Ateneo GBSEALD & Boston College's Lynch School of Education concretize partnership

Almost a year after the signing of an MOU between Ateneo de Manila and Boston College, Fr Johnny Go SJ, Dean of the Gokongwei Brothers School of Education and Learning Design (GBSEALD), flew to Boston to meet with our partners at the Lynch School of Education and Human Development (Lynch School). For one week, Fr Go met with various administrators of the Lynch School and the university to discuss some exciting possibilities of collaboration between our two schools of education.

While many of these still require further study and development, the projects identified have great potential, especially in terms of benefits for our students:

• A dual degree, possibly in Educational Leadership
• Joint research projects between the faculties of our schools of education, as well as with the Roche Center for Catholic Education
• A graduate course offered with Boston College (BC) and Sophia University in Tokyo through Collaborative Online International Education (COIL) (via BC’s Center for International Higher Education)
• A partnership between the Ateneo SALT Institute and BC’s Center for Digital Innovation in Learning (CDIL) in the area of instructional design services and faculty training and support in online learning
• Collaboration between BC’s Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies and our Ignatian Initiative for Teacher Excellence (IGNITE) in jointly offering two 3-unit courses in our Learning by Refraction approach to Ignatian Pedagogy and the Learning by Discernment approach to Ignatian Leadership for the IAJS’s Certificate for Jesuit Studies and the Lynch School’s Masters in Jesuit Education in a Global World

For his course on the Internationalization of Higher Education, Dr Gerardo Blanco of the Center for International Higher Education took the opportunity to invite Fr Go to record an interview about the state of higher education in the Philippines. It provided an excellent opportunity as well for Fr Go to see how the team at the Center for Digital Innovation in Learning operates in providing support to BC’s faculty in the production of instructional media.

Fr Go describes the one-week visit as tiring but productive. “It was great to finally meet face-to-face the people we’ve been talking to over Zoom the past year,” he said. “Nothing like these personal encounters to strengthen the partnership between our schools of education. Just thinking of the projects discussed, I can’t help but feel excited for our students.”