Fake podcasts and false narratives

There is something peculiarly fitting about a politician using a fake podcast to promote a false narrative.

The format is becoming strangely familiar. A politician sits in front of a microphone in a setting designed to look informal and conversational. Soft lighting and a quiet soundtrack sets the tone. There is no visible interviewer, no sustained questioning and no expectation that claims will be tested. A short clip is extracted, captioned and released into the social media ecosystem, carrying the visual authority of a podcast without any of the inconvenience of an actual conversation.

In her latest reel, Education Minister Erica Stanford describes New Zealand education as having followed a “failed experiment”. Into this category she places student-centred learning, project-based learning, open-plan learning environments and, inevitably, beanbags. According to the story presented, these ideas sounded attractive, were introduced across the system and were followed by a steep decline in educational achievement.

But let’s be clear. Student-centred learning is an educational orientation. Project-based learning is a pedagogical approach. Open-plan or flexible learning environments are architectural designs. Beanbags are furniture.

Bundling them together as a single national experiment is not analysis, it is political storytelling. It creates a collection of recognisable villains, connects them to declining achievement and invites the audience to assume causation.

A room is not a pedagogy. A beanbag is not a theory of learning. A project is not the absence of teaching. Putting students at the centre of learning is not the same thing as putting teachers at the margins.

The Minister’s argument depends on collapsing all these distinctions.

There are some legitimate criticisms to be made of each of these approaches. Some open learning environments have suffered from poor acoustics, inadequate breakout spaces and assumptions that teachers would automatically know how to use them effectively. Some schools adopted collaborative spaces without investing enough in professional learning or redesigning their teaching practices. Some versions of project-based learning have lacked sufficient structure, disciplinary depth or explicit teaching. Some interpretations of student-centred learning have underestimated the importance of teacher knowledge and careful instructional design.

Just as with structured literacy, direct instruction, and single cell classrooms, no one pedagogical approach or environment is without its inherent potential to be poorly implemented or utilised. Educators should be able to acknowledge these challenges. In fact, they have been discussing them and addressing them for years.

What we should not accept is the transformation of variable implementation into proof that an entire collection of approaches has failed. No more than we should ever believe a singular silver bullet solution will succeed.

The Ministry of Education’s own review of learning-space design concluded that the quality of teaching remains the most significant within-school influence on outcomes. It also found that it is difficult to isolate the impact of the physical environment because buildings, pedagogy, professional capability and school organisation interact. The review did not conclude that open spaces were inherently superior or inherently harmful. It concluded that the teaching and learning programme must suit the space and that the space must be consciously incorporated into planning and practice. It even noted that flexible furniture, including the apparently sinister beanbag, could support quiet reading and individual work.

The evidence on project-based learning is similarly inconvenient for anyone wanting to declare it a failed experiment. A major meta-analysis involving more than 12,000 students across 189 schools and nine countries found a positive overall effect on academic achievement. That does not mean every project is effective or that project-based learning should replace every other form of teaching. It means that the blanket claim that it has failed cannot be sustained by the research.

High-quality project-based learning is not a teacher retreating to the corner while students wander around making posters. It requires strong subject knowledge, carefully designed questions, explicit teaching, modelling, deliberate scaffolding, regular feedback and clear expectations about the quality of the final work. It can sit alongside direct instruction, retrieval practice, worked examples and deliberate knowledge building.

The choice is not between teachers teaching and students completing projects. Good teachers draw on different approaches for different purposes.

The same is true of student-centred learning. It is such a broad term that condemning it in its entirety is almost meaningless. At its most basic, it recognises that learning happens in students, not to them. Their prior knowledge, motivation, relationships, language, identity and readiness all affect what they learn from an instructional experience.

A student-centred teacher can be highly explicit. They can explain, model, question and correct. They can also differentiate, notice when students are confused, connect new knowledge to what students already know and gradually transfer responsibility as expertise develops. Research on learner-centred teacher relationships has associated those relationships with academic, motivational and social benefits across a substantial body of studies.

Student-centred learning does not mean that students choose everything they learn. It does not mean knowledge is unimportant. It certainly does not mean that teachers are optional.

This is precisely the kind of oversimplification Professor Stuart McNaughton addresses in his recent paper, Simplism in Education or Why “Rocket Science” Isn’t a Good Analogy.

McNaughton describes simplism as the reduction of complex phenomena to incomplete explanations that produce flawed decisions and damaging unintended consequences. He identifies the tendency to present education through false binaries: phonics or whole language, knowledge or skills, explicit teaching or student agency, structure or responsiveness.

Education is not improved by pretending that one side of each binary contains all the evidence and the other contains nothing but failed ideology.

McNaughton’s central question is not simply “what works?” It is what works, for whom, under what conditions and at scale. He warns that highly prescriptive approaches can narrow what is taught, maintain inequities and reduce teachers from knowledgeable professionals to technicians delivering centrally designed sequences.

The Minister responded to McNaughton’s critique by rejecting it and restating that the Government’s approach was evidence-based. That response rather proves his point.

Simply announcing that a policy is evidence-based does not make it so. Evidence does not arrive as a complete political programme with all ambiguities removed. Research findings emerge from particular learners, settings, methods and measures. They must be interpreted, tested and adapted. Different studies can produce different results because learning is influenced by more than one variable at a time.

McNaughton is not arguing against explicit teaching, structured programmes, curriculum guidance or better resources. He acknowledges that these may be useful and necessary. His warning is about elevating one set of principles into a universal prescription while deliberately disregarding the complexity around them. That complexity is what the Minister’s reel removes.

The decline in New Zealand’s educational performance is real and deserves serious attention. As does the decline in many jurisdictions. It has occurred over decades, across governments and alongside changes in poverty, attendance, technology, assessment, curriculum, teacher supply, specialist support and social conditions.

To single out student-centred learning, projects, open spaces and soft furnishings as the causal explanation is not merely simplistic. It directs attention away from the systemic conditions that governments have the responsibility and resources to address. It also undermines the teaching profession.

The repeated description of recent education history as a failed experiment constructs teachers as gullible participants in a national fad. It suggests they abandoned knowledge, stopped teaching and filled schools with beanbags because progressive ideas sounded fashionable. That is not the history most educators in Aotearoa would recognise.

Teachers have spent years responding to changing curricula, assessment systems, diverse learners, increased mental health needs, attendance challenges, digital disruption, staffing shortages and inconsistent access to learning support. They have developed explicit teaching approaches and inquiry models. They have taught foundational knowledge and designed authentic applications of it. They have worked in traditional classrooms, flexible environments, workshops, laboratories and outdoor settings.

Most have never belonged exclusively to one pedagogical camp. They use professional judgement.

Portraying that judgement as a failed experiment prepares the ground for its removal. Once teachers have been represented as people who cannot be trusted to make sound decisions, it becomes easier to prescribe their scripts, mandate their resources, narrow their curriculum and measure their success through a restricted set of standardised outcomes.

The beanbag joke is not harmless, it is part of a wider narrative in which professional expertise becomes the problem and ministerial prescription becomes the solution.

Which brings me to my next point. Should we respond to every misleading reel? Or are we simply helping it travel?

Josh Drummond’s recent piece on Emily Writes argues that misleading political posts are often designed to provoke exactly the reaction their opponents provide. Outrage drives sharing. Corrections repeat the original claim. Each furious quote-post introduces the content to another audience. Being factually right is not the same as communicating effectively. As Drummond puts it, “You are not on the battlefield; you are the battlefield.” It is an important warning.

The worst response may be to angrily repost the Minister’s clip, repeat its framing and spend several paragraphs defending beanbags. The algorithm is largely indifferent to whether the engagement is admiring or appalled.

Yet silence also carries a cost. Unchallenged claims can harden into public common sense. Repetition creates familiarity and familiarity can be mistaken for truth. When a Minister repeatedly describes professional practice as a failed experiment, it shapes how parents, journalists and policymakers understand the system.

The answer is not to take every piece of bait. Nor is it to allow false narratives to accumulate unexamined. We need a more deliberate response.

That means resisting the speed and emotional rhythm of the original post. It means not debating the caricature on its own terms. It means separating the claims that have been bundled together, examining the evidence and restoring the context that the reel has removed.

We should ask what evidence establishes that student-centred learning caused declining achievement. We should ask how project-based learning was defined and measured. We should distinguish poorly designed open-plan classrooms from flexible environments that are working well. We should examine what happened in schools where these approaches were successful and what conditions made the difference.

Most importantly, we should tell a better and more accurate story about teaching.

Teaching is not a contest between explicit instruction and student agency. Effective teachers build knowledge and invite students to use it. They provide structure and respond to individual needs. They explain concepts directly and create opportunities for inquiry. They teach students how to remember information and how to question it.

Fake-podcast politics depends on the assumption that education can be explained in a minute. It offers the microphone as a substitute for authority, certainty as a substitute for evidence and a few soft furnishings as a substitute for serious policy analysis.

If only for our personal and professional wellbeing, we know we should not feed every clip. But neither should we surrender the public account of our profession to those who produce them.

We do not need to take the bait, we do however, for the sake of our education system, need to sometimes take the claims apart.