Leading is healing, leading is loving, and leading is a student’s need
By Franco Mosso, Enseña Perú CEO and Co-founder, and Luis Heredia, student, founder of Edulimitless, and the first lead of the virtual student leadership program described below.
Throughout the past two years we’ve seen firsthand the unprecedented upheaval in education systems around the world. Educators and policy makers everywhere are debating what we should focus on now to ensure that this disruption does not create a lifelong burden for this generation. We put out a call to our network to seek insights from educators on this question. This essay was submitted in response to the question “What do students need now?”
It was the beginning of November, last year, and through the ever present screen, we were saying our bittersweet goodbyes to 71 high-school students from across 15 regions of the beautiful coasts, highlands, and jungles of Peru. During the last minutes, a student, keeping her camera off, wrote on the chat “I’m crying, I don’t want to go”, and in the square of her picture appeared the icon, the reaction, of a heart. We tried to breathe in, then out, and with a heavy heart we pushed the button “finish session”.
When we launched our student leadership program in 2021 — in coalition with five civil society organizations led by some of our alumni — we couldn’t fathom how much of a healing journey it would be for our students. The vision was to create a new kind of classroom, one in which the new “normal” of education would be to promote learning between high-school students across cultures. We imagined that these students, when they reached 25 years old, would say things like, “Yeah, my classroom had kids from all over my country. That was how I experienced education”. A social leader from Australia told us, “You will see the impact of this in 20 years, it’s the building of a compassionate society”. The tone of his words reflected our urgency, given how polarized our country has become.
As part of this initiative, we created a curriculum centered on the topics of self knowledge, social awareness, and collective action. Each of these new classrooms had several talented facilitators who knew how to laugh, joke, share their vulnerable selves, and connect with their inner child. Also, there were 25 student guides, from 18 to 23 years old, who as a group mirrored the cultural diversity of the students who participated, and who led socio-emotional activities in small groups. During the week, the kids also watched movies together, played games, shared their talents and culture. In the end, 91% of them rated the program 9 or 10, on a scale of 1 to 10. No one rated it below 7. And the qualitative data showed that they felt more confident to share their voice, better prepared to engage in learning, more aware and appreciative of who they are, and happy to have a bunch of new friends from all walks of life.
But that was not what amazed us the most. Here is what did:
Upon the completion of the program, Katherine (17), from Cajamarca, co-founded a student network called Wake Up Now. Together with her new friends, from eight different regions, they themselves built a curriculum that impacted 60 high schoolers on issues of gender equality in education. Wake Up Now is set to scale up during 2022 and Katherine is learning about adaptive leadership.
Iris (14), from Amazonas, gave an inspiring talk to more than a hundred high schoolers and even more policy makers and teachers from her own region, as the main speaker of the Amazonas Regional Student Leadership Conference. She was also part of a group who, in that same event, led those students on a leadership session to become agents of change for their community. Iris is now opening a school in her house for kids in her area, and is learning how to create safe spaces for youth in non-formal settings.
Addison (15), from Junín, went on to participate in EduDream, an initiative to show young people the power of the arts in education. The project was postponed last year, but she will pick it up this year again and make it work. She is also her school’s student body representative, and is determined to lead a leadership program, such as the one she experienced, for the three hundred kids in her school. Two social organizations are already allies in her efforts.
Victoria (16), from Lima, is now studying engineering. But at the same time, she will be taking over as the CEO of Edulimitless, a youth organization that this year will create blended learning experiences of English as a second language, programming, and leadership. She will also create a platform to channel provocative articles featuring students’ perspectives on education. Victoria is learning how to develop the “eye” of an editor in chief who raises the voices of students.
These are four examples among many. We wish everyone could see through our eyes all the student leadership we found and continue finding. We know these humble words will never honor the experience of listening to their voices live, and being a witness to their actions. A student finding her own leadership is an event far too impressive, too healing, too humbling, too hopeful. And yet, it is a possible outcome in education.
Were the students’ actions the result of the program? Perhaps a bit — who knows? What we do know is that they already had greatness in them, and we can’t wait to launch the program a hundred more times, because out there, in Peru, you can count Kats, Irises, Adissons, and Vickys by the thousands. Our country, and we are sure yours too, is abundant with such kindness of heart, with such drive to serve. It would seem that there is a need among these 14 to 17 year-olds: to lead today. Not in the future. T-O-D-A-Y. It seems that for them leading is healing, leading is loving, and leading is knowing ourselves.
