Hope and community propel more than 1,000 undergraduates and grad students across Ed&IS.
Dean Christina Christie welcomed Ed&IS students, faculty, and staff to the start of the 2026-2027 academic year with the Fall Convocation on Sept. 23.
“We’re embarking on this new beginning together and with that in mind, I hope that you, as you look around the room today, see the other individuals,” Christie said to the students assembled in Moore Hall. “I hope what you also see is a community … And to be part of that community, you must know and believe that you are because you belong.
“Belonging is not simply about being included,” Dean Christie said. “It’s not having a Bruin card or having a UCLA address… or a seat in the classroom. It’s about knowing that your presence matters. It’s about knowing that your ideas are worth sharing and that your questions are worth asking. It’s about knowing that your professors and colleagues and peers respect your thoughts, your contributions and commitments, and that they matter to the collective knowledge of our community. We understand that belonging not as something that just happens – instead, something that we create together.”
Annamarie Francois, associate dean for public engagement, moderated a panel of faculty and school leadership. Anne Gilliland, professor and director of the Center for Information as Evidence; Miriam Posner, associate professor; and Thuy Vo Dang, associate professor and co-director of the Community Archives Lab at UCLA, represented the Department of Information Studies. Megan Franke, professor and vice chair of professional programs; Jose-Felipe Martinez, professor and vice chair of undergraduate education; and Cecilia Rios-Aguilar, professor and chair of the Department of Education, represented the Department of Education.
Francois led the panel in discussing their hopes for the more than 1,000 students – including 45 new doctoral students and 123 masters’ students – beginning the academic year across Ed&IS. Professor Rios-Aguilar encouraged students to “Never lose your curiosity, about things, about people, about what you’re reading [or] listening … using all your senses,” and “to be in relationship with one another.
“In my own words, I say Convivencia,” said Rios-Aguilar. “It means being together and coming together to understand each other. I would like you to find joy in learning and engaging with different ideas and different people, not just the ones you feel the most connected with or the ones that you like the most.”
Professor Franke exhorted students to take in the stories and experiences of those who came to UCLA before them, but to stay true to themselves in the process.
“You have your own unique ways of thinking and doing,” she said. “I hope you don’t come here and say, ‘I’ve got to give up who I am in order to be here.’ I want you to be able to bring who you are… and be able to add to it, to enrich it; to leave with this continued sense of your histories and your experiences and how those histories and experiences can shape the ways that you make sense of the world, the ways that you engage other people.”
Professor Posner told students that they have chosen difficult professions, particularly at this time.
“We are in a world that is not friendly to the professions that you have chosen, for many reasons, and in many ways,” she said. “And yet, you’ve chosen them and I think it’s a beautiful thing. I am genuinely moved by the depth of feeling and passion and care that it takes to choose the professions that you’ve chosen.”
Posner said that although many graduate students are in the midst of a professional career, as students they are in the unique position of learning and being a champion of their values.
“All of us, when we’re learning, need to adopt a position of humility and sort of expect that there are things that we don’t know and there are areas that we’re not familiar with,” she said. “One of the hardest things in the world is figuring out when to exercise humility and when to fight. But in the professions that you have chosen, you will need to be a fighter.”
Francois posed the question of how to maintain hope in an era of attacks on education and information, to which Professor Gilliland responded with the wish that students “become the antidote for those attacks.
“In my own field, which is archival studies … you will learn while you are here how to preserve and create trusted information,” she said. “We have a crisis of trust. This is a real problem and we focus a lot on that. We will teach you how to develop transparent and accountable systems.
“We don’t allow people and communities to become invisible,” said Professor Gilliland. “We figure out how to make everybody visible and every voice heard. Our institutions are being attacked because they are the bastions for these things. Our hope for you is that through what you learn here and through who you are as people, that you become the societywide antidote to these attacks.”
Professor Vo Dang noted that her hope stems from “all of you and from the students I’ve been fortunate enough to guide for the past four years at this school.” Echoing Professor Posner’s statement, she said that, “You are really here because you are mission-centered and you understand the importance of education and information systems and memory and institutions that ultimately, are made up of people.”
Vo Dang advised students to “reach out for mentorship, not just from the faculty but from each other. You don’t have to do this alone. Find comfort in each other. Commiserate, support – all of those things that will help sustain you in this road ahead.”
Professor Martinez urged students to be not only curious but persistent in seeking knowledge.
“For any undertaking, if you’re halfway through and you haven’t read something that kind of threw you off – not different from confirming what you thought you knew – you’re not reading enough or closely enough,” he said. “Read closer, read more, and seek out other things so that you will appreciate the complexity of the problems we are facing here in education and information. At an institution like this, the one thing we can guarantee that we can offer you is support in becoming thorough, rigorous, and thoughtful in thinking about problems.”
Dean Christie discussed the impacts of AI on education and information, and its importance to educators, researchers, librarians, archivists, administrators, policy makers, and community members.
“Thus, this question matters to us,” she said. “This is why I think belonging is so important to consider right now. Technology can connect us to more people, but connection is not the same as belonging.
“AI can do many things, but it is up to us to create and sustain a shared community,” said Christie. “We need opportunities to contribute and connect … to create a sense of belonging that allows us to feel safe and engaged, to persist when things get difficult, and remind us we are part of something larger than our own specific research interest.
“The good news is that is in our hands. Invite new voices into your conversations. Be generous with what you believe and know. Be willing to say, ‘I don’t know.’ Seek out people whose perspectives are different than your own. Be open and willing to change your mind and recognize that you are better for it. These moments may not seem all that profound as we sit here today, but they form the foundation of an intellectual community.”
Above: Students, faculty, and staff participated in the Fall Convocation at Moore Hall on Sept. 23. Photo by Paolo Cantos