Rethinking Higher Education

15/10/2025 11 min Episodio 10
Rethinking Higher Education

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Episode Synopsis

This episode of The Educator's Lens follows Dr. Olaby reflecting on how a Harvard Graduate School of Education course reshaped her views on admissions, evaluation, and teaching. Key ideas include Kahn’s critique of democratic inequality, Freire’s problem-posing alternative to the banking model, and Yosso’s community cultural wealth.
She describes concrete changes she made revising participation criteria, expanding access to mentorship, using pulse check-ins and peer circles, and introducing the H-U-M-A-N framework (Honor lived experience, Understand context, Motivate meaning, Adapt feedback, Nurture growth), to support first-generation and working-class students in technical fields.
The episode closes with a call for equity audits and policy redesign to lift standards in ways that recognize students’ assets, foster belonging, and dismantle hidden hierarchies in higher education.

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