Keeping Humanity at the Centre: Universities, Power Skills, and the Future of the Reach Alliance

Author: Ana E. Fierro, Tecnológico de Monterrey

What tensions arise when universities pursue scholarly excellence, educational transformation, and societal impact simultaneously? I take up this question from Julius Mugwagwa’s “Wicked Interdependences and Relational Futures in Education and Innovation: Why the Reach Alliance Is Ready,” focusing on the human capabilities that universities must cultivate in an age of AI.^[1]

At Tecnológico de Monterrey, this question has shaped educational innovation since 2020. Tec21 reorganized learning around competencies and authentic challenges. Rather than focusing primarily on the transmission of disciplinary content, students apply knowledge, skills, attitudes, and values to complex problems. These challenges are developed with companies, public institutions, and civil society organizations that bring real needs and contexts into the classroom. Because these problems rarely fit within one discipline, Tec21 also encourages collaboration among students and faculty from different academic backgrounds.^[2]

The model demands more from universities. Professors must design experiences in which competencies can be practised and assessed; students must tolerate uncertainty, integrate knowledge, and collaborate with people who understand a problem differently than they do. Universities must sustain reciprocal relationships with the organizations and communities that make experiential learning possible.

In 2026, Tecnológico de Monterrey updated its curricula again. The new plans preserve challenge-based learning while incorporating artificial intelligence (AI), sustainability, diversity, equity, inclusion, and entrepreneurship. Its educational AI strategy seeks not only to teach the use of technology, but also to strengthen critical thinking, ethics, and innovation so that AI enhances rather than diminishes human capabilities.^[3] This raises a fundamental question: if AI can produce information and propose solutions within seconds, what distinctive role remains for the university?

From Information to Human Agency

A contribution prepared for the World Economic Forum’s 2026 Annual Meeting in Davos suggests that, in the age of AI, information no longer differentiates people; agency does. Analytical thinking, creativity, communication, collaboration, resilience and empathy — often called power skills — are becoming defining competencies.^[4]

These capacities cannot be developed simply by adding another course. Students learn to navigate ambiguity when information is incomplete; empathy grows through listening to different experiences; and ethical judgement develops when they consider whom a solution benefits or excludes. Research supports this approach: community-engaged learning improves academic, social, and citizenship outcomes, while experiential learning can contribute to empathy and prosocial development.^[5]

The Reach Alliance complements competency-based education in this area. Its interdisciplinary teams, mentors, coaches, and partners investigate how initiatives reach geographically, administratively, or socially marginalized populations. Through research, fieldwork, and knowledge translation, students develop research competencies, empathy, sensitivity to inequality, intercultural communication, and relational leadership. Coaching makes teamwork an object of reflection, encouraging feedback, shared responsibility, self-awareness, and collaborative problem solving.^[6]

Education As a Human Encounter

This human dimension becomes more important as AI enters universities. In “Magnifica Humanitas,” Pope Leo XIV argues that AI may imitate language and simulate empathy, but it does not experience friendship, responsibility, or moral growth. He calls for the primacy of the human person and describes education as a place where students seek truth, form relationships, think critically, and recognize every person’s dignity.^[7] For me, the implication for higher education is clear: universities must form people capable of freedom, responsibility, and action for the common good.

Reach’s fieldwork and coaching are especially valuable in this respect. Listening to a community member, recognizing the limits of one’s assumptions, and confronting the consequences of inequality are embodied, relational experiences that cannot be fully reproduced by an algorithm. They preserve what is distinctly human in education.

Two Opportunities for Reach’s Next Stage

Make Cross-University Teams a Regular Feature

Reach’s cross-university teams demonstrate the learning that happens when students collaborate across disciplines, institutions, and national contexts. The University of Toronto–Tecnológico de Monterrey team combined students from different fields, coaching them and doing joint fieldwork to study financial inclusion in Mexico.^[8] Expanding this model would expose more students to different academic traditions and cultural perspectives while embodying the international cooperation required by challenges such as migration, climate change, and inequality.

This would require transparent application processes, early matching of complementary expertise, preparation for intercultural collaboration, and funding for joint fieldwork. Coaching should begin with team formation and help participants address differences in communication, expectations, and institutional culture.

Move from Research on Communities to Sustained Collaboration

The expression hard-to-reach populations identifies exclusion from services and institutions, but it can also reduce communities to objects of study. Community-based participatory research offers a stronger principle: researchers and community members contribute different forms of expertise throughout the process, and knowledge is connected to action that benefits the community. Its principles include equitable participation, co-learning, recognition of community strengths, and a balance between research and practical action.^[9] Service-learning scholarship similarly emphasizes reciprocity and reflection.^[10]

Reach could make reciprocity explicit by asking communities which questions and outputs would be useful; inviting them to review research design and preliminary findings; co-creating recommendations; producing accessible outputs in relevant languages; and returning later to assess whether the work generated useful change. Continuity matters as well. One research cycle rarely resolves a complex social problem. Reach could establish a mechanism through which each generation transfers relationships, data, lessons, and unfinished questions to the next. New teams could revisit projects, assess implementation, and refine recommendations with community partners. Research on iterative service-learning suggests that such continuity can improve implementation and sustained use.^[11]

Forming Leaders Who Can Listen

The distinctive responsibility of the university in the AI age is to form people who ask better questions, evaluate information critically, understand experiences different from their own, and act responsibly when values conflict. Reach is well positioned to advance this mission. Its future potential lies in deepening relationships among universities through cross-university teams, within teams through coaching, and with communities through reciprocity, co-creation, and continuity. Keeping humanity at the centre means ensuring that communities are not only studied but heard; that students do not merely acquire knowledge but learn responsibility; and that research becomes part of a sustained commitment to the people whose experiences made that knowledge possible.

References

[1] Julius Mugwagwa, “Wicked Interdependences and Relational Futures in Education and Innovation: Why the Reach Alliance Is Ready,” Reach Alliance Faculty Mentor “Provocation,” 2026, https://reachalliance.org/commentary/wicked-interdependences-and-relational-futures-in-education-and-innovation-why-the-reach-alliance-is-ready/.

[2] “Challenge-based Learning,” Tecnológico de Monterrey, https://tec.mx/en/challenge-based-learning; “Socios formadores comprometidos con la educación,” Tecnológico de Monterrey, https://tec.mx/es/socios-formadores; “Informe anual 2025,” Tecnológico de Monterrey, 2026, https://tec.mx/sites/default/files/repositorio/Marketing/informe-anual/pdf/tecnologico-de-monterrey-informe-anual-2025.pdf.

[3] “Informe anual 2025”; “Enseñanza y aprendizaje: Estrategia de la IA educativa,” Tecnológico de Monterrey, 2026, https://tec.mx/es/ia/ensenanza-y-aprendizaje.

[4] Jean Daniel LaRock, “In the Age of AI, Human Skills Are the New Advantage,” World Economic Forum, 2 January 2026, https://www.weforum.org/stories/education-and-skills/ai-and-human-skills/.

[5] Hannah Hoi Kiu Chan, Ho Yee Chloe Kwong, Geisty Lin Feng Shu, Chung Yan Ting, and Frank Ho Yin Lai, “Effects of Experiential Learning Programmes on Adolescent Prosocial Behaviour, Empathy, and Subjective Well-Being: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis,” Frontiers in Psychology 12 (2021): 709699, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.709699; Rachel Guanlao, Jennifer Pax, Yufeng Wei, and Wei Zhang, “A Meta-Analysis of Community Engaged Learning and Thriving in Higher Education,” Frontiers in Education 10 (2025): 1525176, https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2025.1525176.

[6] “The Student Experience,” Reach Alliance, https://reachalliance.org/the-student-experience; “What Does Student Leadership Look Like at Reach?” Reach Alliance, 27 April 2023, https://reachalliance.org/blog/2023/04/what-does-student-leadership-look-like-at-reach; “Leading Boldly: How Team-Based Leadership Coaching Powers Our Research Teams,” Reach Alliance blog, 29 September 2025, https://reachalliance.org/blog/2025/09/leading-boldly-how-team-based-leadership-coaching-powers-our-research-teams/.

[7] Leo XIV, “Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence” [Encyclical letter], The Holy See, 15 May 2026, https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html.

[8] “Reach Alliance’s First International Cross-University Team,” Reach Alliance blog, May 2024, https://reachalliance.org/blog/2024/05/leadership-in-action-inspiring-change-from-campus-to-community-2/.

[9] Barbara A. Israel, Amy J. Schulz, Edith A. Parker, and Adam B. Becker, “Review of Community-Based Research,” Annual Review of Public Health 19 (1998): 173–202.

[10] Robert G. Bringle and Julie A. Hatcher, “Implementing Service Learning in Higher Education,” The Journal of Higher Education 67, no. 2 (1996): 221–39.

[11] Sherri WeitlHarms, “Iterative Service-Learning: A Computing-Based Case-Study Applied to Small Rural Organizations,” IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference, 2024, https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.15679.

About the Faculty Mentor Paper Series

This paper is part of the Reach Alliance’s second faculty reflection series, Is Reach the Model for Teaching and Research in the 21st Century?, in response to Julius Mugwagwa’s “Wicked Interdependences and Relational Futures in Education and Innovation: Why Reach Alliance is Ready.” Featuring contributions from leading faculty scholars across the Reach Alliance global academic consortium, the series opens a timely dialogue on the future of higher education, research, and innovation. Developed as part of Reach’s commitment to advancing research-to-impact and fostering interdisciplinary collaboration, these reflections aim to engage higher education professionals in the emerging discussions around new models of teaching and learning, knowledge creation, and societal impact.