Inès Allag and María Angélica Mejía Cáceres have a common goal, and that’s devising new ways to learn and teach that they can then share with others. Read on to get to learn all about these two innovators engineering new pathways in education from the offices of the Institute of Challenges (Institut des défis), a body jointly run by the Learning Planet Institute and Paris Cité University.

Experience Abroad Fosters New Ideas in Teaching

Inès Allag spent much of her life hopping from country to country, in which time she’s observed different styles of teaching at work. After her schooling in France through the undergraduate level, she was on an exchange programme in Turkey when an English professor felt so confident in her translation skills—a confidence she in no way shared—that he asked her to start teaching the subject. Despite her trepidation, she launched herself into the gauntlet of leading a classroom, starting her on a course of continual travel and teaching that took her to destinations as distant as New Zealand, at every turn experimenting with different education methods, trying her hand with digital education tools, etc. 

When she finally made it back to France, she taught in the public-school system and realized what a highly idiosyncratic education landscape the country is home to. It eventually inspired her to leave teaching to get a degree in education engineering. “In my time teaching at the university level, I enjoyed being free to structure my own courses so much that I wanted to pursue it as a career. The field of education engineering is where you get to do just that,” says Inès. She earned her degree in 2022 and joined the Institute of Challenges soon after. 

For María Angélica Mejía Cáceres as well, it was her experience as a teacher that piqued her interest in education engineering. “I’m Columbian and did both my undergrad and master’s in education and science [biology, chemistry, and physics] with a particular focus on environmental education.” María Angélica went on to get her PhD in Brazil in education, health, and science in the hopes of training educators to teach environmental education, and that’s precisely what she did, starting out in primary school before moving onto to high-school and university education.

It was while she was invited as a researcher in Germany that she first read about the Learning Planet Institute online. When she finally got to visit the campus, she felt right at home. “The Institute’s focus on environmental education in a highly eclectic learning space spoke to me right away,” she says. María Angélica joined forces with Inès and the rest of the Institute of Challenges in February 2024 to head the body’s education-innovation efforts.

Education Engineering and Innovating: Two Ventricles in the Beating Heart of the Learning Planet Institute

Inès and María Angélica’s interests are so similar, it’s almost as if they were meant to work together at the Learning Planet Institute, whose long list of innovative-education programmes—from Builders of Possibilities (Bâtisseurs de Possibles) to HOP!’s project-based development of inclusive teaching methods, as well as how the LPI co-designs academic-degree programmes and trains teachers in new, collaborative educational approaches—evidence the value of innovating and retooling in the field of education. 

“Education engineering is the art of designing academic programmes tailored to the needs of students first and foremost,” says Inès. “That means hand-selecting the resources guiding the programme, the right learning approaches and tools […] In tandem to that, you devise how educators will be trained, so it goes far beyond course content, touching even areas of logistics and organisational structure as well. It’s engineering a programme on the meta level.” 

For Inès, education engineering and innovating are two sides of the same coin. “‘Innovating’ is a bit of a misleading word because you see a lot of older teaching methods such as the Socratic method and others getting re-introduced into the classroom,” she says, and María Angélica can only smile at hearing this. She couldn’t agree more. “Something we have in common is we both question traditional methodologies and seek out alternatives. For example, we try to generate greater student participation by designing the education environment to be more collaborative, favoring project-based learning, finding pathways for art to contribute to lessons, and more.”

The Institute of Challenges, A Learning Lab 

Inès and María Angélica hardly have a chance to catch their breath at the Institute of Challenges. “Ask us what a typical day in our jobs looks like, we’ll tell you there’s no such thing!” The multidisciplinary institute was founded in 2020, a joint venture between Paris Cité University and the Learning Planet Institute. Its sole responsibility is to design new teaching approaches that take into account social and environmental concerns for deployment in both institutions and the city. Since it got off the ground, the body has seen its fair share of successes, hurdles, and failures, but the work of bridging gaps between universities, civil society players, and sustainability partners goes on. Since its inception, the institute has developed eight experimental programmes in the areas of technology, education, learning, and more.

New Ways of Learning: Project-Based Learning and Mentorship Programmes

Working at the Institute of Challenges doesn’t mean María Angélica and Inès don’t still don their teaching caps. Both worked with the Learning Planet Institute’s pedagogy teams as well as the student body to design the master’s of AIRE, or Approaches to Interdisciplinary Research and Education. “We started with comments offered up by students themselves and worked hard to structure a coherent programme around their ideas. We try to improve our approach every time we go to work,” says María Angélica.

The first year of the master’s features a course on sustainability science. “There are 16 different nationalities represented by the student body of the master’s programme, and we took that into account, curating the instruction in biology and adopting a multi-cultural attitude to the environment. Project-based learning is central to the course. Students find a specific area of study that they’re passionate about and try to craft a solution to a problem in that area of study.”

Inès adds, “Both the engineering and the innovation found a strong voice here in that, for that course, I recommended a mentorship component to the project-based learning as a necessary bridge for achieving best results.”

Students getting their master’s of AIRE regularly meet with a mentor, but Inès stresses that not just anyone can be a mentor. At the Institute of Challenges, she drafted the list of skills mentors have to have to be eligible. “A good professor does not necessarily make a good mentor. In education engineering, you’re constantly question everything that’s typically taken for granted. You’d think someone with a lot of knowledge on a given subject can teach that knowledge, but it’s simply not the case. Teaching is a skill that has to be honed. Our job is to help guide mentors and teachers along the way.”

Building Bridges between Educators, across Fields

Guiding teachers is one thing. Bringing them together around one table is a whole other. “Universities tend to be split up into siloes,” says Inès. “We work to break down walls and create space for bridges to be built across different areas of knowledge so teachers can exchange and share experiences from their classrooms.” To keep instructors in communication with one another, the Institute of Challenges created a working group called PédaGo! that meets regularly to table discussions on problem areas they encounter in the classroom and take in a wealth of different viewpoints. “The Institute of Challenges simply planted the seed,” adds María Angélica, as PédaGo! has since taken on a life of its own. 

The above examples are not an exhaustive list. More recently, the team at the Institute of Challenges published their iN&Di Guide detailing their plan to raise awareness about issues of inclusion and diversity across the entire LPI landscape. 

A Dynamic Community Retooling Education

It would be redundant to say Inès and María Angélica are passionate about their jobs. Both are quick to express their gratitude for the opportunity to work across academic disciplines while pursuing continuing education in areas such as marketing, technology, project management, educator training, and more. The freedom to exercise their creativity is likewise a major reason why they feel lucky to do the work they do. “Here at the Learning Planet Institute, everyone is given the space to be creative and do things in their own way, and it fosters a lot of wonderful things.”

Learn more

👉 Learn more about the Institute of Challenges (Institut des défis)

👉 Learn more about the Education Hub of the Learning Planet Institute

An article written by Marie Ollivier
Thanks to Inès Allag and María Angélica Mejía Cáceres for answering our questions.