Collaboration Café: Finding Pathways for Relevant and Contextual Education Systems Transformation

The Collaboration Café: Finding Pathways for Relevant and Contextual Education Systems, co-hosted by the Brookings Institution Center for Universal Education and the Salzburg Global Seminar, was held on Tuesday, 24 September 2024, in New York City, on the sidelines of the 79th UN General Assembly.

The event explored the various dimensions of collaboration in global education, from research to policy to practice. Throughout the event, panelists and experts explored challenges and strategies for collaborative research and action by focusing on components such as power sharing and localisation in education ecosystems. The event included an opening panel discussion, the Collaboration Café, featuring various education networks and organisations, and a networking reception.

Moira Faul, Executive Director of NORRAG, was invited to offer the following closing remarks:

We started this session with the premise that collaborations are hard; hard, hard, hard work. We also know we are on the precipice, given the polycrises we are facing, before even thinking about the crises that we are facing in education itself.

Nobody ever came back from the precipice alone.

Collaboration does take work, and it does take time. Collaboration is fundamentally inefficient because it takes more work and it takes more time. But partnerships and collaboration are actually fundamentally also much more effective.  You get what you need to go better and more sustainably if you do it together.

Thinking about pathways to effectiveness, there’s something that’s really important about measurements and metrics as well. They were a lot of people saying funders don’t get this; boards don’t get this. What are actually the metrics that we might need to think about that will actually support us to do the work we do, and won’t get in the way of the collaboration. Are there metrics and measurements that we can think about? At NORRAG, our key principles are surfacing and amplifying underrepresented expertise, especially from the Global South (and also from youth as in our latest publication). So how do we measure t what we are doing in those collaborations? We had a publication on AI and digital inequities, which comprised 70% women and non-binary contributors, 40% non-white, and 40% Global South. So if anybody says to you ever again it’s too hard, you can’t find them, or they don’t exist. You have an example where collaboration with marginalised experts was done with AI; and if it can be done with AI then it can be done with pretty much any other topic, I would argue.

What’s incredibly important that came out in a discussion yesterday as well as today is supporting the networks in the collaboration and their infrastructure, and that does mean teaching funders and boards how to value the networks and the collaborations, but also making sure that you are doing that in your own practice. And the way that you do the collaboration shows that you value the collaboration itself. The way that you are setting up the rewards of the collaboration, always mentions the collaboration itself as a reward, not just access to this or that, the final products, whatever else that may also be a reward.

That gets to the mindset, which is something that we’re all very aware of. Systems approaches tell us the importance of getting to those mental models as the fundamental fulcrum from which you will leverage transformational change.

Practically how do you actually make that work? That’s culture. It’s practices every single day; it’s not the metrics. The metrics allow you to demonstrate that you have this as part of your culture, that you are hiring people with that mindset, or at least with the ability and will to develop that mindset. And also you are nurturing it to make sure that everything inside your organization is also very much promoting that.

Putting the relationships at the center.  In what relationships in your life do you seek to have control? That doesn’t even work for pets, much less other human beings. So if you’re not seeking control in those relationships, why would that be something that you would be asked to speak—even if you’re not seeking it yourself—in a relationship of collaboration.

It’s very important to know your relative power in the room and in particular relationships. It’s always really easy to see the people that are on top of us, and when we do not have power, or we feel like we are the ones who have to ask for permission. If we’re in this room, in New York City, in this week, we have power relative to so many others! So recognize that. Going forward, when you walk into a room to start or continue a collaboration, make sure that you are aware of the position of power that you are in relative to the others in that room and behave in the opposite way. If you walk into a room and you’re the one with more power, shut up and listen; you walk into a room when you have less power speak up, speak out. And make sure you do that everywhere.  Know that you are bringing your contribution, and know that your partners are bringing theirs. And make sure you tell them that you know what their contribution is, that they have defined for themselves and you, and that you value that.

Content is what we all think about: it’s about education, it’s about development, it’s about learning outcomes, it’s about social-emotional learning, it’s about early years, it’s about TVET.  The content is just trripping off our tongues and it’s in our brains over and over and over. What about context? There’s more and more respect for context. I’ve been in this game a very, very long time. When I first started talking about loclaisation and decolonization, people would look at me like I had two heads. There is now much more respect for the need to respect the local contexts, to actually understand and respect differences across borders and within them, and making sure that that is actually being respected and valued and brought to the table, because #TheSouthAlsoKnows. However, the one thing—and it’s what we’re talking about today, so I am fully expecting this to be just part of the wallpaper in five years—is the contact. It’s the most human part of us all. The contact in the relationship speak to the most human part of us. How is it that we have become so alienated from that through the world that we live in? The world in which we have been educated and tamed to work in, that contact comes as an afterthought; that it comes as something that we have to beg funders to allow us to actually do. That doesn’t make sense to me.

On the positive side. It’s juts to much more fun! It’s so much more fun to work with people. It’s so much more fun to have those new ideas and that new energy coming in. It’s so much more fun to sit at a table where you can say oh my goodness, I’d never thought of that, that’s amazing, how do we actually work together to make that happen?

So let’s leave here today and go and have fun at the reception, and then also go and have fun collaborating with each other and getting on with the extremely important work that we do.