NZATD 2025: Dan Te Whenua Walker and John Faisandier

In his keynote speech at NZATD’s 2025 conference, Tahu Ignite, Dan Te Whenua Walker told us his story: how being separated from his family and culture left him trying to find recognition and make an impact in ways that proved to be dead ends, and how being given those connections, and the attention he clearly needed, gave him what he needed to develop as a person.

Dan’s speech really showcased the importance of recognising that the people we develop learning resources for are not motivated by the same goals we as workplace educators are. Fundamentally, workplace learning tends to be discussed as being about the business. Learning programmes are funded because they are expected to change learner behaviours in ways that will improve profitability, improve compliance with legislation (thus reducing the risk of the business being sanctioned by the government), or reduce health, safety, or wellbeing risks (which can be viewed as a subset of the compliance goal). For government bodies and non-profits, there is also generally the goal of supporting the organisation’s goals: things like reducing the rate of cancer or finding people who are lost in Aotearoa’s remote forests.

Learners aren’t generally all that motivated by the idea of improving business compliance or profitability. It’s not really a strong connection.

And business leaders are people, not hypothetical rational actors. So they don’t always connect with this type of goal either, even when they are influenced by it.

I talk in some of my other posts about the need to link learning goals with business goals, but there is more to the context of any learning project than just one goal.

What Dan’s story highlighted for me was the degree to which the learners we are trying to connect with are human beings with much richer stories and their own personal motivations.

John Faisandier’s session was about how to handle interactions when someone says something challenging. But it was more than that; it was about how to empathise with people when we don’t know what is going on for them.

John used physical modelling to emphasise the sheer complexity of any person’s social world, and humour to help us engage with this. By calling people up to represent parts of the brain, characters, and relationships, he helped make concrete the idea that every person we interact with is sitting in the middle of a vast web of both internal and external relationships.

John’s session was also possibly the only one where I didn’t draw my notes on the session as a doodle, because we were laughing, moving around and talking for practically the whole session. Often, if I don’t have a physical set of notes in some form, I find group sessions just fade out of my mind, but the combination of audience interaction and improvised theatre has stuck in my mind brilliantly.

Having won an award the night before, and with two workshops of my own on the same day as John’s, I know I have slightly foggy memories for some bits of Wednesday. I was simply overwhelmed with so many awesome people, such excitement about the award, and a bit of stage fright leading into each of my own workshops that a lot of that day is painted in very, very broad strokes in my memory.

But the physicality and relaxed atmosphere of John’s session seems to have helped it really stick. And I could see it connecting for the other people in the room.

So I definitely learned from John about how blood flows in the brain affect my ability to make decisions and communicate when I’m under stress. And I definitely came out with some good concepts about how to maintain empathy for other people who are under stress. (Especially the importance of giving them time, so that the bloodflows in their brains can get back to their communication and decision-making areas. No one does well in a state of flight or fight.)

But I also walked out of Dan’s session thinking hard about how classrooms can be inherently stressful environments for people who experience formal learning as hostile, and considering how John’s friendly, storybased, physically engaging approach might help me to plan group activities that support learners rather than making them feel alienated or ignored.