by Dana Cognetta Fritchie, AIWC Frankfurt, and Lindsay Nygren, AWC Central Scotland
The Education Team welcomed its new co-chair, Dana Cognetta Fritchie, and is moving forward with renewed energy and focus. At the Malta Interim Meeting, Dana shared the vision for the Team’s future, which aligns with SDG 4. You can view the presentation slides here.
A refocused framework
Dana introduced six focus areas to guide the Education Team’s work:
- Foundational Literacy & Numeracy: Early childhood and family literacy, multilingual and mother-tongue learning, adult and adolescent literacy recovery, and numeracy as economic agency.
- Equal Access & Inclusive Education: Gender equity and girls’ retention, disability and neurodiversity inclusion, language access and culturally responsive pedagogy, and safe, child-sensitive learning environments.
- Lifelong & Continuing Education: Workforce re-entry and vocational pathways, entrepreneurship and financial literacy, micro-credentialing and digital skills, and mentorship and leadership development.
- Digital & Future-Ready Learning: Digital literacy for women and girls, AI literacy and ethical technology use, STEM access for girls, and addressing algorithmic bias.
- Education in Crisis & Conflict: Refugee education pathways, trauma-informed learning models, continuity of learning in fragile contexts, and Target Project storytelling pathways.
- Advocacy, Policy & Global Citizenship: Global citizenship education, SDG awareness and advocacy tools, UN framework engagement, and measuring outcomes versus outputs.
One guiding question
The team is organizing its work around a single question: How can we use education to inspire action? Their answer has three parts:
- Make the invisible visible. Educational exclusion is usually hidden in plain sight. The team will highlight data, stories, and lived experiences that reveal the real human cost—for girls, women, and entire communities.
- Lower the barrier to participation. Give clubs ready-to-use toolkits, discussion guides, and event frameworks so that taking action requires momentum, not expertise.
- Connect learning to doing. Every awareness event, book discussion and webinar should end with a concrete next step—a local partner to contact, a resource to share, an action to take.
What's ahead in 2026
The Education Team has several initiatives planned for the coming year:
- Beyond the Bias: A webinar series on women, girls and artificial intelligence
- Banned Book Week: October 2026
- Every Mind Belongs: A webinar series on neurodiversity, disability, and inclusive education—because every child deserves a classroom that works for them
