Read the full transcript of Episode 76 of the NAIS New View EDU podcast, which features George Abalekpor and Eleanor Daugherty of Georgetown University joining host Debra P. Wilson. They discuss how educators can reframe how we think about adolescence, how we build the student experience for teens, and how we can ensure students transition from our schools to higher education with a full sense of their own agency.
We are starting out on a really interesting note. We have two guests today. George Abalekpor is a 2024 graduate of Georgetown University, and he is currently completing a Hoya Fellowship with the Vice President for Student Affairs at Georgetown. At Georgetown, he supports initiatives ranging from program assessment to equitable approaches to adolescent thriving. He’s just really jumped in with both feet and kind of embracing how do you build the student experience at Georgetown?
He reports directly to our second guest, Dr. Eleanor Daugherty, who is an advocate for student well-being and equity with 25 years of experience in higher education. She currently serves as the vice president of student affairs at Georgetown University. I had the unique pleasure of working with both of them on a symposium we did in April 2025, and the symposium was titled The Promise, Possibility, and Power of Adolescence. We had a fascinating group come together to really think about and talk about, how do we reframe how we think about adolescence, how we build the student experience, and how do we focus on what are we really doing with kids? Most importantly, bringing in student voices so we could have a sort of level set conversation with students, with adults, all kinds of people from different roles, and just talk about how we move forward in 2025 really doing great work for kids, which of course is really what it’s all about in education. So with no further ado, here is our first episode of this season of New View EDU.
All right, let's kick it off! I am delighted, George and Elly, that you're both here with me today. Thank you for coming on.
Eleanor JB Daugherty: Thank you. It's great to be here.
George Abalekpor: Thank you for having us.
Debra Wilson: I know the three of us can talk about a lot of things for a really long time, but would you both share a little bit about what you actually do at Georgetown? Everybody's heard what your titles are, but what are you actually doing? Elly, I'm going to start with you.
Eleanor JB Daugherty: Yeah, you know, it's interesting. Universities are really beautiful bureaucracies and I don't expect most people understand offices and things and people. I just got back from welcoming our entering class, and the way I describe my role is, you know, class of ‘29, you're mine. And that means that I'm in a position of leadership in the university where I'm looking at how do we meet students where they are, welcome them, build a common sense of home and belonging and mattering, and make sure we're constantly provoking them? Like I want to make the uncomfortable comfortable in college settings.
And then organizationally, how do I do that in how we build activities on campus and the staff that do that? How do I do that where we have homes and residences on that campus, where we provide medical care, where their counseling or clinical medical needs that we have? How do we handle problems and conflicts with students? How we handle big problems and little problems and all of the complexities of being a college student. That's a lot of the work that you find reporting into a vice president of student affairs at the university. But simply and sentimentally, when I see a student on campus, I think of them as mine.
Debra Wilson: Excellent. All right, now George, you're sort of a good right-hand man, I know, to Elly. So talk a little bit about what you do and how long you've been doing it.
George Abalekpor: Yeah, so I think right-hand man is a good description. My official title is a Hoya Fellow. So it's a fellowship program in the Division of Student Affairs that was brought to the university by Elly. So it's for recent grads at Georgetown. So I graduated from Georgetown last year in 2024. And essentially, I would say that this role gives me an opportunity to kind of serve as like a bridge between the administration and the student experience as a whole.
So I worked on a range of different initiatives from supporting a retool of our division's assessment planning to make sure that we have a culture that better enables us to make better student-centered decisions. And at the same time, I'm doing amazing work with Elly’s initiatives in youth thriving, where I'm helping to lead national symposiums alongside the likes of legends like Elly Daugherty and Debra Wilson, you guys might have heard of them.
So it's really cool to get to be involved and to be able to spearhead these initiatives. And all in all, Elly always says this fellowship is kind of throwing us in the deep end of the pool. And we have an abundance of resources. There's like a life jacket upon request. We have her expertise guiding us as well. And we get to be thrown in and we're given the freedom to both innovate and to fail with grace, and it's had a major impact both on student life and on our personal lives as well, getting to develop professionally in a very dynamic environment that is student affairs.
Debra Wilson: What surprised you the most when you started doing this role? Because I mean, I think it's a cool role. I think what you're getting to do is pretty neat, and it's really bringing the student experience like directly into the administration in pretty short order.
George Abalekpor: Yeah, I would say generally what surprised me was how much leeway and freedom I was given to not only get involved in issues, but to lead everything. I was excited to be able to make direct impact and to be helping and supporting initiatives, but I didn't think I'd get free rein to kind of do what I want and do what I felt was best for students based off of my experience and my perspective.
Debra Wilson: That sounds awesome. That sounds like, fabulously empowering and probably a little freaky sometimes, maybe?
George Abalekpor: To say the least. Yeah, it's because the flip side of that is you're, you know, you're the first one doing it, right? So, so there's no, there's no bar to compare yourself to, you don't know if things are right or wrong, because there is simply no comparison. So if I have like an interesting idea, and I bring it to Elly, she's like, Okay, do it. And that's almost scary, because you're expecting like a guardrail to be put up. Now it's like, okay, like it, you know, it's just me and this idea and we'll see if it happens and see if it not.
But I think that really does allow us to get comfortable with the failure and to be able to use that as like a stepping stone to success. Like failure is inevitable, and it's something that I think is required to get to the success. Like getting comfortable with it is something that I'm really appreciative of this fellowship for, for giving me that skill of being almost like, excited to fail because I know it's going to lead to something much better.
Debra Wilson: Yeah, and I feel like as I've gone on, my theories of failure have shifted. It takes a lot for something to really be a failure. Most of the time, you're iterating. You do it, and you're like, ooh, that didn't go the way I thought it was going to be. This is how we make it better, and let's try it again.
George Abalekpor: 100%.
Debra Wilson: And I think once you get used to that, a whole lot opens up in your head about what's possible. Elly, how about you? Did you do this before at your previous institution?
Eleanor JB Daugherty: You know, it's first of all, it's just so great to hear George talking about this. And I think, you know, Debra, what you were just saying, we're kind of building calluses, you know, I don't know if we're failing as much as we're and some might, you know, look to resiliency literature to support this. But the more we kind of throw the adolescents into the deep end and allow it to inform theory and practice, the better the work is. And there are two schools like I kind of want to acknowledge.
One is, Wake Forest was doing something like this. And shout out to Rogan Kershe, who was there at the time, for his work there. And University of Chicago also is very invested in direct experiential learning. Like how do we kind of, this was more kind pre-professional, but how do we really put students into what we're imagining and hoping for them? And so I poached it a bit from there, and so I want to make sure I give them credit.
A lot of it also is sort of what led to the conference and our collective work in thriving across independent schools and universities. And I want to be clear in saying like no one grows up between grades 12 and 13. That said, you know, the more we kind of listen to adolescents and allow it to inform the wisdom and experience of those of us who are defining it as our career, the richer the work and the richer the outcome. And that, we have really benefited from that at Georgetown in what we've created over the last four years.
Debra Wilson: I think that's awesome. So let's talk about the project the three of us worked on together. Because I think it was a really interesting model. I'll throw in a little bit of background from my perspective and then I'd love for the two of you to jump in.
Elly and I got connected pretty early when she started at Georgetown. And Georgetown has an unusual track record, I think, for that work, and has had a lot of commitment from the administration writ large, including from Jack DeGioia, who's recently retired from the full-time presidency position, but just a lot of commitment from the university on wellness and thriving. And as a lot of listeners know, this is a passion project of mine too. I feel like the world has fundamentally shifted and the new reality for students coming through school, all the way from pre-K up through college, the human experience has shifted and how we think about and how we talk about that experience and what's happening with students and wellness is crucial.
And to have a connection between higher education and our schools, I mean, as you say, you don't just suddenly magically grow up between grade 12 and 13. There's a lot that happens in there. So Elly and I started kind of, you know, having conversations about it. We had Jennie Wallace coming in and talking with us about mattering. We had a lot of other voices at the table. And then somehow like we had, suddenly Aspen Institute showed up. It was like a meteor on the horizon and that sort of took us to the next level.
Eleanor JB Daugherty: Yeah, this was a space that I really wanted us to lean into. And I want to say, “us” are all of the people who touch and transform adolescent lives. And I think President DeGioia and I were completely aligned that there was a separation that was contradictory to adolescent development that was separating the high school senior, if you're in the US system, and the first year student entering college. And that we had sort of inserted adulthood upon them without it being developmentally appropriate or responsive to the act of growing up, which takes years and years and years to reach sort of full maturity. And we know that from the neuroscience.
So that was the motivation. And so how do we not problematize growing up? And I think that was a natural feeling that many of us had leaving the pandemic. We were concerned about reports that we were seeing from the Surgeon General of increased loneliness, depression, potentially higher risk for suicidal behaviors among adolescents. And that care and concern, I think, was leading us to problematize growing up.
And that's not true. Like, we have so much hope. This is why we are educators. We believe in the youth that we see every day. We believe in the future that they will shape. We see them as sources of hope and joy. And when we slow down a minute and get out of our immediate context, so when colleges and four-year universities talk to junior colleges, and when we talk to high schools, and when we talk to boarding schools versus inner city schools, it activates a conversation of care that is very hope-filled. And I was concerned that hope wasn't guiding the policy. We were sort of problematizing pandemic data and maybe overly reliant on looking at cell phones as the enemy.
That was the motivation, and the call was really how do you convene a conversation among educators who aren't hanging out enough together? Independent schools need to be in the room with Harvard and Georgetown and our junior colleges and our Cristo Rey schools and our inner city public schools. And this was a developing interest of Aspen as well, and my dear friend, Kaya Henderson, there. And so it created kind of a natural alliance or confederation of care. And that's what motivated us to do the Aspen Symposium.
Debra Wilson: Do you think this has been different post-pandemic?
Eleanor JB Daugherty: Yeah, absolutely. And I think there is something really exciting about the data coming from this generation. And the importance of this work is listening to George. The importance of this work is listening to our middle school kids and our high school kids and our college kids, and using that to inform theory and emerging scholarship. And when you stop and listen, there is a happiness. There is a desire to kind of have a fulfilling life, there is a reliance on friendship and connection that are the building blocks for thriving. And when we can orient our work around listening to adolescents and building systems of care that enable thriving through connection, we can go really far in what we do.
Our mental health resources are actually doing a good job. We have destigmatized access to mental health care that was not my truth when I was growing up. So they're being utilized clinically, as they should. And now we need to look upstream and say, how is the community of care? How do we genuinely connect with and support each other? And that involves a lot of listening before we develop and insert models upon it.
Debra Wilson: Yeah, I love that. You would think it'd be a huge perceptible shift through the pandemic, but I mean, it's been five years. So you really have to pause and think like, hey, what did this look like in 2018, say versus now? And how do we have these conversations starting to come together?
So George, tell me a little bit about when you got brought into this project and sort of your perception of it.
George Abalekpor: Yeah, so as you mentioned, you guys had laid really great groundwork. And then this work had been kind of in the works for a very long time prior to when I joined Georgetown's admin team last year in September. So it was just a couple of months after I joined that Elly pulled me in and I was immediately hooked. Just like, the concept in general of bringing youth in conversation with researchers, practitioners, adult leaders, and to have them on equal footing, working to create frameworks and to shift perspective on how we approach youth conversation, was really inspiring to me.
And it's funny because that's also just kind of how my fellowship was modeled anyway. It's this co-creation, it's this partnership between me and Elly on this equal footing. So I was like, this is exactly what we need to be doing. And what I loved the most about it, and Elly touched on this, was just how diverse of a group we had in terms of age, thoughts, and experience. I mean, we had any and everybody there, educators and administrators from all levels of college and high school, from both private, public, independent school. We had researchers, foundation leaders from Gates and Clinton Global Initiative. And they're all in conversation with a diverse group of young people as well. We had students who were seniors in college all the way down to rising eighth graders. We even had college-aged individuals who weren't actively in college, but were maybe in the workforce. So a diverse set of perspectives in the room.
And I thought that that was really important so that we could approach youth thriving from both an equitable and a scalable perspective so that we could find frameworks that worked for all youth, regardless of where they grew up or what institutions they had the privileges of being a part of. We wanted to establish frameworks and toolkits that all youth could take and that could be implemented in all different types of communities.
I think that a lot of amazing research and work was set in stone at that symposium, and more than anything the energy that was cultivated in that space was really powerful. And I think that every individual that walked into that room left continuing to think about how they can bring that change into their respective communities.
Debra Wilson: Yeah.
Eleanor JB Daugherty: Can I jump on that just for a second? I want to say this really intentionally. I really believe in what I call a scholar practitioner model. And when we activate that, we have a lot of capacity. So our research universities are really good at thinking. And many of them are grateful to have a lot of federal funding to enable research and discovery. Our independent schools and our high schools and sort of all those sources that George was just mentioning are really good at doing, but they may not have the research dollars that our universities have. When we integrate the thinkers and the doers, it really becomes boundless how we can make an impact.
When we get out of our cluster, when I was with the Ivies, I hung out with the Ivies. When I was at the publics, I hung out with the big publics. When we break out of those clusters and combine the thinkers and the doers, we start creating full toolkits and methods of doing that really have impact. And we're no longer kind of doing niche work in adolescence, we're doing collective impact work in adolescence. And that is what was so beautiful about bringing everybody together.
Debra Wilson: Yeah, well, that was one of our learning principles too. And I want to talk a little bit about the program that we created, because we pulled everybody together for basically like a day and a half ish, right? And we had some design principles. One, you know, adolescence is not a problem. And two, like some of this work has to carry forward. We can't come together, think big thoughts and then have everybody go on their way, right? To your point, like the whole point is to sort of break down some of the silos, build up some capacity and understanding, but also to get people really sort of using each other's expertise, using each other's insights, and like how do we get each other to work together? So let's talk a little bit about how we set the program up.
George Abalekpor: It was a two-day symposium. We started off with that first day that was more educational. So we had three facilitated sessions with the goal of just kind of level setting and making sure that everyone was kind of on the same page in terms of like the lexicon and the framing of adolescence. So we had amazing session leaders who talked about themes of building capacity in youth, changing that perspective that we've been talking about, from viewing adolescence as a problem to viewing it as what it is, which is that hope and that stage of opportunity. And also talking about meaning and mattering and looking at innovation, in ways that different communities across the country are already working on having unique frameworks for approaching adolescence.
And my favorite part of day one was that although we had those kind of like TED talk-like sessions, it was still extremely interactive. People weren't getting talked at. There was conversation consistently throughout. We had round tables where we took that, like, motley crew-esque group of individuals that we brought in and we split them into round tables where they were sitting with people who were not in their industry.
Off the top of my head, I remember like we had the Dean of Harvard College sitting next to like a DC public high schooler, talking with an administrator from a JuCo, right, and it's like each table had that level of diversity and perspective. And they were all talking and engaging with discussion questions about these really important topics, and with that they were able to then take that information and go into day two, which was my favorite day because that's the day where we got to work, we got to ideate, and each of the roundtables actually created a framework. They created an idea that they felt was actually tangibly implementable, equitable, and scalable, as I talked about earlier, that dealt with a specific problem that they felt was facing youth.
And I really love the way that we approached this because the symposium wasn't about prescribing solutions for young people, but it was about building new systems and strategies alongside of them. Elly always says it best, you know, we had the expertise in researching, working with youth, but for the youth, their expertise was their lived experience. And that was probably the most crucial, probably, that was the most crucial insight to have in the room, to have them on equal footing and to co-create these ideas.
And we were able to have, I think, 12 different ideas from the round tables that were generated. And that was a great foundation, as you guys have said, that we can build upon now to take implementable ideas and put them into different communities.
Debra Wilson: Yeah, I loved that.
There was so much connection there, and to know we weren't just talking about people, right? Like the research that was coming forward, you know, that level setting was really, you know, it's kind of about all of us and we've all been through these periods of time, but also to have students there really hearing that, because I did, I enjoyed my conversations at different tables where people were like, now I actually understand why, you know, with the students. And now I understand why adults were doing some of these things. And by the way, you're missing the mark because that doesn't mean what you think it means, right? Like it was really eye-opening conversations.
Eleanor JB Daugherty: It was beautiful. And I will say they did not hold back. I think in the preparation, so every table had adolescents there to speak up as experts in their experience, that this was an equal table. And I thought, we'd have to coach them up a little bit. We'd have to, no. And I will forever remember this student who said, “You keep asking me how I am, and then you correct my tone of voice.”
And just this idea of, we need to get over ourselves. If we want to truly and authentically connect and create scholarship and practice that is meaningful for today's adolescent, we need to listen a bit more and abandon a little bit the watch your tone of voice, young lady. Those little corrective behaviors are actually stifling the presence, the authentic presence of adolescents. And these folks did not hold back in the conversations and I think really informed our outcomes as well.
George Abalekpor: Yeah, and if I may add, part of that as well was due to our framing of adolescence. I think that that had a real time effect in that room and it created an energy that empowered the youth to be able to make the contributions that they did make. We had all stars in our youth cohort, every single one of them. But I really believe that any young person could have walked into that room and gave a really insightful contribution because of the tone that was set and the empowerment that was being had.
Debra Wilson: George, just describe that a little bit because I could see like school folks listening to this podcast and saying, you know, I'd love to create something kind of like that, like just in my school, like how do I invite students to the table?
George Abalekpor: If you start the conversation by reassuring youth that, first of all, they are not a problem, and that there is so much potential and opportunity in that stage of development, it's going to change the outcome that you have.
If we started off by saying that we are here to figure out what the problem is with youth, a lot of the youth wouldn't have felt as empowered to speak their mind about ways that they felt we could create initiatives or interventions to affect them in a positive manner. There would have been a feeling instilled in them of, well, do I belong in this space? I'm the problem. How can I fix myself? I think that framing in general is something that you need to make integral and it needs to be explicit in any space that you're doing, especially in schools.
Educators obviously have best intentions, but it's very easy to kind of leave that to be an assumption, is to leave that thought that, you know, the youth matter and that the youth are our future and the opportunity. It's very easy to leave that implicit, but it's really important to make it explicit because surrounding youth with joy and with affirming language, and also with joyful spaces. We had a session talking about specifically how to build capacity in youth. And one of the biggest takeaways I had was that it's really important to actually surround youth with the energy that you want them to take in and then therefore replicate. If you allow youth to co-create and make the space alongside you, right? Like maybe like decorate or to ask them about how they want to approach certain things, you're empowering them in those actions. And I really realized that it's a lot of little things that kind of add up to create the space that makes youth comfortable to contribute to these conversations anyway.
And then the last thing I would say is to also assume that they want to actually participate. I feel like there's sometimes this connotation that, oh, youth, they don't want to get involved in the schools. They don't want to participate in conversations like these. There is a huge desire for dialogue, especially intergenerational dialogue, dialogue with people who are not in your age group, people who are older, because there's learning to be done on both ends. So assume best intention and create spaces that are joyful, that will create the energy you want to bring out.
Eleanor JB Daugherty: Yeah, and I'm just thinking of ways of how would I do that, right? And so I mean, I think a couple of things that have come out is, in a familiar structure in both university life and in high school life is like the role of a student advisory board that is there to advise your leadership. Some schools have taken it further, and they'll look at survey data out of NAIS or out of NCHA data if you're on the university side, and say, OK, we've got a problem with loneliness on our campus. How do we sit and listen with students and then make it actionable?
Allow the youth that you're meeting with to be co-partners, co-creators in resolving the issues that are coming up. It's a great way to just introduce critical thinking and problem solving and iterative development, which we know is so important for adolescents. But more importantly, it creates agency and a sense of co-ownership over their experience. And things will come out of that that you wouldn't have anticipated.
I pulled George into a challenge we were having here with our student organizations. And he was in a room that didn't have students in it, and we left the room. And he just gave me these words of wisdom, like, I think you're making the following assumptions about how a 20-year-old student is going to do this. And what if we just added a different perspective into the work and the partnership? Which fundamentally changed how we tackled that problem as a university.
The other piece that I so appreciated that independent schools were doing was, as they were launching assessment initiatives, they brought students into the art of assessment and learning how to give feedback that could be actionable. What are facts and feelings and how do you distinguish that in a leadership role as you are caring in common for the school that you call home?
And I think the other piece, and this is maybe easier for our residential communities, but a lot of us live on campus, whether it's in a university setting or a high school setting. And the degree to which you open up your home, you let them pet the dog, you chew on some pizza, and you really sort of drop the professionalism and become relatable and able to listen to the experience the students are sharing with you, is a great way to develop policy and practice at a localized level within individual schools. And we are uplifting toolkits that can be applied more broadly. Aspen's interested in doing that. Georgetown's about to partner with a large public on that as well. But there's a lot of local listening and acting that can be done.
Debra Wilson: Yeah, I just think it's so crucial and just thinking about how do you do this regularly enough? And particularly we'll be experimenting at NAIS a bit about this, around AI with students in December and really kind of going through a deliberative process with a lot of discernment about like, okay, like what are the upsides of AI? What are the downsides of AI? Like, what does this mean for students of the future?
What are the big takeaways for the two of you about, like, how do we truly build the capacity of youth so that they feel empowered to thrive and flourish into problem solvers and leaders, right? I know President DeGioia called it formation and flourishing, right?
Eleanor JB Daugherty: Yeah, yeah. First of all, I love this question. And I appreciate the timing of it as we now welcome the next class onto our campuses. There's a couple of things.
One, we got to undo perfect. And in many ways, the college admissions process is responsible for this.
Debra Wilson: I'm so glad you said that, now I don't have to point fingers at you.
Eleanor JB Daugherty: Yeah. And I don't know a better way to do it. And I love all my friends at admissions and I'm grateful for the students they bring here.
And again, my focus, I really think, from middle school on, the formation process for students is how are you perfect? How do you choose the classes that you know you'll do well in? Do the SAT prep that you'll ace, do the activities and organizations that you'll know you'll succeed in, because it will look good in that application process, which really stymies being creative, being yourself, trying something you haven't tried before. And I want to offer that as just sort of context, that I think universities have a role in playing and undoing perfect.
And I don't know that I can fix the college admissions process. But I do know that as educators, we could work together to undo perfect. And with that comes, I think the goal of all of us is to teach three things.
One, care. How do we care for each other? Authentically care. This is where I think a lot about in social, we see a lot of perfection. I often, when I'm speaking to high school students in particular, have them Google me. And I'm like, I look fabulous, don't I? And it's a beautiful headshot and there's a lot of makeup. And then I'll say, now look at me really. Like, these are two different things. So how do we truly care for each other and understand each other for who we are?
The second is curiosity. There's another Hoya fellow that also works as my TA in classes that we've developed to teach sort of how to undo perfect, how to engage in community with others.
That comes with asking questions, not knowing the answers. The SAT doesn't allow a lot of room for you to ask, well, I don't know if I see the answer the same way as you do. One of the reasons why I didn't go to law school was I kept debating with the LSAT on what the right answer was. So how do we open up curiosity and questioning?
When I introduce students to each other in the room, and many of them will open with sort of this is my major, and it's very elaborate and far more refined than when I sit with many doctoral students, someone will eventually be brave enough in that room and say, I don't know. And that's the most powerful thing a student can say, because with that comes curiosity and questioning and discovery. So care and curiosity.
And the third one, which I think is increasingly important, is how do we teach conflict and not polarization, not hiding when there is disagreement, but choosing to meaningfully engage in conflict and disagreement so we might discover new things and discover how to care better for each other? Those three things should be fundamental to how we educate as educators. And the how is determined as we develop pedagogy and our syllabi. But care, curiosity, and conflict need to be the levers for undoing perfect. And I think that's very much a combined effort for all of us.
Debra Wilson: I love that, particularly the undoing perfect idea, because it's sort of where George started, right? Like George, it sounds like one of the things you've sort of reveled in is like, I'm going to mess up and I'm going to be allowed to mess up and then I get to improve it. You know, the faster I mess up, actually, the better it gets more quickly. And so you do, you do build those kinds of calluses against perfection.
But it's sort of ironic that we have to get almost through education before we have more of those learning moments. So, I don't know, George, what are your thoughts on that?
George Abalekpor: Yeah, I'll retweet everything Elly said, because I think she hit it on the head. I think we have to find a way, as you said, to teach those skills using our education instead of having to wait for the schooling to be over to learn those things. I'm thinking back to the symposium again, and I remember one of the biggest takeaways that the youth had because in addition to those table ideas, they actually got the opportunity to go back and sit with their youth cohort and actually like critique them, and come back to the large group and let us know which gaps they identified, what they liked, what they didn't like, and then just their general takeaways. And one of the biggest takeaways that they had was that they want a lot more intentional education in social and emotional learning. That was one of the things that was like a consensus amongst all of the youth, is that they felt like their education right now wasn't focused around these like, crucial skills.
I remember they made a good point that they always hear these skills referred to as soft skills in their education, but they wanted to be referred to as, like, life skills, because these are the things that they feel are integral to being human and to flourishing. They talked about conflict resolution, civic dialogue, relationship building, things that you feel again are more like implicit or can be kind of learned later as you go, but need to be explicitly taught to students. And I think that those skills are what are needed to kind of get rid of that sense of perfection or that feeling that your schooling isn't relevant.
Like one of the table ideas, the title that they put was “What's the point?” Their framework was trying to address issues that the youth had with not feeling a sense of meaning or purpose in their schooling. So youth, I think more than anything, they want to feel as though their schooling matters. They want to feel that they are getting a sense of meaning and purpose in their education. And I think to tie it all together, I think co-creation is an answer to that solution. It's something that I think is tangible, can be honestly pretty easily developed in all educational spaces, and it allows for meaning because when you give youth an opportunity to be active participants in not just affecting policies, but affecting policies that specifically impact them and communities that they're involved in, there's automatically a sense of purpose that is attached to that.
Your actions have a little extra meaning. Like, I feel so much more purpose knowing that like the stuff I'm doing in this work is directly impacting my peers and my age group and my fellow Georgetown friends here. And finding that sense of mattering, I think, is huge. And I think co-creation and meaningful co-creation is an effective way to achieve that.
Debra Wilson: Yeah, I love that. You're reminding me, we had some descriptions of students that they felt like their education didn't matter sometimes to the very people who were teaching them. Those relationships, and we know relationships are the key to education, but some of what the students were sharing about either being disregarded or teachers sort of phoning it in, AI has certainly popped up.
There's been a thread of stories this summer about students, interestingly in grad school programs, sort of saying, you know, is this MBA, is this course, is a set of programs like, relevant to what I'm actually going to be doing? And, you know, is this university actually paying attention to what we really need going out into the world next? Right? And it is changing so fast. I don't know how you do that without some co-creation, but you know, that purpose you're talking about, like if you feel like the very container in which you're learning doesn't actually care about you. I mean, those were really sad examples that I felt like we had there.
So the opportunities for people to come together and do some co-creation and really have that buy-in and purposeful conversations about what are we trying to do, particularly with the people who are experiencing the programs, I think have become more crucial over time.
So we'll close out here, just one last question. What are you both hopeful about in terms of this work moving forward?
George Abalekpor: I'm just, I'm hopeful about implementing the frameworks and just the overall thinking and perspectives that we were able to kind of establish at the symposium. I feel like I try to be pragmatic, and sometimes when I get stuck in like the theory, I get frustrated because I look for like practical solutions to problems that I face, and the symposium really gave me hope that there is actually like a tangible way forward in terms of finding ways to actually like instill meaning in youth and to allow them to thrive at a scalable level.
And I say that because I was able to see in real time just how these changes that we're implementing at the symposium can actually have an effect. I've been able to see through my fellowship how co-creation actually does work, and how it actually allows for youth to develop effectively and to showcase the talents that they already have.
So these frameworks surrounding co-creation, and surrounding empowering youth and allowing for a shift in language regarding how we talk about adolescence is something that is possible. It's something that, when done, does work. And I'm just excited to see us continue to find ways to implement that in spaces and to go big. I'm really hopeful that this is something that we can take to any space and any community and can kind of like, work into the fabric of different spaces and adjust to the needs of different communities in different ways. So I'm excited for that.
Debra Wilson: Elly?
Eleanor JB Daugherty: Thank you, George, for going first. And the reason why I have you do that, and you know this if you're in my class with me, I open class by saying, you are my joy. Because I don't think we tell students enough. You know, very direct. I think it's implied all the time. But it's never said as explicitly as it needs to be said. And instead, we sort of surround ourselves with language of crisis and uncertain times.
I don't want to dismiss that. It's true. But growing up is uncertain. Being human is uncertain. It is fundamental to being a person in the world. And we can problematize that, or we can see the possibility of that. The possibility of making connections with people that are real, and not based on being perfect and having perfect hair and makeup every day. The possibility that exists when you say, just jump in the deep end, and if you fail, no biggie, we'll just, we'll pick up and start over again.
And that's really the reason why we named the conference what we named it. And we named it The Promise, Possibility, and Power of Adolescence. There was no fear, there was no perpetual crisis. There was no, if they just put the cell phones down, everything will be fine. Instead, we engaged on those principles of power and the hope that students create for ourselves and for the future and the possibility that exists when we come together around the table and figure it out. And that is our promise. That is our promise to growing up. That is our promise to our youth. And as colleagues, that's our promise to each other.
And so I'm really committed. I know Georgetown is, I know Aspen is, I know NAIS is, and I know George is, to making sure those integrated intergenerational conversations continue with outcomes, with toolkits and articles and work. And George and Rose, the other fellow, are working on an article right now on the deep end, which I think is going to be fantastic. There is a lot of momentum and energy in that because we're speaking to our truth, and we're just activating it among a bigger audience. And I think there's more of that to come. And we just welcome friends and partners along the way, like you, Debra.
Debra Wilson: Excellent. Excellent. I cannot think of a better note to end on. So thank you both for joining us on New View EDU. And yeah, I can't wait for the work together ahead. I'm really looking forward to it. So thank you both.