When it comes to education, is there any other option rather than being an optimist?
About the author: Lara Viela is an MA student in the Department of Education at Stanford University and a recipient of an FSI Conference Grant.
I arrived in Minneapolis on a Wednesday night without knowing what was awaiting me. I was so excited to be among such inspiring minds at the most important academic conference on International and Comparative Education that I almost forgot that I had to do a presentation myself! On the next day, I was craning my neck to better read name tags in the crowd. I was astonished to recognize familiar authors from readings of my masters. But also, I was both very anxious and excited about my presentation. Having never presented academic research in such a public setting, I had many doubts and concerns, but I also wanted to receive good feedback on my presentation. Would any person be listening to it? Would they understand what I was presenting? Would I be able to convince them that it is a relevant paper and clearly present my first findings?
Luckily, I shared my table with four of my classmates, with our advisor conducting the discussion. We were four women presenting our master thesis in Brazilian education with our renowned advisor, Martin Carnoy. I can’t express how amazed I was to be part of this moment in words. I decided to dedicate my career to improving Brazilian education eight years ago. Compounding this table was a true honor to me. I very much enjoyed listening to my peers’ presentations, and much to my relief, the environment was very constructive. I returned to Stanford with good feedback for my research proposal.
As for the other presentations I went to, I tried to choose relevant topics. The first ones were on systems of education around the world, in which I could hear beautiful presentations on Brazilian and Israeli systems of education.
After that, I chose to follow presentations on subjects that I don’t often have the opportunity to be provoked. The first experience was talking to colleagues about the future of education. The host asked us to separate ourselves into optimistic, pessimist, and neutral about the future. Being the optimist person that I am, I chose the first. The first sentence in that table I heard was: “I believe it’s impossible to be both pessimists and work in education, everybody here is an optimist, or else we wouldn’t be talking about the future!”. I am probably taking this speech for my life. Even if things are hard, as we can not by the struggle we have been facing in recovering kids learning after pandemics, we can not spare to be pessimists. We have to keep moving forward and working towards every kid having access to a good education.
Another impressive experience was listening to a University of Minneapolis Ph.D. in education talking about her research. She interviewed American black teachers that were moving to Abu Dabi because in the US, apart from teaching, they also had to be the emotional support for their students. In Abu Dabi, they only have to teach. So that also struck me, how can we deal with this invisible extra work our minority teachers have?
I am very grateful to FSI for the grant that provided me with the resources to attend the CIES in person. As a result, I had the opportunity to share my work, receive good feedback, and have a remarkable experience that I will take for life.
