Guiding Impactful Change in Education with Paula Elksne

Meet Paula Elksne, a Latvian researcher who focuses on education innovation. She uses her openness and genuine interest in the world to connect with people. In her work, Paula wants to foster honesty, equality, and happiness, and to strive for bigger goals. Her passion lies in exploring new ideas and sharing them with others.

Paula loves creating and executing new projects and initiatives, and she spent a year with BAFF in Boston at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she was a researcher in the Abdul Latif Jamel World Education Lab, to research innovation diffusion and change management in higher education. Today, she's a director of the Education Innovation Lab at Riga Business School and is a guest on the Beyond BAFF podcast.

Paula joined Tiina for a Beyond BAFF podcast episode to talk more about his journey in science and other aspirations in life. Listen to the full episode.

Let's start with how you chose the field of education innovation. How did it come about?

That's a really good question. I studied business administration, which isn’t maybe the usual field that you start with to end up working in education and researching education.

But actually in my family, in many generations from my mom's side, people have worked in education. So I always had this vision that working in education would be my second career because I would mainly do other things.

But somehow it didn't work out that way. I worked in the industry after getting my bachelor's degree for just a little bit, and then I went back to working in education. And I got really interested and fascinated by advancing new initiatives in this field. I'm passionate about bringing new ideas to life and, and also integrating them into the education system, which can be hard and tricky sometimes.

And how can one bring innovation to education? Do you have to be a teacher at one school or can you do it on a bigger scale somehow?

The answer is yes to both. That's one of the questions that we try to answer every day and that I was looking into when I was doing my research in the U.S. That’s also what we think about in the Education Innovation Laboratory at Riga Business School.

Of course, each teacher, professor, or educator in a broader sense can bring new ideas and new approaches to their classrooms. So you can start there on the individual level. And I do believe that sometimes it's the most impactful one because those are the people who actually work with kids, young people, or in general, people who want to develop themselves. So if you create a meaningful learning experience, it goes a long way.

But this type of change can be very slow and clustered. So even if you have a star professor in one school or university, there are many others who might not be able to follow the same approaches. And if we want to raise the bar for the system, we need to make sure we find ways how to integrate the new initiatives and change mindsets.

And at the country level, when I was in the U.S., I was looking at how innovation is moved forward and fostered from the national perspective. And that's, of course, a very, very tricky and slow process, but it can be very impactful in the long term, I believe.

Can you mention some specific examples of how U.S. education and the approach to education is different than the one in Latvia?

There are quite many things, actually. The biggest difference not just in Latvia but the whole of Europe is how specialized the bachelor programs are. In most cases, when you apply for a bachelor’s program, you choose to study biology or math, or whatever, something quite specific. But in the U.S., you apply for a bachelor's degree. Of course, you can already indicate what your major will be, like a specialization, but you start with general requirements. So, there are a lot of subjects that everyone has to take.

That's a really big difference because bachelor studies in the U.S. are completely, completely different. You have to choose what you want to do maybe after the second year or during the third year. You're a little bit older, you have already had some experience in the university.

Another thing is the facilities that universities offer. In the U.S., you basically have a small city there. We are starting to develop this type of campus in Latvia, as well, but in the U.S., they're so advanced. On the university campus, there's everything. You don't ever have to leave that place. You can live there, eat there, you have a hairdresser there, the gym is there. You don't really have to worry about anything and you can just focus on your studies.

As you're working in the Education Innovation Lab at Riga Business School, is it one of your goals to find ways to make sure students don't need to work besides the university and can focus only on studies and self-development?

That's actually a really good question. Our goal at the Education Innovation Lab is to create a platform and a community where changemakers can try out bold ideas that can create impactful change in education. So I do see that this could be one thing that we could be working towards, but our goal at the lab is more about providing the support and resources that people who are implementing change projects need to move forward.

We want to foster a more systemic change, bold ideas, and a willingness to try out new things. We want to make sure that we are there as a resource to help people go through the process and make sure that their ideas don't stay on paper, but that we go to the universities and see those things happening.

So far, we've done two rounds of that, and it's amazing to see that the projects are moving forward.

I saw on your LinkedIn that you’ve also done a boot camp in Namibia. Can you share something about that as well?

For the last two and a half, almost three years now, I have been involved in an amazing project. It's called She Rebuilds the World and the main organization that created and started the project is SELV, which is a diaspora professional organization in Latvia.

Their goal with this project was to build connections also with other countries with an idea of potential economic exchange in the future, like import and export. And then we as RBS are part of this project as an academic partner.

I think it's an amazing opportunity to work with girls in Namibia, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. The program goes like this—we do a boot camp there. So we go there, build a little bit of the community vibe, and get them inspired. Afterwards, they do a full semester of studies online together with our Riga Business School students. And all of that is to develop their entrepreneurial skills.

The first cohort finished and they were very, very happy. And now we're working with the second one. I have had a fantastic opportunity to do this boot camp twice in Namibia and once in Zambia, and those are three very challenging days because it’s a group of 60 ladies. They are super active, and very much willing to learn. So after those three days, I feel quite dead, even though I consider myself an energetic person. But it's very rewarding.

Next year we will expand the program, and we’ll be adding Rwanda and Ethiopia to the group of countries that will be part of the project.

What are some other things that you're passionate about at the moment?

Finding work-life balance. That's something that I'm very passionate about at the moment because we do have so many interesting initiatives going on that it's very easy to get carried away and continue doing the work. But that's more on a personal level.

We are also doing a lot of things related to digitalization. I am not an expert in that by any means, but I am interested in the potential change that could happen in business, society, and education with AI specifically.

I'm interested in understanding what all of these tools mean for education Maybe we will somehow integrate all of them, which will completely change how we see studying and education.

As we start wrapping up the conversation, what were the biggest things you gained from this year in the U.S. with COVID in the background?

It was definitely an amazing year and I'm very thankful for the opportunity. I remember when my parents came to visit me and I showed them the campus, I said that I didn’t think I’d ever be able to do a normal job again. So I think it gave me kind of a new way to look at my career, the things that I do, and the questions that I want to think about daily.

Overall, the MIT community is just fascinating and mind-blowing. The people that you get to meet there are very inspiring. There are Nobel laureates and people who have made amazing discoveries, and they're just walking around like normal people. So that made me understand that you don't have to be that special to do something. You have to be committed to doing that.

And it was great to hear their stories, how they just found that problem that they wanted to solve and they just did everything to solve it. That was quite inspiring for me. So getting to know that community, I didn't want to go back because it just felt like I was starting to fully be immersed in it and there was so much more I wanted to learn.

Is there anything else you would like to add before we wrap up?

If you’re doubting whether you should apply for a BAFF program or not, and you're listening to this, I just highly encourage you to take this step. It will be so cool—you will get to explore your interests and the world, and I think that's the best combination.

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