Three Pieces of Advice

Thank you HGSE students for this incredible honor. When I learned I’d be the recipient of the Morningstar Award, I was deeply moved. As an educator, there is nothing greater than learning that the work you do matters to your students. 

After my initial delight, in came the terror of this exact moment — standing in front of students, family, friends, and colleagues to do my least favorite activity: give a speech. Like a good student, I did some research. I googled the speeches of my colleagues. This turned out to be a huge mistake. Of course, their speeches were brilliant, because they are so brilliant.

I learned something important from them: it’s easier to get through a speech like this if you create some kind of list to organize your thoughts.

So HGSE students, class of 2026, here is my list of unsolicited advice, three things I think you should do as you move on to your next adventures.

Advice #1: Thank the people who made today possible.

Commencement season is my favorite season. Not only because it means we survived another New England winter, but because I love seeing joyful graduates and colleagues dressed up in funny outfits and hats, celebrating. By far, the best part of commencement is meeting student’s people.

I get to see the pride on their faces when their graduates cross the stage, hear embarrassing childhood stories, I get a tiny glimpse into the community that loved and supported them and helped make today possible.

There’s a line of poetry by ee cummings I always think about in these moments: “Whatever done by only me is your doing.” Sometimes we forget to tell people just how much they’ve shaped our learning. We forget to tell them that the lessons they’ve taught us live on — they get sampled into the remix of work done, “by only me.” 

Graduates, I hope you’ve already started your gratitude tour this week as you wrapped up your classes and you welcomed your people to Cambridge. Like all of you, nothing I’ve done has been done “by only me.” I’m the result of my people — my husband Chris, my children Isa and Gabe, my extended and created family, and all of the educators who encouraged me — they made this moment possible, and I am so grateful. In that spirit, I want to thank someone who taught me to value learning: my mother.

My mom, Linda, is a CODA, a hearing child of two deaf parents, and American Sign Language (ASL) is her first language. She spent her career as a sign language interpreter for the Commission on the Deaf and Hearing Impaired (CDHI) in Connecticut. When it was created in 1974, it was the first state agency focused the deaf in the US. My mom is long retired, and still, when I run into deaf people or interpreters, even here in Cambridge, within five minutes we figure out that they know my mom. (Sign hello and thank you to interpreters).

I knew that my mom was an interpreter and that she knew every deaf person in New England, but there was something I didn’t know. When I was registering for the SAT, it asked for my parents’ level of education. When my mom said, I don’t have a college degree, I was surprised. First, because my mom was so obviously smart and knew so many things, and also because she was constantly talking about college.

She didn’t just reference higher education in abstract ways; she spoke in detail about the writing assignments in Introduction to Sociology. On long car rides, she would me ask if I knew John Dewey, mentioning his name casually like he was her friend. Her favorite thing to talk about was microbiology — which, honestly, was very unpleasant at dinner.

Raised by deaf parents in a world not designed for them, my mom learned to be creative when facing a barrier. When a traditional or even nontraditional pathway to a degree wasn’t possible, she took what she knew how to do — serve the deaf community — and what she valued — learning — and she became an interpreter in college classrooms. Over her career she followed deaf students through their associate’s, bachelor’s, and master’s degrees.

Years later, I asked her, does it bother you that you don’t have a college degree? You could go back and finish; I could help you. She just laughed and said, no, I beat the system. In my brain, I have access to so much knowledge, and I never did any of the homework!

My mom started and stopped college after high school, in her 20s, and again at 44. Like 43 million working adults in the United States right now, life got in the way of completing a degree, but my mom isn’t a statistic. She isn’t defined by credentials. She’s defined by her love of learning, her creative thinking, and her passion for making spaces more accessible and inclusive — even the college classrooms that weren’t always accessible to her. I want to thank my mom for teaching me that whether it’s happening in person or on zoom,  in libraries (with Mychal Threets), around kitchen tables, in community centers, or on the bus ride home — Learning is powerful.

Degrees, even degrees from Harvard, will not define you either. You will be defined by how you take what you know, and what you value, and put those two things into action.

Some of you know that before coming to HGSE, I spent many years at an institution right down the river, Bunker Hill Community College. When I left BHCC I was a dean, but in 2008, while I was a graduate student here, I was an adjunct faculty member there. I spent my days learning about higher education policy and practice in Gutman and Larsen, and at night, I watched the research and theory become real people, facing real problems, and bringing real promise to community college.

Today, I want to share a BHCC tradition. When the president opens commencement, she asks students to lift their hands, make the sign for I love you in ASL, and send love and gratitude to the people who made their achievement possible.

Since my mom and dad couldn’t be here today, I’m going to do the next best thing, and send them a selfie, Here’s where I need your help — students, please join me in expressing gratitude to your people — in the HGSE community, in Cambridge, across the country, across the world, and with you in spirit. 

Advice #2: Ask big questions.

Recently, I was at one of my favorite places, College Unbound in Providence, Rhode Island, and a colleague said, “If you’re focused on a problem that can be solved in your lifetime, you aren’t thinking big enough.” It made me reflect on the power of questions and the role they play in learning.

I learned about big questions from my abuela. She was a hairdresser, and when I sat in her chair, she’d pump me up to the right height, and I would tell her exactly what hairstyle I wanted. She would smile and nod — and then give me whatever haircut she wanted. It was an important lesson; I was clearly not a decision-maker.

My abuela would wait until she was at a critical juncture, like cutting my bangs. If you’ve ever had bangs, you know this is a pivotal moment. She would squint at me and say, nena, and then she would ask a real, big, juicy question. As she cut, she wouldn’t let me get away with skirting around the edge. I couldn’t fidget or squirm. I had to address the big question head on.

Like sitting in my abuela’s salon, facing big questions reveals power imbalances and deep truths. Big questions are generative. They multiply. Just when you think you have an answer, you realize what you actually have is a set of more precise, more complicated next questions.

And as educators, it matters what we ask. Our questions have consequences. When students from particular groups — students who are racialized, low-income, first-generation, or who learn differently — when these students don’t accomplish their goals in our institutions, we can ask: what is wrong with them? Or we can ask the bigger question: what is wrong with us? Where did we go wrong in building learning environments where these students can thrive? We can choose to blame students for systems that have failed them, or we can ask the biggest, most unsettling question: how are we complicit in perpetuating the problems we seek to solve?

Big questions expose us. They test our beliefs and challenge what we think we know. They require us to resist the urge to turn away from the discomfort of uncertainty, resist skimming the headlines, reading the summary instead of the source, and reducing people and ideas to caricatures. In a world that is fighting very hard to keep us distracted and distanced from each other, grappling with big questions teaches us to listen carefully, share honestly, and struggle together toward educational justice.

So how do we do this — That brings me to my third and final piece of advice.

Advice #3: Cultivate critical hope.

Ask Rilke asks, how do we live the questions now and sustain that living into the answer? For me, it is the practice of critical hope, and because I am a faculty member, I am contractually obligated to say: let’s unpack that phrase together.

To be critical is to notice, with precision, the ways in which the world is imperfect. You’ve probably spent your time at HGSE building that muscle. You can now see more clearly — maybe more clearly than you ever wanted to — flawed systems, outdated models, bias, the many ways educational institutions produce and reproduce inequity. You’ve been exposed to research and frameworks, theoretical lenses, and an impressive number of multi-syllabic words. You can sling a literature review at an ignorant comment like it’s no one’s business, and that is an important skill.

But if you stop there — if all you do is point out what’s broken — being critical becomes destructive. It wears us down. In a sector facing public distrust, funding cuts, political overreach, and persistent challenges of access and opportunity, criticism alone burns us out.

To be hopeful is to notice that the world is full of possibilities. To be inspired by potential of ordinary people to affect change. Hope insists that this is not the end of the story. While hope is essential, hope that waits quietly for the next group of students to do better, the next department chair to retire, the next election cycle to fix everything — that kind of hope allows us to excuse inaction, and it softens us from feeling the sharp edges of injustice. 

“Critical” and “hope” work in partnership. Together, “critical hope demands that leaders take up the most difficult challenges, explore the most sensitive subjects, and raise the most daring questions. Critical hope begins with an effective critique of the present and is sustained by a powerful, unifying vision for the future.” Critical hope helps us sit in the discomfort of knowing what education is and what it could be. 

As you leave HGSE and join schools, colleges, organizations, ministries, districts, think tanks — whatever your next adventures take you — don’t choose between being a sharp critic or a hopeful idealist. We need you to be both. Lead from an honest assessment of what is broken, an unwavering belief that something better is possible, and a stubborn willingness to figure out how to build it. 

And if people resist this approach, which they might, critical hope is powerful, remember, as my 13-year-old daughter Isa would say — that’s an ish-them not an ish-you.

So graduates — before you turn the page on your next chapter, my last assignment is to thank the people who made today possible, continue to ask big questions, and lead with critical hope.  

…And when it’s your turn to take over, invite me to the party so I can celebrate all that you’ve done.