Author: Nelson Rosario

When you walk into a dance studio for the first time, you feel a certain way of nerves. The tunes are already on. It looks like everyone else knows something you don’t. You start to question whether you made a mistake somewhere between the mirror walls and the strange rhythms. That feeling goes away faster than you might think at Piel Canela Dance School in Midtown Manhattan. Piel Canela has been open since 2000 on the 12th floor of Pearl Studios at 500 8th Avenue. That’s a really long time to keep someone’s attention in New York City. At its…

It is said that Conrad K. Sangma remembers a time when he first became Chief Minister of Meghalaya in 2018. Someone asked him what he was going to do better. He didn’t promise a big change in policy. In the words of author Shiv Khera, he said he wouldn’t change anything, but he would change how he did things. It sounds like something from a business class. In real life, it seems to be shaping something more important. In June, a three-day Early Childhood Development Implementation Science Workshop was held in Shillong. During that time, Sangma talked about this philosophy…

When the Treasury releases He Tirohanga Mokopuna, its 2025 Long-term Fiscal Statement, and watches it land with the weight of a document that says in careful government language what advocates and researchers at OMEP Aotearoa have been trying to say for years, it’s almost like a quiet victory. Not with a sound. Not with a show. Only with facts and a growing feeling that New Zealand has been slow to care about its own future. Not a big deal, the report. Not many Treasury reports are. But the picture it paints is enough to wake you up. In 1965, seven…

Some people get very angry when everyone in the room agrees on what the problem is but nothing is done to fix it. It’s kind of like how people in Britain’s early years sector feel right now. The proof is here. The interventions do their job. And the cuts are still going on. Researchers went all over the UK earlier this year to talk to grant recipients, local governments, and groups that work directly with young families. It wasn’t really surprising what they told them, but it did make them think. The need is getting bigger. For more than ten…

Something very interesting is going on in British early years education. Childminders who work from living rooms and back gardens are already incorporating sustainability into their services, while formal nurseries with their staffing structures, compliance calendars, and governance committees are still debating how to do it. Not going to talk about it. Getting it. Possible that this has something to do with the framework itself. The OMEP UK’s Early Childhood Education for Sustainable Citizenship is based on what kids already know, notice, and care about. It seems to work better in places where one person makes the decisions and can…

Today, if you walk onto almost any major university campus in the United States, you’ll notice right away: students stream lectures on their laptops before class even starts, AI-powered tutoring tools open in browser tabs next to course readings, and administrative systems are so automated that a student can sign up, pay, and appeal a grade without talking to a single person. It works, but it can be cold at times. It does work, though. And it doesn’t exist in most of the developing world. There is a difference between how digital tools are used in higher education in the…

In most American schools, there is a teacher at the front, students at desks, and some kind of curriculum on the wall. These are all signs of organized learning. That doesn’t look like what’s going on at a small experimental school in Chicago. There was no teacher at the board. No one is calling roll. They only had screens and an AI system that would walk them through lessons, answer their questions, and keep real-time track of their progress. It has the sound of science fiction. It’s not. The school has gotten a lot of attention online in the past…

A phrase keeps coming up in the work of Cambridge researchers who spent two years keeping track of the schooling of Palestinian children who lived through war. It’s a powerful phrase to say that these kids are “like the living dead.” Not even comfortable. That being said, it’s hard to argue with the choice of words after reading what the researchers found. It wasn’t like these kids had just missed a few weeks of school. The kids had seen their classrooms destroyed and had lost teachers, siblings, and neighbors in the past few months, but they were still expected to…

The latest report from the World Health Organization on the health of teens and young adults includes a number that doesn’t get enough attention. About 4,500 teens and young adults between the ages of 10 and 24 die every day. They die in car accidents, by drowning, in fights, by suicide, or from diseases. There is no projection in that. That’s how 2021 looked. And mental health is close to the middle of almost all of those groups. One in seven teens around the world is dealing with a mental health problem right now. Teenagers and young adults age 15…

There is something worth noticing about the way New Zealand shows up in regional conversations about early childhood education. It is not the loudest voice in the room. It does not have the population size of China or India, nor the economic weight of Japan or South Korea. And yet, within the Asia-Pacific network of the World Organisation for Early Childhood Education — OMEP — the Aotearoa chapter has carved out a presence that feels disproportionate to its geography. The Asia-Pacific region, as OMEP defines it, covers an enormous stretch of the world — South Asia, East Asia, Southeast Asia,…