In 2014, six months before we founded Curious Learning, my soon-to-be cofounder, Stephanie Gottwald, and I set off on a crazy trip. Early research from an MIT, Tufts, and Georgia State group, showing that children in two remote villages in Ethiopia had been able to gain literacy skills by using mobile devices with a curated set of apps alone, had inspired us and spurred lots of questions. Could these results be replicated in different countries, cultures, and situations? With more data from more locations, could we better understand what types of apps would most engage and promote the learning process? We were convinced that smartphones would become prevalent, and we wanted to be prepared to leverage them for literacy learning.
On our trip, we intended to follow up on the group’s research, visiting and setting up more sites to begin the process of answering these questions. In hindsight, our itinerary was insane. We had scheduled ourselves to visit five countries—Uganda, Ethiopia, South Africa, India, and Bangladesh—by taking fourteen flights to set up or visit ten research sites. It amounted to 34,000 miles of travel in only twenty-eight days. Benefits of this admittedly insane and unsustainable travel schedule were that it allowed us to experience a whirlwind of engagement with some of the poorest communities across the globe, and it allowed us to not only understand important issues but also to identify opportunities for transformation by observing similarities and differences among communities in rapid succession.
Day 22: 21,570 miles Wonchi
As we reached the remote village of Wonchi in Ethiopia, two children came running up the hill to greet us. It was no surprise that the boy in the lead was the one we had heard so much about. This was our first visit to the village, but others had told us his story. His father had committed suicide some years before. In this community, suicide is viewed extremely negatively and stigmatizes an entire family. The son had been shunned and barred from many of the village activities.
When our program was set up, we made it clear that every child in the village would get a tablet, with no exceptions. When the tablets were handed out, the children were told nothing about how to use them, not even how to turn them on. Within minutes, one child had figured out how to turn his tablet on and had already begun showing the other children. This child was our ostracized boy. Over the course of the first year of having the tablets, he was consistently figuring things out before the other children. He would share information with a couple of the older girls, who would then disseminate this new know-how to the rest of the children. Everyone knew this boy was the leader. When we asked how he was doing, he replied, “I am a lion.” He now felt like he was on top of the world. This opportunity had redefined his relationship with the rest of the village as well as his relationship with himself. Over the course of this first year of the program, he had moved from surviving to thriving, from stagnation to growth. Having started their literacy learning journey, he and other children were now talking about the careers they could have, like working with computers or becoming doctors. Their whole outlook on what was possible had changed.
What was the reason for his transformation? Sure, our program provided an opportunity for him, but who is to say that was the cause of his growth? Some other opportunity could also have presented itself. After spending time with this boy and the other village members, I came to believe his profound change was a product of his natural curiosity, his curiosity about the tablet, about learning to read, and about how to share what he’d learned. By engaging his curiosity, he (if only momentarily at first) had left behind beliefs that had limited him, like the idea that he had nothing to add to his village. Or the belief that his father’s suicide had condemned him to a life on the margins of his community, with limited resources. Curiosity is the antidote to stagnation, self-imposed or other- wise. Curiosity is the vehicle that moves us from stagnation to growth.
Driven by curiosity, we wield the ability to look beyond our own beliefs. We allow ourselves to try on other beliefs and see things from different perspectives. Curiosity knocks us out of our stagnated comfort, putting us back on a path of growing and thriving. Curiosity is so fundamental to this process that I think we often forget about it, take it for granted, similar to the way we forget that oxygen is fundamental to breathing.
In every child I met on this trip, I could see a glowing zest for life that many lose along the path into adulthood. Their innocent curiosity had not yet been covered up by the family and social conditioning that happens to all of us as we age. This knowing glow and supernatural energy are what make it so hard for us to look away from a young child’s smile. When seeing that smile, we might ask if we ever had such a smile ourselves. Of course, we did! We have just taken on beliefs that suggest we should suppress that curiosity and that have the unintended consequence of removing the very oxygen we breathe, the basic instinct toward learning and growing. But there is a simple solution, if we can only remember it:
Just stay curious.
Curious about everything. Curious about everyone. Curious about what we have to learn from every situation, every emotion, and every person.
TINSLEY GALYEAN, author of REFRAME, is a technologist, designer, and co-founder of Curious Learning, a global nonprofit dedicated to eradicating illiteracy. He holds a PhD from the MIT Media Lab and works at the intersection of education, storytelling, and digital innovation, creating interactive experiences for museums and programing for networks like Discovery Kids, Disney, and Warner Bros.
Under Galyean’s leadership, Curious Learning has made its literacy apps available in 60 languages, reaching children in diverse communities worldwide, many with little or no access to formal schooling. By partnering with parents, educators, NGOs, and governments, the organization has helped children in some of the most resource-constrained settings begin their reading journey. Curious Learning’s work is recognized for its commitment to mother-tongue instruction and its focus on data-driven evaluation to ensure real, lasting impact. To learn more, visit: www.curiouslearning.org
Excerpted with permission from the publisher, Business Expert Press, from REFRAME: How Curiosity & Literacy Can Redefine Us by Tinsley Galyean. ©Copyright 2025 by Tinsley Galyean. All rights reserved.