Nokia and the Pearson Foundation have been working together for years, helping educators incorporate the latest mobile and digital technologies in support of traditional classroom objectives. Now, the partners have launched a new film series that highlights the important work of international education leaders and innovators.

The film series, called “A 21st Century Education,” 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.

The goal, explains Mark Nieker, president of the Pearson Foundation, is to start conversations and get people thinking about what works, what’s needed, and what individual teachers and school administrators can do in their own schools and classrooms to make sure their students can succeed.

“Each of these profiles demonstrates two things that it’s easy for people to forget—even people wholly devoted to helping young people learn,” says Nieker. “The first is that, despite generalizations to the contrary, there are remarkable, amazing things taking place in classrooms all over the United States. The second: For people who care about education, there’s nothing more inspiring than encountering someone with the same passion and then understanding exactly what their own experiences have taught them.”

The series was produced by the Mobile Learning Institute (MLI), a co-funded effort by Nokia and the Pearson Foundation.

MLI helps students in the United States and internationally use computers and digital-arts technologies to tell stories about themselves and their communities. The initiative also conducts professional development workshops and hosts leadership summits for school administrators.

MLI wants the audience for its new film series to be inspired by stories such as that of David “T.C.” Ellis. He rose from the streets of St. Paul, Minn., and had a recording deal with pop-music sensation Prince, a Minneapolis native, but what Ellis really loved was helping urban youths graduate from high school. He created Hip Hop High to invite dropouts back to school to rap, write, produce, and perform.

“It’s about giving people ideas—and giving people who are successful with those ideas a chance to explain why they are successful,” said the films’ producer, Stephen Brown.

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—including the mobile and digital technologies that are the heart of the MLI program—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.