Lab Initiative
Global Speaker Series
A dialogue across borders — exploring what works in classrooms around the world.
While the fundamental theories of education — from Bloom's Taxonomy to Project-Based Learning — remain universal, their application is deeply personal. At Vicharanashala, we recognise that every educator interprets these frameworks differently, allowing them to take a unique shape in every classroom.
The Global Speaker Series is our attempt to explore how these theories play out in classrooms outside India. It is a space designed to uncover the realities we share and the opportunities we have to learn from diverse perspectives, while offering our own insights to the collective “world classroom.”
Beyond the “sage on the stage”
This is not a regular webinar series. Rather than experts delivering wisdom from a distance, we invite teaching faculty from global universities to share a theme, an idea, or an experiment they have tried in their own practice.
The sessions are structured as natural dialogues. Knowledge isn't delivered; it emerges through the interaction between our guest speakers and our participant community.
We look for the "aha!" moments that happen when a practitioner from another part of the world shares a challenge or a success that resonates with our own local context.
To build a global bridge of practice where we learn, unlearn, and relearn together.
From the series
The Global Speaker Series opened with a question — not an answer. Prof. Chris Dede from Harvard University set the tone for everything that followed: a conversation that refuses to treat AI as a solution looking for a problem. If a machine can answer anything, what does it mean to ask a good question? What remains distinctly, irreducibly human about the act of inquiry itself? These were the threads the opening session pulled on — and they are threads the series has kept returning to ever since.
Academia runs on two contradictory impulses: the drive to share knowledge openly, and the pressure to outpace your peers. Prof. Ravi Kumar Majeti from the University of Alabama brought this tension into the open — examining how the interplay between collaboration and competition shapes the growth of faculty and research professionals, and asking whether the incentive structures of modern academia are built to produce the best outcomes for the people inside them.
What happens when undergraduate students are not just taught research — but do it? Prof. Anil Kumar Challa from the University of Alabama made the case for a pedagogy that places real inquiry at the centre of undergraduate education — exploring how structured research engagement transforms not just what students know, but how they come to know it.
Recordings of past dialogues are open to all on our YouTube channel.
Join the dialogue
The most profound insights often come from the practitioners themselves. If you have a classroom success story or a unique interpretation of a learning framework you'd like to share — or you know an educator whose practice is transformative — we'd love to hear from you.