Joseph Levitan, PhD is an associate professor in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education at McGill University. His work focuses on community-based participatory methodologies to address community-defined challenges in education and development. Sitting at the intersection of policy and leadership studies, his work focuses on developing processes and evaluating impacts of collaborative work with youth, adults, and community leaders. Dr. Levitan works with communities throughout the Americas to identify context-specific challenges, culturally grounded methods to address those challenges, and processes to put those methods into action. Through this work he has co-developed methods such as the Student Voice Research Framework, Culturally Grounded Curriculum Development, and Accidental Ethnography. He currently holds multiple grants to engage in this work in Peru, Canada, and the United States.
Dr. Levitan has won multiple awards for his research and teaching, including the A. Noam Chomsky Global Connections Award as an Emerging Scholar from the Society of Transnational Academic Researchers; the Heather Reisman and Gerald Schwartz Award for Excellence in Teaching from the McGill Faculty of Education; and a Doctor Honoris Causa (Honorary Doctorate) from the national postdoctoral research society of Peru. His work has appeared in journals such as Teachers College Record, American Journal of Education, and Action Research. His 2022 co-authored book, Student Voice Research: Theory Methods and Innovations from the Field (TC Press), offers insights into how adults can do better research work with students to improve schools and social systems.
Mekin is the founder & CEO of Udhyam Learning Foundation - a Non-profit that has enabled entrepreneurial mindsets for over 16 lakh govt school & ITI students across 8 states in India and an annual income uplift of Rs. 20 Cr for 5000 Istri entrepreneurs. He is also a co-founder of Global Alliance for Mass Entrepreneurship (G.A.M.E) and Social Change at ACT Grants and an independent board member at TeamLease. As an Angel investor & philanthropist, he is focused on creating impact at scale in the fields of human capital & Ed-techs with investments in companies like Urban company & Quizizz. An engineer by education, Mekin started his career at Yahoo! and has held entrepreneurial roles throughout his career. Before Udhyam, he helped Flipkart through its scale journey. An early leader at Flipkart, starting from when the company was in a 2-room house, building & leading the most impactful technology team in the country to eventually playing the role of Chief People Officer for 35k strong team.
Kunal is a research scholar at the Department of Integrated Studies in Education at McGill University. His research interests lie in exploring how agentic thinking and decision-making are developed using curricular interventions. His doctoral project examines how students use their agency to manage their goals, shape their perceptions and negotiate to find their voice in society.
Positioned at the intersection of academia and developmental practice, his work also pushes the binaries of traditional research by adopting participatory frameworks and longitudinal research designs to understand the dynamic impacts that entrepreneurship and 21st-century curricula have on students. He collaborates with stakeholders across strategic, design and pedagogical portfolios to curate meaningful data-based stories from his research.
Kunal also brings significant experience as a curriculum designer and trainer, having led curriculum design teams and participatory curriculum design processes for large-scale non-governmental organisations in India. Through his work with young people, he aims to create and amplify more holistic and enabling spaces in which youth can thrive.
Syeda Asia is a researcher and a participatory design practitioner in the field of education, entrepreneurship and sociology of work in India. As a senior specialist at Udhyam Learning Foundation, she has designed the student-led entrepreneurial action programme for Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs). Asia was a research scholar at the Delhi School of Economics where she conducted a comparative study between 500 distinct grassroots and large-scale entrepreneurs on how they form public-private consortia to drive social impact in India. Asia is a co-founder at AeSha, a multi-disciplinary gender-focused lab that co-designs innovations with communities for women’s entrepreneurship and civic solutions in low-income settlements. She has received several prestigious international awards and grants for further research rooted in participatory methods of social design. She has been a Global Emerging Scholar awardee twice for her excellence in action research and design. Her work has been recognised at the European Group of Organisational Studies, Germany; the European Council of South Asian Studies, Paris; and the Common Ground Research Network, United States. Asia has previously worked with the Rishi Valley Institute for Educational Resources (RiVER), and Krishnamurti Foundation India for their Teacher Enrichment Programme focused on pre-service and in-service government school teachers. As part of the project core team, she led the curriculum design and pilot testing efforts for the course.
Ashwin Mohan, PhD is a Senior Research Specialist at Udhyam Learning Foundation. With a doctoral degree in Curriculum & Instruction and a background in Physics and Mathematics, Dr. Mohan’s work focuses on understanding longitudinal identity formation within communities of practice through sustained participation. In particular, his work explores the intersections and tensions between personal identities participants bring to settings as newcomer learners, and the professional identities that are discursively determined as productive to adopt within epistemic cultures. With research methodologies that draw from the ethnographic tradition and rooted in the philosophical tradition of pragmatic epistemology, his work has focused on how individuals are formed into subjects within epistemic regimes. The findings of his work have implications for curriculum design, participatory research principles and the epistemic foundations of educational experiences.
Aside from his research, Dr. Mohan brings many years of experience as a curriculum designer and instructor to the lab. Having designed and taught courses across a wide variety of disciplinary areas ranging from high school physics and calculus, to public speaking and debate, his teaching philosophy draws from the funds of knowledge and community-led design perspectives. His work across research and teaching looks to bring student agency to the fore in determining the structures of education from the design of classroom discursive structures, the participatory structures of the community, and the very learning outcomes that determine the shape of the experience.
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