Whole Child, Whole Team: A Conversation With Fernanda Soares
At the Global Center for the Development of the Whole Child (GC-DWC), we know that supporting the "whole child" requires a "whole team." Our work is powered by a diverse global collective of researchers, practitioners, and experts who bring unique life experiences and scientific rigor to the world’s most challenging contexts. Whole Child, Whole Team is a series of faculty and staff features designed to take you behind the research. Through personal stories and professional insights, we explore the roots of our work that connect our team’s individual journeys to our shared mission: providing pathways out of adversity for the world's most vulnerable children.
For Fernanda Soares, the path to her role as Assistant Research Professor at the GC-DWC was a steady narrowing toward what mattered most all along: understanding how systems shape people’s chances in life, and how research can help make those systems more just, more humane, and more responsive to those who have historically been left at the margins.
In this first installment of our Whole Child, Whole Team series, we sit down with Fernanda to explore the personal and professional roots of her work, from the wisdom of her mother’s classroom in Brazil to her search for the 'missing link' in global education. Together, we discuss the 'human system' of education and why the how of delivery is just as vital as the what.
Lessons from Behind a Garage Door
When asked who most shaped her path, Fernanda does not hesitate.
“That person would definitely be my mother,” she says. “She opened a school in our hometown in Brazil in the 1970s, when she was only 20 years old and studying psychology. The school began very modestly, behind a garage door, inspired by the Montessori approach, and over time it grew into a well-established school in our community. Looking back, even though she would not have used the language of ‘Whole Child Development,’ that was very much the philosophy she lived out.”
For Fernanda’s mother, education was about much more than academic learning. It was about helping children become more fully themselves.
“What shaped me most was that she never treated any of this as extra,” Fernanda says. “For her, these were not add-ons to education—they were education. Through her lived experience I learned that a school can be a place where children gain knowledge, but also where they develop empathy, responsibility, confidence, and a sense of connection to others and to the world around them. That has stayed with me very deeply, and it continues to shape how I understand education today.”
That early lesson became a through-line in Fernanda’s life and work. Across her training in Law, International Development, and Education Policy, she remained drawn to questions of equity, social justice, human dignity, and the role systems play in shaping people’s opportunities to thrive.
“Those values have been the constant thread in my journey, even as the questions I asked and the spaces I worked in evolved,” she reflects.
Education eventually became the place where those questions felt most concrete. For Fernanda, schools are where large ideas about justice become daily realities for children, families, and educators.
“Education can open possibilities, expand freedom, and create pathways out of adversity,” she says. “But it can also reproduce inequality when systems fail to recognize and respond to the realities children carry with them. What led me toward applied education research was the desire to stay close to that reality and not only to think about systems and policy at a distance, but to understand how they are actually experienced by children, families, and educators.”
The Science of the “How”
Today, Fernanda’s research focuses on the implementation, effectiveness, scalability, and sustainability of educational interventions that strengthen teacher practices and student outcomes in the Global South. Her scholarship centers on teacher professional development and school leadership, foundational learning in multilingual and resource-contrained contexts, and the activation of home-school-community systems to support Whole Child Development.
At the heart of that work is a simple but often overlooked question: What does it take for a good idea to actually work in the real world?
“I usually describe implementation science as the study of what it takes for a good idea to have a meaningful impact in the real world,” Fernanda explains. “In education, we are building a stronger evidence base on the kinds of interventions and instructional practices that can improve student learning. But knowing what works is only part of the challenge. The harder question is what happens when a program moves into everyday school systems, where there are significant constraints, competing priorities, limited resources, and a lot of variation from one school or community to another.”
She notes that while the “what” is important, the human reality of the system is where her focus lies.
“That is the part I am most interested in,” she says. “I study why some interventions are implemented as intended and others are not, why they work well in some places but not in others, and what conditions are needed for them to produce meaningful and lasting gains for children. That is where actors and context become deeply important. Programs do not implement themselves. Teachers, coaches, school principals, and government officials are the ones who ultimately make decisions and take actions that shape whether an intervention works in practice.”
For Fernanda, this is why mixed-methods research is essential. Quantitative data can show whether a program worked and for whom, while qualitative data can illuminate how people experienced it, what constraints they were navigating, and why the same program may unfold differently across settings.
“If I had to name one universal truth,” she says, “it would be this: education is not just a technical system. It is a human system. And if we want lasting change, we have to understand both.”
Fernanda sees implementation science as a bridge between evidence and action.
“I think of implementation science as the missing link in global education because too often we stop at asking, ‘Did this program work?’ But that is only part of the story. If we want to improve education at scale, especially in low-resource settings, we also need to understand how programs are delivered, what gets in the way, what helps them succeed, and how to adapt them without losing what makes them effective in the first place.”
One experience that stays with her is a teacher in Guatemala who was deeply committed to a Social and Emotional Learning approach but was managing a large class with limited support.
“The challenge was not motivation,” Fernanda recalls. “The challenge was the gap between what a program assumes and what a teacher is actually able to carry out consistently under real conditions. That experience reminds me why the science of implementation matters on a human level.”
“From my experience,” she adds, “implementation science is really about understanding that bridge between evidence and action, so that promising ideas can translate into meaningful and lasting improvements for children.”
Weaving a Sustainable Future
At the GC-DWC, Fernanda is part of an integrative and interdisciplinary team that works across silos to help foster environments where every child has the opportunity to thrive. Being part of the Center has deepened her understanding of learning as one part of a much broader developmental system.
“[Being a part of the GC-DWC team] has strengthened my understanding of learning as part of Whole Child Development, shaped not only by what happens in school, but also by what is happening at home, in the community, and often in faith spaces that are important in children’s lives,” she says. “Children do not experience learning separately from everything else. Their development is also shaped by relationships, emotional well-being, safety, health, and nutrition. A child’s ability to learn is deeply connected to whether they feel supported across those systems.”
That perspective also shapes how Fernanda thinks about sustainability. For her, sustainability is not a final stage of a project. It is something that must be considered from the beginning.
“What I have seen across different regions is that sustainability is much more likely when it is woven into the design from the start,” she explains. “That means asking early on whether the program can realistically be carried out by the people and structures that already exist, whether it fits within teachers’ and school leaders’ daily responsibilities, whether local actors are developing ownership, and whether the government has a pathway to finance and support it over time. Sustainability is not something you add at the end. It is foundational in shaping how a program is designed, implemented, and supported from the beginning.”
When asked what the world would look like if a Whole Child approach became the standard, Fernanda’s answer returns to the children at the center of the work.
“It would mean that every child, irrespective of their background or circumstances, would have a real opportunity to reach their full potential,” she says. “That matters deeply because too often children in those settings are asked to learn while carrying enormous burdens: hunger, displacement, violence, stress, interrupted schooling, and uncertainty about what tomorrow will bring. A Whole Child approach would recognize that learning depends not only on what happens in the classroom, but also on safety, relationships, health, emotional well-being, and a sense of belonging.”
For Fernanda, this vision is not abstract. It is the same idea she first saw in her mother’s school: that education is not only about what children know, but about whether the systems around them allow them to flourish.
“It would mean children being more fully supported, more resilient, and better equipped to grow into who they are capable of becoming,” she says, “not limited by the conditions they were born into, but given the opportunity to thrive.”
At the GC-DWC, that vision grounds Fernanda’s work: producing research that helps schools, communities, and systems better support children in the places where adversity is greatest.
Stay tuned for more stories from our Whole Child, Whole Team series, where we take you behind the research through personal stories and professional insights, exploring the roots of our work that connect our team’s individual journeys to our shared mission: providing pathways out of adversity for the world's most vulnerable children.
About the Global Center for the Development of the Whole Child (GC-DWC)
The Global Center for the Development of the Whole Child (GC-DWC), housed within the Institute for Educational Initiatives (IEI) at the University of Notre Dame, collaborates with researchers and practitioners to ensure the well-being—physical, emotional, social, and cognitive—of children and adolescents in low-resource and conflict-affected settings. Established to serve as a coherent platform for the IEI’s growing portfolio of global child development and learning programs, the GC-DWC creates environments that foster resilience and empower children and adolescents to thrive. Using an innovative Whole Child Development (WCD) approach tailored to context-specific needs, the GC-DWC translates research into timely and thoughtful action, adapts research tools to improve the development of learning programs and policies, and activates systems (families, schools, communities) to lift children and adolescents out of poverty.
Learn more about the GC-DWC’s work to transform child development globally: iei.nd.edu/gc-dwc
