Students Present Projects at Global Ed Conference

When it came time for master’s student Sarah El Nashar to present her paper, “Education Reform in Egypt,” before an audience of peers and senior education leaders at the Global Education Leadership Opportunities Conference, she couldn’t help but be nervous.

“I’m not a public speaker and don’t usually stand-up in front of a crowd, or feel my ideas are worth listening to,” admits the Egyptian native. “I mean, who am I to tell these people what should be happening in Egypt. I was really nervous about the caliber of people present.”

Now in its second year, the Global Education Leadership Opportunities conference gives students from Professor Fernando Reimers’ Education Policy Analysis and Research in Comparative Perspective course an opportunity to present their final projects for feedback from education leaders from around the world.

“I believe that students learn most when they can see the relationship between education and issues they care about, and the capacity to solve problems is developed through exercise,” Reimers says, noting that students are invited to select policy challenges that are relevant to them in an effort to help develop policy analysis skills. By using evidence-based research to examine factors, students then must make recommendations for policy.

“A capstone of this kind of project-based learning is to invite the students who have produced the best work to present it to an authentic audience of leaders of thought and practice, and receive feedback from them,” Reimers says. “I believe this experience contributes to the development of valuable professional skills and to a professional mindset among my students.”

With 42 students presenting, topics ranging from urban refugee education in Uganda to New Hampshire's Educational Disparity Rating and its implications for state prosperity to improving teacher quality in Brazil to vocational and education training in India to sexual violence in Liberian schools.

“There are serious and important education challenges, in the U.S. and around the world, which call for innovative thinking,” Reimers says. “Innovation is the result of dialogue among disparate groups that can bring different perspectives and experiences to the solution of these challenges.”

For this reason, the conference included a variety of education leaders from leading organizations -- including Save the Children, Open Learning Exchange, Inc., World Bank, UNICEF, and World Education – as well as members of the HGSE faculty to discuss students’ papers.

“What I found impressive was [the students] had quite a thorough review of the research and had come up with solutions based on the literature review,” says Sajitha Bashir, sector manager in education for the World Bank Eastern and Southern Africa, who reviewed El Nashar’s paper. “When doing something like this, they don’t know the situation on the ground, so I saw my role as giving them a different perspective.”

Bashir applauded the students who presented on the panel about developing 21st-century skills. However, she notes that inferences made were not always correct. “I stressed the need to get analysis right because [if one doesn’t] then you could give wrong recommendations,” she says.

Ultimately, despite feeling vulnerable in presenting her recommendations, El Nashar feels positive about her experience at the conference. “It was definitely good practice,” she says. “It was good to hear the different presentations being articulated rather than just reading them on paper. It really allowed us to clarify what we are trying to say… in terms of how we would communicate our ideas in a similar [real-life] setting.”