Learning Designer. Photographer. Writer. Musician.

You might be here because you care about how people learn, and how culture shapes the way we think, teach, and create. I do too. I'm John, an educator, learning designer, musician, photographer, and perennial question-asker based in Toronto.

A literature and media class in Bangkok once convinced me to throw out my lesson plan and rebuild a unit around the music videos they were already arguing about. That mix of culture, critique, and improvisation is still how I think about learning, and it was a turning point in how I understood power and subjectivity in the classroom-how students consent (or refuse) to the roles we ask them to play, and how real learning happens when those roles become negotiable.

I spend a lot of time asking who gets to tell the story, whose voices are missing, and how power shows up in classrooms and everyday conversations. Foucault has been a constant companion here: I'm drawn to the idea that manipulation, in any meaningful sense, cannot happen without the consent-tacit or explicit of the individual, and that our task as educators is to make those relations of power visible, discussable, and transformable. If you've read Fanon, Jameson, or Lacan, you'll recognize some of the questions that keep me up at night, but I'm just as interested in how those questions land in a workshop, a hallway conversation, or a rehearsal room.

I've lived and worked in Bangalore, Tokyo, Bangkok, Singapore, and Jakarta-eighteen years in all-and those experiences changed how I see everything. Work in a culture, live in one, listen as much as you can, and your sense of what's "normal" stretches in ways that don't snap back when you return home. That widened perspective runs through my learning design, my writing, my photography, and my music: different ways of paying attention to how people make meaning together.

If you're curious about how learning design can be beautiful as well as rigorous, wander through the Learning Design section. If you want to see how the same questions show up in images and sound, visit the photography and music pages. And if something here sparks a question or disagreement, I'd love to hear from you.

After all these years, I'm still most interested in what we can learn next, together.