Help Olafare continue his journey as an educator

On Pi day, I received my offer to study for a Master of Education (Ed.M.) in International and Comparative Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. As an educator with the privilege of ancestor-educators, it certainly is a full-circle moment. By God’s beautiful design, it is my turn to become an exceptional educator.

My name is Samuel Olafare Olagbaju, and I am a systems thinker and education researcher based in Lagos. My goal at Teachers College is to learn how to create innovative and adaptable education models that mediate the emergence of agency in Global South children and adolescents.

This is urgent as global education systems leaders work to bridge the gap between traditional curriculum and pedagogy, and the complex shifts we observe in the labor market—climate cognition, future of work, and artificial intelligence. I am building a school where I can bridge practice with cutting-edge education research, and support teachers, students, and families in pursuing value-aligned learning pathways that prepare learners for the demands of the future global economy. But first, I am getting an Ed.M. at Columbia.

I was first inspired to become an educator during my AmeriCorps service year at St. Vincent de Paul in Cincinnati, Ohio. I facilitated an adult empowerment program called Getting Ahead in the city’s poorest neighborhood. As I learned about “mental models” and how they shape our perceptions of reality, I realized that a person’s environment shapes their thinking more profoundly than periodic interventions can. For my participants, certain mental models ensured their immediate survival, and unlearning them felt unsafe. Being confronted with these rigid adult schemas made me curious about preventative interventions: fostering adaptive mindsets in Nigerian children, minimizing psychological and social threats to child development, and cura personalis.

For over seven years, I have served as an education advisor to students who seek to leave Nigeria for tertiary education in the United States. Along with intellectual growth and the disorienting dilemmas that have made my students resilient learners, is the knowledge that their educational path could have been better. My students have motivated me to ask the question: “How can Nigerian primary and secondary schools use curriculum design and pedagogy to cultivate cognitive schemas that enhance child agency?”

Currently, no academic study discusses how Nigerian primary and secondary schools can mediate agency in children using systems thinking methods. My research objective is to illuminate how modifying simple rules within education ecosystems affects emergent outcomes for children and their families. In particular, I am interested in drawing lessons from high-performing school systems worldwide to serve as a guide for bolstering Nigeria's primary and secondary school systems.

So far, I have yet to secure institutional and external funding to attend Teachers College. Therefore, I invite you to donate to my GoFundMe—I am raising $88,000 to cover my expenses at Columbia. I am privileged to have ancestor-educators who have shaped some of Nigeria's sharpest minds and the world as we know it. Join me as I take up the torch and work to create sustainable Global South education models in the imagination age! Please share with your friends, colleagues, and fellow educators. Share this post far and wide, and know that my students and I would appreciate anything you donate to this fundraiser. Feel free to message me for more information or a conversation. Thank you, and God bless you all.