Dr. Joyce T. Andrigue-Mbewe

Dr. Joyce T. Andrigue-Mbewe, a Zambian educationist now based in New Zealand, opened the very first Global Education Forum with a session on inclusive education — grounded not in theory, but in what she has seen work in real classrooms.

Holding a PhD with a focus on early childhood education, Dr. Joyce shared practical, achievable ways schools can build more inclusive learning environments, drawing directly from best practices within New Zealand's education system. Rather than treating inclusion as an abstract policy goal, she framed it as a series of everyday decisions — in how classrooms are set up, how teachers respond to different learners, and how schools involve families in a child's progress.

Her talk set the tone for the forum's founding idea: that some of the most useful ideas in education travel not through research papers, but through educators honestly sharing what is actually working in their own schools and communities.