My name is Bayly DiPilato. For nearly twenty years I’ve taught high school English in Southern New Jersey, designing courses in media literacy, journalism, and global perspectives alongside traditional English classes. That experience has put me in the middle of every ed-tech innovation to hit our classrooms, for better and for worse.

What I kept noticing was the slow erosion of something harder to measure: young people’s sense of where they come from, and what that means for the communities waiting for them. Schools and communities need each other, but technology has complicated that relationship while simultaneously enabling deeper, systemic problems in education to go unaddressed. For teachers, it can feel like the tools keep changing while the fundamental challenges never do. And as AI begins to reshape how young people learn, create, and see themselves, I’m not sure we’ve even begun to reckon with what that means for any of us.

That observation pushed me toward doctoral work in Educational Technology, where I’ve been wrestling with the researchers and theorists asking the hardest questions about technology, society, and who actually benefits when we hand education over to Big Tech. Braving Education is where I plan to bring such conversations into the open with researchers, teachers, and community voices who are ready to imagine something different.