Human Genius Project – Leveraging a universal force to benefit humanity
Project conceptualization by Michael Maser, PhD*, 2025
Overview
The Human Genome Project, spanning 1990 – 2003, is acknowledged as one of the great scientific achievements in human history. Bringing together hundreds of international researchers, the project led to numerous discoveries in biology and profound advances in medicine and health research.
The Human Genius Project is conceptualized around a core contention that genius is a universal and emergent characteristic of human living and being. This project will provide insights on genius and stimulate efforts to nurture its development for the benefit of human societies, worldwide and biospheric health.
The Human Genius Project is envisioned as as an international collaboration holding similar potential as the Human Genome Project for sowing benefits to humanity. Please read on to learn more.

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Introduction
Scientific and social indicators consistently trumpet a message that human activities, worldwide, are stretching the bounds of all life on earth and impeding the future viability of biogeoclimatic and social systems that sustain life.
With little exception, human societies are dominated by systems rooted in an empiricism that emerged following the Enlightenment hundreds of years ago. This has shaped modern economics, education, nation-states and political systems that reify narrow, self-serving and expedient agendas that continue to foment conflict, competition and exploitation.
The result is a world beset by climate change, shrinking biodiversity and ethno-diversity, unbalanced prosperity and precarious stability across societies. Many people are working to address and offset complex vulnerabilities and threats and the results they are achieving are inspiring. That said, field experts addressing the issues listed above agree the future may well be unpredictable, unstable and potentially calamitous.
We can’t wait to on the sidelines to see how this turns out, the precarity of human existence swings in the balance. We must devise something richer and the solution is staring us in the face.
Roots of Genius
Scientists have categorized various ‘life-forces’ among the world’s life-forms according to perceived ‘drives’ serving species survival and reproduction. Myriad species have thrived and also gone extinct in response to changing planetary and local circumstance, a trait proposed by Darwin as reflective of ‘adaptability’ and ‘natural selection’ that favoured species’ ‘fitness.’
Darwinism has helped to explain many bio-evolutionary processes but it’s not the whole story about species survival.
Seldom discussed is a proclivity or disposition towards ‘genius’ as an emergent, dynamic characteristic shared among all living organisms extant in the ‘tree of all life’ since the explosive-emergence of life-forms beginning in the Cambrian Era. Genius drives innovation, adaptation, evolution, and physio-psychological re-configurations of life-forms and living systems, and may be seen in photosynthesis, reproduction, niche-habitation, species mobility, envenomation, camouflage and colouration, and countless other examples.

In the last few hundred thousand years, the proclivity of genius is also found in the emergent characteristics of the mammalian genus Homo which designates our own humanity.
In truth, our existence today has leveraged a proclivity for ‘genius’ in myriad ways.
One of the earliest artifacts researchers point to as an indicator of our existence and self-consciousness are the cave paintings of Europe and Indonesia, now back-dated to 60,000 years ago. These depict life outside the bounds of cave-dwelling but they also reflect a human disposition for representation and story-telling that profoundly shaped human consciousness and sensibility. The same can be said of so many other artifacts and entire systems now linked through academic studies to the roots of modern humanity: tool-making, development of language, agriculture, artistry, transportation, energy harnessing and production, celestial and biotic study. And, and, and.
Each development was triggered by an impulse rooted in neurobiology, socio-ecology, circumstance and an innate imperative rooted in a proclivity for genius.
The development of the wheel, the smelting of metals to create bronze, or the introduction of crop rotations thousands of years ago reflect an emergent proclivity for genius as much as a spider’s proclivity to create a silken web to trap food or a flower’s proclivity to innovate a system of pollination.

Genius, then, is reflected in life on earth, including humans, whose unique genius may be seen in a thousand-thousand facts, trial-and-error developments and astute observations.
A study of human genius surely merits much closer examination. To this point, various pronouncements and categorizations of human genius have been declared and assigned by an earlier generation of researchers but these have been short-sighted and linked to a vested-interest scientism that reinforced racism and colonialism. Earlier pronouncements about genius also reified an ideal of genius as an individual who displayed exceptional intellectual and artistic talents. The chosen exemplars of this form of genius included Leonardo da Vinci, Mozart, Beethoven, Darwin, Thomas Edison, Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, Martha Graham, Stephen Jobs, and others.
To recognize a new, more expansive form of human genius is not to deny that these individuals have made exceptional contributions to human societies – they surely have – but it is to broaden a notion of genius that sees genius and genius-potential in all people and peoples.
This new notion recognizes and honours ways of knowing and being in the world that extend beyond previously constrained notions of genius. This project will note how genius can and does emerge from all races and cultures, neurodivergent people, children and youth, elders and marginalized individuals, as well as a group or team of people.

Our existence, and a quality of life we hope to be available to future generations, depends on leveraging our proclivity for genius. The time is now to enact a Human Genius Project that affirms a broader notion of genius and seeks to nurture genius across all human societies in the service of benefitting humanity.
Focus of the Human Genius Project
The Human Genius Project will re-conceptualize the very human proclivity towards genius as our birthright, as a reflection of our very being, our ontology. It will expand our understanding of genius to embrace those individuals and groups that have been excluded or marginalized from earlier conceptions of genius. And it will identify how and where human genius is taking root and flourishing, and also offer educational guidance on how genius may be best nurtured in all human communities.

Specifically, the Human Genius Project will profile:
– An expanded version of human genius beyond an outmoded, modern conceptualization that has been preoccupied with defining ‘genius’ as an individual of exceptional intellectual capacities. This has ignored the contributions of countless indigenous cultures. The modern definition has also fortified an ideal that excludes and potentially harms many people of all ages, and also groups whose capacities and contributions transcend beyond the narrow criteria of ‘exceptional intellect.’
– A consideration that genius is a biological attribute of all living organisms, noted in humans (Homo sapiens) and non-human species through myriad aspects of species evolution, adaptation, behaviour, reproduction and survival.
– Emphasizing how human genius in its broadest forms has contributed positively across countless civilizations to enhancing quality of life, survival and longevity, and continue to do so.
– Emphasizing how nurturing human genius may be viewed as critical to mitigating the most significant, existential threats to human welfare now and in the future. Such threats include climate change, conflict, inequity, pollution, loss of biodiversity and habitat, etc.
– Identifying and emphasizing how genius may be effectively nurtured through educational, social, technological and political gestures to help mitigate against the threats listed above.
Some Thoughts about Human Genius
The real work of humanity at this time may be to awaken the unique spark and inner resiliency of genius within each person.
– Michael Meade, The Genius Myth
Cut from the same genetic cloth, we all share, by definition, the same intellectual capacity and potential. … Every culture is a unique expression of our shared human genius. Each has something to say that the world needs to hear.
– Dr. Wade Davis; Beneath the Surface of Things
Indigenous ingenuity once fuelled the growth of civilizations across North America. Today, that same ingenuity, including resourcefulness, imagination, and creativity, continues to thrive inside both Indigenous children and non-indigenous children alike. This means indigenous ingenuity is part of us all. We are all members of Turtle Island.
– Deirdre Havrelock & Edward Kay; Indigenous Ingenuity
We desperately need synthetic minds. No major problem facing the world today can be boxed neatly within a single discipline or approached effectively by analysis, emotion, or tradition alone. Innovation is always trans-disciplinary and multimodal. The future will therefore depend upon our ability to create synthetic understanding by integrating all ways of knowing.
– Dr. Robert Root-Bernstein; Sparks of Genius
The word genius derives from Greek and Latin meaning “to beget,” “to be born,” or “to come into being” (it is closely related to the word genesis). In education, Genius means essentially “giving birth to the joy in learning.” I’d like to suggest that this is the central task of all educators.
– Dr. Thomas Armstrong, Awakening Genius in the Classroom
I would define human genius as an evolutionary phenomenon.
– Edith Cobb; The Ecology of Imagination in Childhood
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.– William Blake; Auguries of Innocence
Key References
– Individuals who have explored and commented on Genius, including historical figures (Plato, Aristotle, Goethe, James, Jung), and more recently EP Torrance, Einstein, Howard Gardner, Edith Cobb, Joanna Field, Mihaly Cziksentmihalyi, Robert Sternberg, Robert Root-Bernstein, Adele Diamond, Scott Kaufman, Wade Davis, Dean Simonton, and others.
– People who have illuminated a path or guided others to enhance their capabilities for genius or potential, including the pioneers of Human Potential Movement (e.g. Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow, Rollo May); and educators like Leo Tolstoy, Charlotte Mason, AS Neale, JD Krishnamurti, Paolo Freire, Thomas Armstrong, John Holt, Maxine Greene, Maurice Gibbons, Brent Cameron, Temple Grandin, and others.
– Other author-researchers of significance, especially critiquing modernity and suggesting new and/or more expansive-inclusive ways of human engagement and genius: Timothy Ingold, Arturo Escobar, Wade Davis, Chellis Glendinning, Michael Yellow Bird, Robin Wall-Kimmerer, Suzanne Simard, Dr. Iain McGilchrist, Dr. David Suzuki, Eduardo Galeano, and others.

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* About Michael Maser, PhD
Michael is an award-winning, innovative educator and writer based in BC Canada. He has been a lifelong student of human learning and genius, and has led numerous workshops and courses on both subjects. In 2023, Michael completed his PhD (Simon Fraser University, Faculty of Education), focusing his research on the nature of human learning. His dissertation was selected as runner-up for an SFU Convocation medal. Presently, Michael serves as faculty for the Individualized Masters (IMA) program offered by Antioch University (online) in which he teaches Neurobiology and Learning and Introductory Research. From 1993 – 2017 Michael helped lead and provide educator services in two award-winning, innovative learning programs he helped pioneer in BC, Canada: Virtual High Learning Community and SelfDesign Learning Community. In 2007 he shared a Prime Ministers award and Award of Merit (BC Ministry of Education) for his role in co-founding these programs. Michael previously published a ‘Profiles of Genius’ series for youth and he has led ‘Genius Hour’ workshops in SelfDesign and ‘Outschool.’

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(Below = archive for Learn Your Way project)
Learn Your – Project Overview)
(2024) I completed my PhD in the fall of 2023 in the Faculty of Education, Simon Fraser University (Burnaby, Canada). My dissertation, entitled ‘Insight-Out: A phenomenological exploration of the nature and appearance of learning,‘ reflected my life-and-career-long interest in the nature of human learning.
(Spring 2024: MY DISSERTATION HAS BEEN NOMINATED FOR A FACULTY OF EDUCATION CONVOCATION MEDAL, AN AWARD PRESENTED ANNUALLY THROUGH THE OFFICE OF GRADUATE STUDIES, SFU)
I wish to extend my PhD research through developing this project, Learn Your Way, to build out my dissertation into a reader-friendly, website-format including focused database development, as noted below. This format will help to optimize navigational efficiency and ensure this project benefits:
- Educators & Administrators
- Learners (of all ages and backgrounds)
- Families
- Organizations
- Professionals involved in Curriculum Development, Learning Platform Development
- Educational counsellors
- Health care practitioners
- Professional and personal coaches
- Human resources personnel
Why this project, now? Significant forces are currently intersecting and influencing education paths for children, youth, young adults and adults. These include new insights from the learning sciences, including neuroscience, education and sociology, about how to optimize learning experiences for students of all ages and backgrounds. Additional factors include rising incidence of mental health issues and neurodiversity across student populations adding increased challenge to already-burdened educators. With the rise of AI-based education platforms educators must also discern how they might use AI in support of helping students achieve educational goals, at the same time they critically distinguish the nature of human learning from machine-based learning. This project will address these intersecting factors.
Education is the institutionalization of learning but learning is individual. Learning is broader than education. … learning is fundamental to human being and to life itself.
Peter Jarvis, Paradoxes of Learning
Project Format: This project is conceived of comprising three Key Elements (each Element is described through the links, below):
Key Element I: The Nature of Learning
Key Element II: The Subjectivity of Learning
Key Element III: Personalizing Learning to Nurture Human Flourishing and Healing
To view a project overview click on the image below.
I am seeking additional funding (winter 2024) and I will provide updates here as the project is developed.
Michael Maser

Learn Your Way – PhD Project – Detailed Outline
In this outline I provide some signposts and content to better define this project.
Background
My PhD research into the nature of human learning blended my lifetime interest in the subject with professional experiences and observations enriched by the studies I completed, starting with a literature review of western conceptualizations of learning from the 1800s to the present. Since the mid-1800s, especially, positivist science, based in the belief that reality is best determined objectively, has dominated the development of psychology, education and sociology.
The first scientific pronouncements on human learning ironically reflected crude lab experiments focused on measuring responses to stimuli by birds, rodents and other animals. Despite their crude simplicity, the foundational precepts of these experiments proved enduring in shaping beliefs that human learning arises from a kind of inanimate conditioning without considering the human subject or self. These precepts reflected a limited and often misguided perception about how humans experience the world, uniquely, and how each person’s learning is shaped through these experiences.

My literature review was followed by two studies investigating the nature of (human) learning revealed through autobiography and an extended fieldwork project, both of which were refracted through the lens of phenomenology. Rooted in the work of Edmund Husserl in the early 20th century, phenomenology comprises a philosophical and methodological approach to describing the world of phenomena through subjective experience. Phenomenology is described by philosopher-author Henri Bortoft as “the most important philosophical development of the twentieth century.” Phenomenology poses very poignant counterpoints to the mindset of objective empiricism advocated by Enlightenment thinkers like Galileo and René Decartes.

Phenomenology is the primary source of knowledge, the source that cannot be doubted. … Phenomenology is concerned with wholeness, with examining entities from many sides, angles, and perspectives until a unified vision of the essences of a phenomenon or experience is achieved.
Phenomenological researcher Clark Moustakas
My PhD research confirmed this.
Below, I frame this project through identifying three Key Elements: The Nature of Learning, The Subjectivity of Learning, and Personalizing Learning to Nurture Human Flourishing and Healing. Each of these will be elaborated with many additional details in the final work including database development of all elements to aid reference research.
By way of introduction, consider this personal learning experience (excerpted from my dissertation):
Pond/ering – A Childhood Learning Experience
“It’s getting dark, Michael, five more minutes and we have to go. Look at you, you’re filthy. And put all the frogs you caught back in the pond. They’re not coming home with us.”
This pond, a swamp really, five to six kilometers from my home, is my prized ‘go- to-place.’ I am four or five years old, and I beg my mother to bring me here, after school, on weekends, anytime in spring, summer or fall. There, aided by a dip net and magnifying glass, I pull off my boots and jacket and commune with the life of the pond. As my feet sink into the mud and I dip my arm in water up to the elbow, my senses are engulfed as I observe, hear, smell and feel. I experience a pondering in which I am extended in all sensory ways. I have no preferential trajectory except that which calls me most strongly in-the-moment. There’s a wriggling tadpole. There’s a water beetle swimming upside down. There’s a painted turtle! Uh-oh, there’s another leech on my leg. Mom! Hour after hour, the pond enthralls me as I wade about, poking here and there in my quest to learn its secrets and make sense of it all. I feel so good, so buzzing with life that I don’t notice time whizzing by, pangs of hunger or the mosquitos and deerflies using me as a pincushion.

To this day, I recollect with much fondness and in vivid detail my Pond/ering as a young boy. This experience tested my resolve in countless ways, catalyzed cascading emotions and helped propel me in numerous ways into a lifelong love of the outdoors, swimming, hiking, camping, an early career in geology and a 30+ year career as an outdoor and science educator. The experience exposed the core of my being to the raw plasma of life. In both cases, what I was learning engaged all aspects of my living-being – my perception of myself, imagination, intellect as well as my corporeal senses and sensibilities. In a nutshell, this description affords insight into the very character or nature of life-wide and lifelong learning as it appeared and arose for me.
My excerpt above points to how the nature of learning reflects essential characteristics unique to each of us. Of course, you need not take my word for this but participate in a personal reflection important to you: in deeply associating with a learning experience you hold in your memory, re-construct not the what of his experience but carefully unscroll the how of this learning experience as it appeared and arose for you, as I did above. Permit yourself to remember and note sensory details, your unfolding response, and the meaning of this experience in your life in-the-moment and later.
Our learning lives are suffused with myriad experiences, shaped by the how of our somatic, relational and intellectual beingness. I will unpack this further when I detail some of the insights I gleaned from my autobiography study and also my fieldwork research.

Key Element I: The Nature of Learning
It’s been exciting for me to follow and unspool learning, as an educator of course but also one who has had a lifetime interest in the nature of human learning. From these perspectives, I had long perceived a mismatch between formal-schooling pronouncements about learning and my own experiences, including observing my students’ learning. In my literature study I traced the conventional roots of learning to the mid-late 1800s when the first pronouncements about learning were linked to laboratory-controlled experiments involving pigeons and rats and very rudimentary human studies. These experiments were valorized in the language of the emerging field of empirical psychology which was establishing itself as a field of objectivist science. What ‘mattered’ in this nascent field was what could be measured and quantified and repeated in controlled experiments.
Missing from early literature about learning, or discredited, was recognition of the personal – the subjective qualities that help define human learning. To help me better understand the basis of subjective learning, I investigated works of field-leading researchers and writers from psychology, education, sociology, philosophy, neuroscience, special education and indigenous studies. This field included John Dewey, Jean Piaget, Jerome Bruner, Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow, Edith Cobb, John Holt, Maxine Greene, John (Jack) Miller, Loris Malaguzzi, Howard Gardner, Caine & Caine, Adele Diamond, Joseph LeDoux, Daniel Stern, Gregory Cajete and others.
An exciting avenue of research linking subjectivity to learning has recently emerged in neuroscience. This is seen, especially, in insights synthesized by eminent scientist and author Dr. Joseph LeDoux who hypothesizes (2020, 2019) the existence of idiosyncratic cognitive-neurological ‘self-schema’ reflecting each person’s unique history and character and prefiguring responsiveness to stimuli. LeDoux’s assertions align with those of Dr. Antonio Damasio (2010, 2000) about ‘the autobiographical self’, and other researchers like Dr. Adele Diamond (2012, 2018) who assert the neurobiological basis of social-emotional learning reflects idiosyncratic accretion of subjective experiences.

A critical aspect of investigating subjectivity I drew on was the philosophy and research methodology of phenomenology, mentioned above. From its inception in the early 1900s, phenomenology has been elaborated to comprise a sophisticated scientific basis that, Husserl insisted, included objectivist science as a subset. Numerous, subsequent researchers and authors have broadened the reach of phenomenology to include psychology, health care, education and pedagogy, sociology and other domains. In my investigation of phenomenology I drew on the works of Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Martin Buber, Michel Henry, Max van Manen, Stephen J. Smith (PhD supervisor), Don Beith, and others. Phenomenology, as a recognized research methodology, also provided the guidance for my autobiography study and fieldwork investigation into subjective learning.
Because of obvious overlap, considerations of learning intersect with notions of education and schooling; indeed, to some the terms are practically interchangeable. This makes a certain sense: people go to school to learn and educational institutions oversee approaches to schooling, managing everything from architecture to scheduling to curriculum design, testing and student control. Yet, as educator-author Peter Jarvis writes (1992), “learning is wider than education,” and, further,
all the social institutions together cannot contain learning, since learning is fundamental to human being and to life itself.
– Jarvis, P.; Paradoxes of Learning; p. 10
Understood in this way, learning is distinct from education. Education, on the other hand, generally overlooks or ignores how learning emerges subjectively or idiosyncratically for each and every student, favouring empirical-objectivist theories of learning. To this point, conventional education adopted tenets of industrialization to resemble assembly line standardization and efficiency in its practices starting early in the 20th century. This may be recognized through the processes of standardized curricula and administration, teacher training, mass testing, streaming and other processes. Sidney Pressey’s ‘Teaching Machine’ (ca. 1926), shown in the figure below, exemplifies the adoption of such processes and was the forerunner to the ‘Scantron’ era of multiple choice testing that continues to this day, reifying objectivist learning principles. Pressey’s machine, manufactured and distributed to thousands of schools, relied on crude, semi-automated processing of multiple-choice test answers selected by students pressing levers and turning a scrolling question drum.

Conventional psychology continues to frame learning in terms of prediction and measurement and abstract cognitive schemata, i.e. the language of objectivism. My research, drawing from less well-known domains of psychology, holistic education, neuroscience and phenomenology, challenges this objectivist framing to offer a new frame of learning oriented to personal subjectivity. I will further elaborate this foundation in this project and identify how the thrust of ‘Personalized Learning’ is making important inroads into K-12 and post-secondary education, adult education, career re-training, special education and indigenous education. In its nascent reach, personalized learning is being recognized as having potential nurture greater student learning than its conventional predecessor.
Project build-out will include narrative description and database categorization of learning typologies and domain milestones per my PhD review (e.g. psychologistic learning [late 1800s], cognition and learning (ref: Jerome Bruner), multiple intelligences theory (ref: Howard Gardner), neurobiological learning (ref: Caine and Caine, Adele Diamond, Joseph LeDoux), holistic, personalized learning (ref: numerous practitioners), neurodiverse learning (ref: Thomas Armstrong, Dr. Barry Prizant), etc.

Key Element II: The Subjectivity of Learning
Subjectivity refers to the personal quality of self-experience denoted through self-presencing gestures and acts. A subjective act, such as self-reflecting, exists in a personal or idiosyncratic manner, and is distinguished from an objective act that is denoted or described via parameters external to the subject. Human learning has conventionally been studied objectively and categorized as an act lacking personal qualities. This reflects the roots of analyzing learning via empirical-analytical psychology traceable to the mid-1800s when the first studies of learning centred on measuring responses by pigeons and rats to crude prompts in lab-controlled situations. This led to the first categorizations of human learning as behaviourally objective n character and lacking in anything resembling self-agency or subjectivity.
But, if as Jarvis says, learning is fundamental to being and life itself, then learning must be re-cognized as a subjective act, and in this it is observed in humans as commensurate with living itself from birth or earlier and extending lifelong. With the help of bodily senses and tissues, our learning guides us into mobility, first crawling, then walking, and coming to embrace the surrounding world with animated determination. As perceiving and linguistic bodies, we touch and explore, listen and mimic, ponder and discover the character of the world and of our place within it through these manifold modes of engagement. The trajectory of this ‘learning journey’, within and without, extends to a horizon of being and knowing, that, itself, seems boundless whether people are consciously aware of learning or not.
New insights about subjective learning are noted in neuroscience in which learning is perceived as innate disposition that can be correlated to evolutionary traits but also distinct neurobiological correlates that indicate subjective presencing. An important correlate posited by researcher-author Antonio Damasio (1999, 2019) are lifelong, accumulated “autobiographical memories”; another posited by researcher-author Joseph LeDoux (2018) are idiosyncratic “mental schema,” reflecting personal experiences and cultural dispositions. Other researchers have also elaborated to this subject.
These are important scientific insights that contribute to knowledge about subjective learning. But there’s a rich realm of information illuminating personal insights into learning in a domain of knowledge that I tapped in my PhD research: that which exists through auto/biography. My study, inspired by sociologist Edith Cobb who had compiled an extensive library of these in completing her pioneering work into children’s lives, included excerpts I had retained for years and new profiles I studied. Like a complex puzzle that comes into focus, rich autobiography illuminates poignant, personal insights and intersections with contextual forces shaping and influencing one’s existence and guiding the evolution of a self. My study, including 15 separate excerpts including first-person experiences and reflections and first-person pedagogical observations, contributes to denoting a phenomenal gestalt of subjective sensible and meaning-laden nature of learning. (helped denote qualities of subjective learning that I further confirmed in my fieldwork study.)
To this end the following sample of autobiography excerpts from my study help the reader grasp these qualities:
Unfolding Learning – childhood learning experiences described by author-disability rights activist Helen Keller:
As the cool stream gushed over one hand (my teacher) spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten—a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that “w-a-t-e-r” meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! There were barriers still, it is true, but barriers that could in time be swept away.
Helen Keller; 1905; The Story of My Life; loc. 263-264

Unfolding Learning – young adult learning experiences described by Academy Award-winning documentary film-maker Michael Moore:
I looooooved the movies. I always did. … At seventeen, I saw Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, and then I saw everything else by Kubrick, and after that there was no looking back. I was hooked on the potential and the power of cinema … Two years later I opened my own “art haus” in Flint where, for just two nights a week, I would show everything by Truffaut, Bergman, Fassbinder, Kurosawa, Herzog, Scorsese, Woody Allen, Buñuel, Fellini, Kubrick, and the masters of cinema. Each film would get four showings, and I would spend my Friday and Saturday evenings watching all four shows. On the first viewing [,] I would sit close and enjoy the experience. On the following three screenings, I would sit in the back and study them, sometimes taking notes. This became my one-room, one-student film school. (2011, pp. 398-399)
Michael Moore; 2011; Here Comes Trouble: Stories from my life; pp. 398-399

Unfolding Learning – observation of learning by author-educator John Holt:
On days when I have a lesson, I bring my cello to school, take it to a classroom, and give the children a turn at “playing” it. … They start off by working the bow vigorously back and forth across one of the strings. They keep this up for a long time. Just the feel and sound of it are exciting. Then they begin to vary their bowing a bit, trying different rhythms. After a while, they begin to move the bow so that it touches more than one string, or they move to another string. But it is important to note that the first few times they do this, they do not seem to be doing it in the spirit of an experiment, to find out what will happen. They do it for the sake of doing it. They have been bowing one way, making one kind of noise; now they want to bow another way and make another kind of noise. Only after some time does it seem to occur to them that there was a relation between the way they bowed and the kind of noise they got. Then there is quite a change in their way of doing things…They have to pile up quite a mass of raw sensory data before they begin trying to sort it out and make sense of it. … (a child) is used to getting his answers out of the noise. He has, after all, grown up in a strange world where everything is noise, where he can only understand and make sense of a tiny part of what he experiences. His way of attacking the cello problem is to produce the maximum amount of data possible, to do as many things as he can, to use his hands and the bow in as many ways as possible. Then, as he goes along, he begins to notice regularities and patterns. He begins to ask questions—that is, to make deliberate experiments.
John Holt, 1967; How Children Learn; loc. 1064-1120

Overall, the qualities I denoted in this study, likewise confirmed in my fieldwork study, comprised the following:
- learning is fused with a sense of emerging selfhood, arising idiosyncratically and often linked to deep, vital interests and personal meaning, or questing to create meaning.
arising as an animated and embodied dynamic act of the sensing (affective) body and life-infused body.- arising through aspects of relationality (intersubjectivity, pedagogy) arising in some fusion with the surrounding environment, the “lifeworld”, including non-human living things.
- arising as an event of some sustained duration and temporality.
Project build-out will include narrative description per my dissertation and detailed database categorization of subjective or personalized learning experiences. Categorization of these experiences will extend beyond my initial PhD research and pertain to learning rooted in affective or emotional response, high motivation, and somatic or physical engagement; learning linked to emerging selfhood; learning linked to aspects of relationality and circumstance; learning based in an experience of ‘eventiality’ (unique timing). These experiences will reflect direct, personal insights as well as important insights noted by observers (e.g. educators, care-givers, parents, coaches, etc.).

Key Element III: Personalizing Learning to Nurture Human Flourishing and Healing
How might learning and especially human flourishing be best nurtured?
This has been a focus of educators, philosophers and cultures for centuries. My experiences as a career educator and researcher lead me to an unequivocal conclusion:
Human flourishing is best expedited through an educational approach oriented to supporting holistic, personalized / personalizing learning.
This disruptive movement – informed by critical insights from neuroscience and assisted by recent developments in AI – is happening across all educational jurisdictions but in the face of various challenges it needs support and research to be optimally effective. Learn Your Way will contribute to this end.



Project build-out will include narrative description and database categorization of established and emerging initiatives reflecting the precepts of holistic, personalized learning. Such initiatives are arising across North America throughout K-12 and post-secondary programming, adult education and re-training, special or neurodiverse education, first nations education and specialized training programs. Focused subject profiling (case study) will also reveal personal pathways followed to successful learning achievements.
“It’s time for a new definition of human intelligence that … emphasizes the value of an individual’s personal journey. That extends the time course of intelligence from a two-hour testing session of decontextualized problem solving to a lifetime of deeply meaningful engagement.”
Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined (2013); by Scott Barry Kauffman, psychologist
Rather than a one-size-fits-all approach, we need an educational system built on the understanding that all learning is personal and with the flexibility to engage learners where they are rather than where the lesson, curriculum, or pacing chart assumes they should be.
Tapping the Power of Personalized Learning (2016); by Dr. James Rickabaugh, Idaho Superintendent of Schools

Project Benefits
The conclusions arising from my PhD research – to be expanded upon in this project – help confirm the primacy of subjectivity or personal dynamic forces shaping each person’s learning. To learn is to experience learning arising with “a basis in life” (Michel Henry, 2003) influenced by personal biography, background, previous experiences, interests (attractive forces), dis-interests (repellent forces), sensibilities, dispositions, and biological characteristics (behavioral, neurological). Learning arises relationally and intentionally, motivating any and all students to attend to the “things” held in consciousness that create the context for the most significant learning to arise.
These insights provide a vital counterpoint to how most people have been conditioned to consider learning, formally, informally and lifelong. As noted above, society and the dominant culture of schooling have introduced practices for many decades oriented to impersonal, objectivist learning. These practices continue to dominate educational praxis and inform educator and caregiver training. This is unfortunate because holistic, personalized learning holds the promise of priming new generations to flourish and achieve learning breakthroughs that exceed conventional parameters. As supported by my research, countless stories of human genius and healing unfolding reflect this reality. Now, education is afforded the opportunity to support this as never before. The insights denoted in this project will also be complemented by numerous examples that will extend to internet-based approaches supporting personalized learning (e.g. YouTube, online courseware, Maker-DIY-Gaming communities, and countless others) and emerging AI developments.
Accordingly, this project will benefit:
- Educators & Administrators
- Learners (of all ages and backgrounds)
- Families
- Organizations
- Professionals involved in Curriculum Development, Learning Platform Development
- Educational counsellors
- Health care practitioners
- Professional and personal coaches
- Human resources personnel
Learn Your Way Deliverables
Learn Your Way will contribute to nurturing human learning and flourishing as detailed below.
Through an engaging website it will:
• identify the key components of subjective learning arising phenomenologically, neuro-biologically, holistically and psychologically
• identify how and where personalized learning / personalizing learning is flourishing*
• identify how personalized learning/personalizing learning is positively addressing the noted youth mental health crisis*
• annotate autobiographical examples of subjective learning*
• identify how and where recent developments in AI are effectively contributing to personalized / personalizing learning across all educational strata.*
(* will be co-presented in database form)
(** all will directly reference Michael’s PhD dissertation where pertinent)
Coda
The first steps in venturing in this new educational promise of holistic personalized learning lies in educators being curious about the lifeworlds of their students – no matter their students’ background. As Dr. Barry Prizant says (2015) about his interactions with autistic children, helping an autistic child does not begin with seeking to identify a problem and determining to “fix it.” Rather, he says, help begins by listening and paying close attention to what a child is trying to relate. “We need to work to understand them, and then change what we do.” Prizant’s assertion helps sound a fundamental chord of this project, namely, that through pedagogically sensitive encounters and inquiries, educators may deepen their understandings of who their students truly are, observe how and where authentic student learning is striving to emerge, and more richly enable its arising. The genius embedded in human learning asks nothing more of us.
The future of learning …. is personalized!
