Q&A With Rhonda Broussard, Founder and CEO of Beloved Community and Aurora Institute Symposium Keynoter

Aurora’s Communications Director Chiara Wegener recently had the chance to sit down with Beloved Community’s Rhonda Broussard, who will be keynoting at the Aurora Institute Symposium 2024 in New Orleans this November.

CW: Your book, One Good Question, explores how the investments countries make in their education systems reflect their values. Can you share the key insights that you came away with in the process of writing your book?
RB: The leaders I interviewed had a range of roles and experiences–from program leaders, to superintendents, to CEOs, to university presidents–all of whom held a deep belief that education can be different, and took action to do something about it. 

The first insight I had while in the process of writing my book was that deep learning can come from every level of the community. You will absolutely learn something new from people who sit in different seats in the education system. As leaders in the work, we have the opportunity to learn as much from a parent or an afterschool staff member as we do a superintendent of curriculum and instruction. Don’t limit yourself by pre-determining who can inform your learning journey. 

I consider myself a Global Citizen–I’m a French speaker from Louisiana; I’ve raised my kids speaking our language. I’ve studied and traveled on six continents. But I still process ideas and strategy through a very American lens. I’ll never forget my conversation with Zaki Hasan from Bangladesh. We were talking about workforce development, and specifically workforce development for underserved populations who hadn’t completed school. My American lens kicked in right away, and I immediately thought about opportunity youth. The more we talked and listened, I understood that we weren’t talking about the same groups of people. His target audience was adult women who had not been able to complete elementary school. We had totally different concepts of who we had in mind in this conversation. Probably the biggest insight that I had during the process of interviewing folks and writing my book was that you have to be willing to give something up in order to learn something new. 

CW: How can we apply those insights to reshaping and re-envisioning the education system at home here in the U.S.?
RB: No country thinks they’re doing it right. No one I spoke with said, “let me tell you everything we’re doing right, and why every country should follow us.” Everyone was invested in talking about what success looked like for where they were, and where they were trying to get to for the next generation. I had conversations with a Finnish entrepreneur who said something along the line of: “We’re not doing school well enough in Finland, because we’re not producing enough Finnish entrepreneurs. What can we learn, how can we take what’s worked well here for generations, and at the same time create space for entrepreneurship and leadership?” This was fascinating to hear this viewpoint from a country that consistently ranks very highly on PISA.

CW: Did you find that high performing nations (according to traditional standards) were always thinking about what comes next? Did they have a sort of culture of continuous improvement?
RB: Well, most of the folks I talked with were thinking about what parts of the American education experience they could bring back to their communities. But I’m really interested in thinking about ‘what’s a continental pedagogy that isn’t influenced by Western culture?’ Maybe that will be my next book!

I spoke with a university leader in Brazil, who told me that they don’t have liberal arts schools there. It’s not a part of the system. You go to high school, take your placement exams, and if you’re going onto postsecondary, you start school in a particular subject area. If it turns out it’s not the right fit for you, you essentially have to start the college application process over. So this Brazilian leader created a two year liberal arts program (similar to how college students in the U.S. may spend some time testing things out before deciding upon their major). This is revolutionary for Brazil; so I think it’s important to remember that things we take for granted in some places are actually quite revolutionary in others. 

CW: You’re joining us as a keynoter for the Aurora Institute Symposium. Can you give our attendees a little preview of what they can expect? I know you’ll be joined by young people for an invigorating conversation!
RB: One of my biggest regrets around the experience of writing my book is that I didn’t interview young people. So, this is that opportunity! We’re going to be having a conversation with young people about how they’re experiencing our investments. Folks interpret investments in very different ways depending upon their role and perspective–some people go to literal dollars and cents and funding formulas. Others are thinking about opportunities–what are the programmatic things that countries are investing in that are providing such opportunities? 

At the Symposium, we’ll be chatting with a middle schooler, a high schooler, and a college student, each of whom have been equipped with youth participatory action research to reflect on questions about their own learning experiences. 

So during our conversation, I’m going to ask them about my one good question: In what ways are you experiencing these investments as part of your capacity to lead? Which of these investments are receiving within your K-12 experience, and which are outside of the K-12 experience? We’ll wrap up with the young people telling us what their one good question for the audience is. 

CW: As you know, the Aurora Institute’s focus is around transforming education systems through personalized, competency-based education. From your perspective, how can personalized, competency-based education serve as an equity lever?
RB: The promise of personalized learning at a population level is still the most exciting thing to me. The extent to which we can democratize and personalize learning is our best chance to achieve educational equity for all of our learners. My youngest awakening as a social justice and equity warrior was in elementary school, being placed in a Talented and Gifted program and seeing that we had access to supports and opportunities that other learners did not. These opportunities were in essence a lot of personalized and student-driven learning experiences. 

During COVID, my son left a highly regarded public school in our community to join a small, private micro-school. The way that we rolled out online learning during COVID was not personalized learning, and it did not serve my son, or many students for that fact, well. But once he was able to enter a learning community that was small, personalized, and hands on, he felt his most successful. He felt the smartest that he’d ever been in school. He’d come home talking about his ‘big brain.’ Going to a micro-school allowed him to go deep into content that was interesting to him. 

One of the things that I focus on in my book is exploring who has the right to innovative pedagogy. Where are innovations happening, and where are they not happening? If we’re going to get to deep, competency-based learning, we have to really interrogate these questions. 

CW: Is there anything else you’d want to add?
RB: I keep thinking back to the experience of classroom educators, because I know that there will be many in the room at the Symposium. I’d like to give a shout out to Mrs. Benjamin–she was the only Black teacher in my Talented and Gifted program, and she was a community anchor; a presence. She was encouraging, made space for productive struggle, and allowed students time to find their voice and passion. My wish is for all students to have a Mrs. Benjamin, and I know many that will be in attendance at Symposium are Mrs. Benjamins too! 

Lastly, I’ll leave you with a conversation that I had in the process of book writing that really resonated with me. It was this notion of: “Are you preparing your students to be your peers? Do you envision these young people as your actual peers–your intellectual peers, your leadership peers, and are you designing learning experiences for them to support this?”