In late 2024 we worked with the Faculty of Education at Queen’s University on an action-research project. 113 internationally trained teachers took part in structured, one-to-one conversations instead of small talk.
The group mattered. Internationally-trained teachers have often left careers and communities behind in one country to rebuild them in another, retraining, re-credentialing, and starting over among strangers. If anyone understands displacement and the quiet work of belonging somewhere new, it is them. They were not an abstract sample; they were exactly the people the research was about.
We paired participants and gave them real prompts, the kind that move a conversation past “where are you from” and into something that genuinely connects two people. Participants told us they valued it. The thing they mentioned most often was the chance to be properly heard by another person.
This feedback changed our plans. The structured one-to-one conversation stopped being one feature idea among others and became the core of the product.