"Emancipation begins when we question the opposition between those who know and those who do not know."

Jacques Rancière

Education systems are under pressure: artificial intelligence but also climate change, geopolitical instability, and social disruptions reshape what it means to teach, learn, and prepare for the future. Traditional methods — built on transmission, repetition, and standardization — are seen as limited to face these transformations.


Improbable Education is an experiential, immersive program where educators, researchers, deans, curriculum designers, as well as students collaborate with artists, scientists, and critical thinkers to reinvent what education could become. Instead of fixing what exists, we subvert and imagine new possibilities.

Strategic Angles

  • AI amplifies computation, not wisdom. Explore emotional, embodied, collective, political, and more generally artistic intelligences that cannot be automated to redefine what it means to “know.”

  • AI should not be an add-on course—it reshapes entire programmes.
    Rethink curricula, sequencing, and learning journeys to integrate AI as subject, tool, and context, while redefining what graduates should know, do, and become.

  • AI consumes energy, resources, and attention.
    Design pedagogies that confront its environmental cost while imagining regenerative learning systems.

  • If AI can argue, summarize, and persuade, what becomes of critique?
    Move from evaluating answers to questioning assumptions, systems, and knowledge itself.

  • Learning is not only cognitive, it is a social lived experience.
    Use AI to augment, transform, or simulate experiences, while preserving what must remain human and embodied.

  • Always-on intelligence creates always-on expectations.
    Address cognitive overload, acceleration, and exhaustion in AI-mediated learning environments.

  • AI can tutor, guide, and respond at scale.
    Redefine the role of the educator: not replaced, but repositioned as curator, challenger, and meaning-maker.

  • What happens when AI disappears?
    Reclaim slowness, presence, memory, and effort as essential components of learning, not inefficiencies.

  • AI adoption is uneven, fragmented, and often superficial.
    Equip educators and staff to move beyond basic use—toward thoughtful integration, shared practices, and collective upskilling across the institution.

Learning Experience

Designed by Professor Sylvain Bureau and artist Pierre Tectin at ESCP, Improbable has been recognized internationally from Stanford University to the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City. 

The Improbable seminar was highly commended by Financial Times and received a QS Bronze Award and the Independent Higher Education Award in 2025.

Improbable Education is an immersive, high-intensity experience that transforms skills, mindsets, projects, and networks. It is not traditional training but a lasting learning journey.

Through masterclasses, hands-on workshops, and curated creative tension, participants challenge conventional thinking and doing about education to unlock new pedagogical perspectives. Using the practices of the Art Thinking method—donate, deviate, destroy, drift, dialogue and display—they create a bold, improbable art piece unveiled during a memorable vernissage.

Key Outcomes

  • Use Art Thinking as a concrete transformation tool to education.

  • Strengthen your human leadership in times of AI massive adoption.

  • Master AI × Artistic Intelligence as strategic drivers of pedagogical transformation.

  • Rethink education models in the age of AI.

  • Expand your ecosystem through rare intergenerational and cross-disciplinary collaborations.

  • Prototype bold, improbable perspectives ready to challenge dominant industry logics.

Earn the Art Thinking Certificate from ESCP Business School

Who Will You Learn With?

Participants :

  • Teachers and professors willing to integrate future-oriented issues into their practice

  • Researchers in education, social sciences, cognitive sciences, and edtech

  • Curriculum directors, program managers, and deans seeking transformation

  • Educational project leaders and innovation officers in institutions

  • Students committed to help redesigning curricula

Professors, Speakers and mentors  :

Pr. Sylvain Bureau: Scientific Director of the Improbable Chair by Galeries Lafayette, is a normalien and agrégé in economics with a PhD from École Polytechnique. A pioneer in interdisciplinary education (received multiple international awards), he co-created the Improbable Seminar and developed the Art Thinking method, which he has taught at leading institutions worldwide, including Stanford, NYU, FIT, and HEC Montreal.

Ishita Gupta: Stanford research assistant, computer scientists working on AI within education

Christophe Bruno: artist pioneering with AI for 20 years

Thomas Brigger: COO of the Improbable Chair, polyglot, art lover, educator and designer

Format & Location


2 days
Duration:

english
language:

ESCP Business School, Montparnasse Campus, Paris
location:
Philanthrolab: fantastic Parisian building next to Notre Dame!

Beton Salon: unique art gallery in hype district of Paris
Professionals : 500 Euros
pricing:
students : 50 Euros

An Improbable Executive Education experience by ESCP Business School to shape the future of education.