Editor’s note:
This is the first event in a four-city Global Symposium Series, which continues in Mexico City (June 4), Nairobi (July 2), and Ho Chi Minh City (August 20).
On April 20, the Center for Universal Education at Brookings (CUE) convened its annual symposium on collaborative research and action for education systems transformation in Washington, D.C. The event brought together over 150 researchers, practitioners, policymakers, educators, and young people from across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and North America to explore how partnership-driven learning, inquiry, and collective action can drive more equitable and lasting change in education systems.
Co-hosted with An Giang University, EducAid Sierra Leone, Educación para Compartir, Mizizi Elimu Afrika, Society for Access to Quality Education (SAQE), and Vozes da Educação, the symposium built on the collaborative work of the Knowing Doing Network (KDN), a global community coordinated by CUE focused on transforming education systems to ensure all children and young people develop the skills they need to thrive.
Young people know what they need, but systems are not yet designed to do it
The symposium opened with youth perspectives on what meaningful education systems transformation should look like, featuring reflections and insights gathered by members of the Network for Education Systems Transformation (NEST). Drawing on responses from more than 100 young people across multiple countries, participants between the ages of 15 and 25 shared their experiences, priorities, and hopes for more inclusive and responsive education systems.
The responses were striking in their consistency. Young people across very different contexts identified critical thinking, adaptability, and mental health as the skills they most want and need. They asked for transferable, practical capacities to navigate life: how to manage failure, regulate emotions, exercise agency, build financial literacy, and turn ideas into action. As one respondent put it, “school taught me how to pass exams, but not really how to navigate life.”
Young people also emphasized that schools cannot support them in isolation. Many reflected on the importance of supportive relationships and environments in helping them thrive, particularly the role of families, teachers, and mentors. At the same time, they spoke candidly about the barriers they continue to face, including financial constraints, mental health challenges, limited opportunities, and unsafe or exclusionary environments. Underlying many of these reflections was a broader call for education systems that not only deliver academic content but also create space for young people to exercise agency, feel heard, and engage meaningfully with the realities shaping their lives and futures.
These perspectives set the tone for the day: Young people are not passive recipients of education. They have a clear view of what is failing them and what would help. Reflections from the participants in the room also noted that the youth who shared their reflections were largely those who had already navigated formal education systems “successfully,” raising sharper questions about what those who have been excluded from those systems experience.
Jennifer L. O’Donoghue welcomes participants and opens the Global Symposium Series on Collaborative Research and Action for Education Systems Transformation.
Left to right: Jennifer L. O’Donoghue, Ng’ang’a Kibandi, Anya Kasubhai, Ganga Gautam, and Emily Markovich Morris during a panel discussion on a living framework for collaborative research and action for education systems transformation.
Participants engage with tools and approaches shaping gender-transformative education during a session led by SHEF India.
Daniela Brito Calderón leads a session on youth perspectives on thriving in today’s world.
Stories of transformation
To ground the symposium in lived experiences, the opening plenary featured “Stories of Transformation” from members of the Knowing Doing Network (KDN). These stories highlighted how collaborative research and action unfold in practice across different contexts, and how locally rooted partnerships are reshaping relationships, participation, and decisionmaking within education systems.
- In Sierra Leone, EducAid and the Ministry of Education shared progress on their efforts to address chronic absenteeism through collaboration with CUE’s Family, School, and Community Engagement research stream. In a context where learning poverty sits at nearly 96%, the team emphasized that meaningful community engagement begins with listening rather than prescribing solutions. Students took the lead on research, interviewing their peers to better understand why children stay home from school. This shift from “leading with their mouths to leading with their ears” is now being scaled across all 16 districts in the country.
- Enseña Perú told the story of how participatory research has contributed to visible shifts in relationships and behavior, with teachers co-creating alongside students and local administrators rethinking how they engage communities. Carried out as part of the broader efforts of the Network for Education Systems Transformation (NEST), they have brought together students, families, teachers, and local stakeholders in two provinces to co-design research questions and processes. The findings from this research are now being used by local advisory committees to guide action and decisionmaking.
- Members of the Learning and Action Alliance for Girls’ Agency (LAAGA) shared how their work is driving broader ecosystem change in the Feni district in Bangladesh, including increased family engagement, teacher training in girl-centered methodologies, and replication of the approach by civil society organizations in other regions. Rather than imposing an external definition of girls’ agency, researchers worked with girls and communities to define the concept and address barriers in locally meaningful ways. As the presenters reflected, girls were no longer viewed simply as beneficiaries, but as agents of change.
Participants map the relationships, values, and conditions needed for meaningful education systems transformation during a collective reflections session.
Participants explore pathways for engagement and collaboration through the Knowing Doing Network.
Imogene Johnson shares the program overview with participants.
Omar Qargha in conversation with participants during a coffee break.
A framework for collaborative research and action
The plenary also introduced the framework underlying CUE’s Knowing Doing Network (KDN), which brings together over 200 people and organizations across 70 countries. The KDN rests on a shared understanding of the problem: When education systems are not systematically guaranteeing relevant learning for all young people, especially in marginalized contexts, what is needed is not incremental adjustment but a fundamental rethinking of the purpose of education, followed by a rebuilding of systems around that purpose. Achieving this in meaningful and sustainable ways requires the collective efforts of actors across education ecosystems.
Collaborative research and action is an approach that brings together partners across geographies, sectors, roles, and generations to share power, expertise, resources, and lived experience. It means co-defining research questions and methodologies, building knowledge together across diverse contexts, and then collectively working to elevate evidence-based solutions into policy dialogues at national, regional, and global levels.
The framework centers on three mutually reinforcing elements—commitment, capacity, and cohesion—and on a theory of systems change that works not only on visible conditions like policies, practices, and resource flows, but also on the less visible ones: relationships, power dynamics, and mindsets.
In a moderated conversation, collaborators working across research, practice, higher education, and network coordination offered their own reflections on what this approach has meant in practice. Several common themes emerged:
- System actors need to shape research questions from the outset, so that they own the evidence rather than simply receive it.
- Tensions arise between the iterative, emergent nature of collaborative work and the more linear expectations of academic institutions and donor timelines.
- There is great value in prioritizing learning over completing an agenda.
- Alignment across a diverse network does not require a single shared definition of core concepts; holding multiple meanings at once can be richer and more honest than forcing convergence.
One participant offered a final note of caution about what she called “the dangers of yesterday’s logic,” or the tendency to assume that what worked before will work again, and to resist the slower, messier, more generative processes that real collaboration requires.
Emily Gustafsson-Wright discusses the Childhood Cost Calculator and Costing Labs with a participant.
Left to right: Mary Otieno and Tanh Nguyen in conversation during the opening plenary.
Adelaida Gómez Vergara leads a session on youth-centered strategies to build trust in schools.
Rebecca Winthrop leads a session on tips for parents: Raising resilient learners in an AI world.
Looking ahead
Across sessions, participants returned to several shared themes: lasting transformation depends not only on changing policies and practices, but also on addressing relationships, power dynamics, and mental models; young people must be treated as active partners in shaping education systems; and collaborative research requires trust, shared ownership, and honesty about whose voices and priorities shape the work. Discussions also challenged the false dichotomy between foundational and social-emotional learning—meaningful and joyful learning often emerges when the two are integrated in practice.
What emerged over the course of the symposium was not a single solution, but a growing sense of collective possibility. Despite differences in geography and context, participants recognized shared struggles and aspirations—from student absenteeism and family disengagement to the tension between rigor and joy in learning, and the persistent gap between policy and practice. That recognition became a source of solidarity, reinforcing the value of learning across contexts rather than working in silos.
At the same time, the symposium highlighted the importance of locally grounded approaches and practical experimentation, with participants sharing examples of how collaborative research and community partnerships are already shaping change in their own contexts. Participants left with concrete frameworks and tools, and lessons from locally led research collaboratives. CUE also announced an upcoming Field Guide to Collaborative Research and Action to Transform Education Systems, to be published in fall 2026, incorporating learnings from all four events in the symposium series.
The day also marked the launch of a Knowing Doing Network platform, bringing together an interconnected global community focused on transforming education systems to ensure all children and young people develop the skills they need to thrive.
Perhaps most importantly, the symposium served as a reminder that building relationships across contexts is itself a form of systems change. As the Deputy Director and Senior Fellow of CUE, Jennifer O’Donoghue remarked, “The relationships we build through these types of cross-country, cross-community collaboration are among the forces that, in a time of division, keep renewing the possibility of a more just world.”
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