Dr. Veronica Boix-Mansilla (2021)

Veronica Boix-Mansilla is a principal investigator for Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where she leads the IdGlobal and Re-Imagining Migration projects.

Originally from Argentina, Veronica Boix Mansilla is one of the world's most renowned experts in the fields of global competence and interdisciplinary education. Her work focuses on how to prepare our younger generations for an increasingly complex and interdependent world, basing teaching on strong intercultural awareness and training in cognitive sciences, human development and education. The aim is to facilitate students' ability to understand and act on contemporary issues of global importance such as globalisation, genocide, migration and climate change.

Her research focuses on three main areas:

• Global competence and its development among students and teaching staff in various regions of the world with a particular emphasis on intercultural education, equity and migration.
• Quality interdisciplinary research and education among experts, teaching staff and young people.
• Quality teaching and learning in disciplines (history, biology, arts) that can be seen as lenses through which to understand the world.

Veronica Boix-Mansilla's work has produced practical frameworks and tools for educators around the world in areas such as learning, curriculum planning, assessment and professional development. In 2011, alongside Howard Gardner, senior director of Project Zero, Verónica Boix-Mansilla addressed the concept of global competence. For the authors, global competence involves not only awareness of global issues, but “learning about the world and how it works” and integrating “ideas, tools, methods, and languages that are central to any discipline […] to engage with the burning issues of our time”. Later, Verónica Boix-Mansilla co-developed the OECD-PISA Framework on Global Competence, which today forms part of the standardised PISA assessment applied to 15-year-olds around the world.

She is also the driving force behind projects such as Re-Imagining Migration, an interactive web portal open to educators around the world that seeks to help understand migration as a shared human experience and thereby reduce hatred and xenophobia. She is also co-founder and director of the L@titud project at Project Zero, a gathering of Latin American schools and leaders that aims to provide collaborative spaces to promote educational reform in developing countries. In addition, she works as an advisor and collaborator for a number of institutions, including UNESCO, the OECD, the Asia Society, the Smithsonian Institute, AFS American Field Services, the Longview Foundation, the Association of American Colleges and Universities, the Council of Chief State School Officers, the Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center, the International Baccalaureate, WorldSavvy and Global Kids.

Throughout her career she has published numerous studies and books, including her brilliant essay Educating for Global Competition: Preparing our youth to engage the world, written with Tony Jackson in 2011 with a second edition to be published very soon.