Nokia and the Pearson Foundation have launched a new film series, called “A 21st Century Education,” that profiles a dozen acclaimed school-reform leaders from around the world. In individual, mostly black-and-white documentary profiles, these leaders put forward fresh, sometimes challenging, approaches to learning. Together, the 12 first-person films in the series explore three related themes, each in its own way at the center of current debate about what works, and what’s needed, to help students succeed during school and—more generally—in life.

The first set of films, profiling international education figures Stephen Heppell, Alan November, Elliot Soloway and Cathie Norris, and Yong Zhao, looks at the ways in which the latest technologies can transform students’ educational experience. Each suggests the key to transforming contemporary education is to give kids the tools to produce and share their own knowledge.

A second group of films looks at other ways that educators are testing and proving new project-based models for a student-centered approach learning. This collection—which includes profiles of school innovators T.C. Ellis, Jean Johnson, and Larry Rosenstock, as well as a profile of school architect Randall Fielding—explores collaborative, creative, multi-disciplinary approaches to engaging students. Each leader has developed personalized, project-based approaches to learning that encourage students to take ownership of the ways in which they learn and present what they know. Conversations with these leaders suggest just how much students can achieve when their education is aligned with their own personal interests.

The last four films push the issue of student-centered learning even further, focusing on the specific challenges of effectively supporting the poor and disadvantaged. Dismissing suggestions that poor kids can’t learn, the figures profiled demonstrate that—no matter where a school is located, or who makes up its population—students can succeed when met with dedication, tenacity, fearlessness, and a missionary-like devotion to the craft and social responsibility of teaching. These last four films’ subjects—Steve Barr, James Dierke, Doug McCurry, and George McKenna—have each made it a personal mission to create schools that center on deep, sustained relationships between adults and kids. In the process, they demonstrate how much is possible when people come together to challenge the conventional, sometimes limiting wisdom about urban public education.

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