After completing his travels, Julio shared the following summary of his time in Ahmedabad:

I attended the I CAN Children’s Global Summit on behalf of my home country (Ecuador) and Diseña Futuro, an educational social enterprise I co-founded. The Riverside School, the recipient of the World’s Best School Prize for Innovation 2023, hosted this event. This summit gathered +400 educators and students that are engaged in the Design for Change global network and have carried out social innovation projects impacting their local communities. This event celebrated the students’ sense of ownership and agency over issues that matter to them through masterclasses, hands-on workshops, play fairs, and the showcase of +40 stories of change led by children worldwide.

I had the opportunity to present Ecuador’s leading projects while engaging in conversation with leading educators, such as Kiran Sethi (founder of Riverside), Andreas Schleicher (Director for Education and Skills of the OECD), Shaheen Mistri (CEO of Teach for India), among others. Amid this celebration, educators accessed training workshops while networking with other teachers, thus enriching their instructional practice.

Following the summit, I participated in an immersion experience at The Riverside School with educators from Brazil, Japan, Taiwan, and India. Through student-led workshops, classroom observations, stakeholder meetings, and group reflections, we experienced the school’s culture, pedagogy, and humane curriculum firsthand. If students in Teachers College wish to participate in experiences like those mentioned above, contact the institutional partner of Design for Change in their respective country or me for more information.