has relevance in the world, relevance for them , and for the world.

[00:31:12] Elyse Klaidman: And so for us one of the things that we would talk about at Pixar was we are putting a lot of, or Pixar, And most companies, we’re putting a lot of effort into recruiting at the college level, which makes sense, right?, these are your potential hirees and they’re going to be there sooner, right?

[00:31:37] Elyse Klaidman: , and I would often argue, , we really need to be starting with preschool. And I know it’s going to take a long time until they get to, to be hired, but if we truly want equity, And we truly want to be hiring from a deep pool of diverse students. We have to remember that college and university is [00:32:00] already been, the pool has been narrowed because many young people don’t get there, right?

[00:32:07] Elyse Klaidman: They don’t have the resources. They don’t live somewhere where they can. And they don’t, if they don’t necessarily know what they want to go into because they haven’t been exposed really broadly. I think about, I talked to Tony about this a lot about math. I was really good at math and I was good at art, right?

[00:32:28] Elyse Klaidman: But I had no idea you could be creative. With math, because I wasn’t exposed to that. I was taught algebra and I did well on my tests, but did I know that you could create characters , and beautiful scenery with math? Had I known that, right? , and I was fortunate and privileged and exposed to many things.

[00:32:48] Elyse Klaidman: So when we think about the vast numbers of young people all over our world in remote areas who have more exposure these days because of phones and [00:33:00] intranet and content online, but. but not nearly the kind of exposure that a more privileged student has. So, that, I’m telling all of that, I’m saying all of that to say that equity really fuels my passion , and really helped to make that jump.

[00:33:21] Elyse Klaidman: While I could understand why a company would want to invest in recruiting just from college, it’s not enough. It’s really not enough. 

[00:33:30] Aidan: I often think about a company like Tesla. So Tesla opening up their chargers for everybody, for competitors, et cetera. And the whole idea being that a rising tide helps all ships that, and I think about , your work as that, . Yeah sometimes you might end up creating a competitor or helping a competitor but you’re gonna get better because if your culture is right and you’re a magnetic force and you’re putting out great work they’re gonna wanna work for you i [00:34:00] thought we should share how people can get involved how they can find you what they can do apart from a student educators as well can engage you and can use your work so maybe some of the best examples that you can see.

[00:34:16] Aidan: That are achievable for people. We’ve mentioned names like Disney and Pixar and Adobe. You don’t have to be them. You can get involved and use this as part of your own learning inside of an organization. I’ve sent it to consultants, I’ve to authors to go look, check out the storytelling and the magineering work is always valuable.

[00:34:37] Aidan: So those different. Perspectives any little knowledge of extra learning you can get makes you stronger makes you better at your job

[00:34:46] Elyse Klaidman: Yeah. Well, so lemme pick up the story where, where I left off, which is our experiential platform. So when we, when we decided to spend less of our time as kind of education consultants and producers for other [00:35:00] companies, we self funded and spent a year and a half building what we call the experiential platform.

[00:35:09] Elyse Klaidman: And the goal of this platform was to be able to provide programming that is all hands on, relevant, Experiential learning in different industry sectors and allow educators to bring experiential learning into their classrooms in a way that’s not maybe as time consuming as when you have to invent it all yourself and allow students wherever they are really to scale this experiential learning to bring it everywhere.

[00:35:47] Elyse Klaidman: So we thought, well, what should our first. experiential program B. And we decided on storytelling for a number of reasons. One, we have a background in storytelling and [00:36:00] wonderful contacts in that world. But almost more importantly, for these two reasons, storytelling is the foundation of our humanity. It is what makes us empathetic.

[00:36:14] Elyse Klaidman: It is what makes us learn. It is what makes us passionate. You can tell somebody, what you did in one way, or you can tell somebody what you did with stories. and what is going to make you light up and listen. It’s what stories, right? It’s what connects us. So that’s one really critical piece of storytelling.

[00:36:38] Elyse Klaidman: The other really critical piece is that storytelling is a part of every job. It is a critical skill set. And we haven’t we haven’t talked about AI yet and how AI is changing the world and profoundly. Changing education. And, and it’s actually one of the things that I hope is going to be an impetus for [00:37:00] pushing education in the direction it needs to go, because so much of our education, as we talked about a little bit before, it relies on a teacher in the front of the room, telling you a bunch of stuff that you have to remember and then spit out later for a test.

[00:37:15] Elyse Klaidman: Well, that knowledge It’s at our fingertips, right? It’s so easy to have a paper written, to get all the answers for a test, all of that basic information. But what AI can’t do and doesn’t do, at least yet, is bring it all together, right? Creatively. And I think the word creativity is so important because creativity isn’t just art and dancing and music.

[00:37:44] Elyse Klaidman: Creativity is solving problems. Creativity is taking knowledge and information and putting it together and coming up with new things and different things and working together in partnership, right? [00:38:00] So creativity and collaborating and being a critical thinker and solving problems, all of that is how education needs to be, right?

[00:38:10] Elyse Klaidman: And our teachers know that, but they work within a system that pushes them to. Teach to the test sometimes, right, or they have classrooms where there are too many students. Their classrooms are huge. Some students are coming in, not even having had breakfast because they live in impoverished situations.

[00:38:32] Elyse Klaidman: They’re dealing with so much. Are we also going to ask them to create really exciting, creative project based learning? Let’s give them some resources, right? So that’s experiential platform is about that. Plus exposure to career options, to skills that are critical in the world that we are building now.

[00:38:55] Elyse Klaidman: Not yesterday’s world, right? But the world of today and tomorrow. And [00:39:00] those skill sets are the ones we’ve just talked about, right? And so how do you expose young people, young adults to what they could be doing? Well, they need to be doing it. And so the experiential platform is all about, yes, there are lessons taught by industry experts.

[00:39:18] Elyse Klaidman: But there are, there’s a sequence of steps of things you must do to create an end product. And that end product is an authentic industry prototype. It is something that you could get an internship with, a job with. But more importantly, you’ve learned to do the job the way professionals do it. And so by doing that, you’re exposed to different industries and you have a portfolio piece.

[00:39:46] Elyse Klaidman: But then what’s really critical and what really holds the experiential platform together is the community so You are getting feedback in this community at every step of your creation [00:40:00] process so at every step a Participant uploads their work into a gallery. You’re asked to give feedback on three random submissions of other participants And then the entire gallery of work being done by current participants in the program at the same step of creation you’re at opens to you.

[00:40:22] Elyse Klaidman: So you can explore someone from Ghana, someone from Dublin, somebody from California, someone from New York or Detroit. You can see their work and the way they’re approaching the problem solving and the storytelling. And so that community at the heart is what allows the mentorship to scale, right? Because if you have a mentor, a famous person, They can’t look at hundreds of thousands and millions of people’s work, but the community, which is rich and full of talent and diverse perspectives, can do that.

[00:40:59] Elyse Klaidman: [00:41:00] So that’s the magic at the heart of our experiential platform. So the question you asked to begin with was how can people get involved? Story experiential, StoryExperiential. com. That is our program that’s been running for a couple of years now. We are in the midst of building an entrepreneurship, a startup experiential, which we hope will be out in 2025.

[00:41:24] Elyse Klaidman: We have plans for a video game industry experiential, and then a list of about 20 other industries around robotics, around the sciences, around all Journalism, media, all kinds of areas. The big picture vision is that there will be 20, 30 experientials. And starting at a young age, students can explore their potential, become aware, create, have a portfolio full of showing what they can do.

[00:41:55] Elyse Klaidman: Because I think, I think we all know the portfolio is today’s resume. The resume [00:42:00] is everything. a piece of paper, a portfolio is your work. So that’s, that’s where we are today. We’ve reached, I think, around over 10, 000 participants all over the globe. And , our biggest job right now is to, to get the word out and to make sure that Story Experiential and the ones we, we’re working with.

[00:42:18] Elyse Klaidman: continue to build, reach those far corners of the globe.

[00:42:23] Aidan: well you absolutely deserve getting this out there and success because it’s so important and i was so delighted to be part of hopefully sharing it to a different audience for you as well i think it’s vital and. It answers so many of the challenges of learning. So that whole idea of inhale the information long enough to get to an exam and get it out versus build it, go through the struggle.

[00:42:48] Aidan: Because when you go through that struggle that is so important to the learning cuz it sticks it sticks when we go through that struggle i love the way you have done this and thank you for taking the time it’s a longer episode than [00:43:00] we normally done but i think bringing people on the journey of how it all came together also brings them on the struggle and therefore it actually makes way more sense so absolute pleasure talking to you. i’ll share the links to where to find you where to get involved, i’ll share links to some of the courses the resources that you provide as well for x in a box but it’s been an absolute pleasure talking to you, founder of x in a box and story experiential Elyse Klaidman thank you for joining us on inside learning.

[00:43:31] Elyse Klaidman: It’s been completely my pleasure. Thank you for asking such wonderful questions and thank you for the work you’re doing, exposing the world to innovators in education and every other area, because the more we learn, , the more is possible.

[00:43:48] Outro: Thanks for joining us on Inside Learning. Inside Learning is brought to you by the Learnovate Centre in Trinity College, Dublin. Learnovate is funded by Enterprise Ireland and IDA Ireland. Visit learnovatecentre. [00:44:00] org to find out more about our research on the science of learning and the future of work.

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