Quality Holistic Learning: Teachers Learning and Leading in Displacement Contexts

 

Photo provided by the authors

 

By Hadizatou Amou Ali, Sara Kassab, Yanal Moussa, and Vianney Mpitabavuma

27 February 2023

We are teachers. We work in displacement contexts: in urban areas in Niamey, Niger which only recently started experiencing an influx of refugees; with Palestinian, Iraqi, and Syrian refugees located throughout Lebanon, making up 1 in 4 residents of Lebanon; and with recently displaced refugees and communities of prolonged displacement residing in both refugee camps and urban areas of Kenya. Some of us are refugees or children of refugees. We are all advocates who support the learning of every young person in our classrooms, regardless of their status, prior schooling experiences, or current life circumstances. We have persevered through political and economic unrest, wars, the COVID-19 pandemic, climate crises, and many other challenges. We are committed to education and take pride in our work as educators.

What teachers in displacement need

Yet, we recognize that there is much we do not know or that escapes our control. We know that many teachers start teaching with no training at all. Those who get the chance to be trained are typically trained on teaching pedagogies that emphasize learners’ cognitive skills, ignoring many other vital aspects of learners’ whole selves. For example, the majority of teachers – once including ourselves – working with refugee and displaced learners and in emergency contexts have not formally learned about holistic learning nor do they have access to resources to support holistic teaching and learning.

Our experiences show that focusing on holistic learning is essential in all contexts, especially when working with students who have been displaced. Holistic learning offers room for students to develop their social and cognitive skills effectively while focusing on the child as a whole. Holistic learning attempts to restore a sense of home and family, essential in helping students to work with their emotions and cultivating empathy between teachers and their students. This helps every learner reach their full potential.

Quality holistic learning requires that educators integrate the emotional, social, psychological, and academic needs of every student into the learning community. In order to create holistic learning environments for students, it is also essential to create holistic professional learning environments for teachers.

Yet in many education systems, like our own, these conditions do not yet exist. Instead, our situations are characterized by large classes, high student-teacher ratios, teachers with little to no initial training, and low levels of learning. For instance, in Lebanon, Syrian refugee students are asked to attend an afternoon shift in public schools and there are often 60 students in each class. In Niger, more than 70 students are attending a class in one room, where almost half of the students sit on the floor. In Kenya, the situation is similar with over 100 students in secondary and up to 200 in primary classes. The COVID-19 pandemic has only made things worse and has affected teachers’ professional learning and development. We need to grow and stay updated psychosocially, emotionally, pedagogically, and technologically in order to create holistic learning environments for our students.

What we, as teachers, are doing to address our needs

Being a teacher is one of the most challenging professions, even for a teacher who graduates with a degree. We are always still learning and developing ourselves. This is why we are calling on all entities and individuals involved in teacher professional learning and development to pay attention to how they are creating and sharing resources and opportunities.

We recommend that teachers be centered in their professional learning, as experts and leaders in their classrooms and communities. We met through a project with the Center for Professional Learning at Childhood Education International that adopts this approach. Quality Holistic Learning (QHL) Teacher Fellows – us – are involved in all project decisions through consultation on when, how, and why activities should be done. We learn alone or in groups and work at our own pace to fulfill our professional duties. We learn when to speed up the pace of the class and when to slow down. This learning comes from working with our students, colleagues, and other QHL fellows. We learn together through daily routines, forums, weekly Zoom/class meetings, journaling, content sharing, continuous communication by phone, WhatsApp, and email. In our shared learning, we have become a friendly village of educators across the world.

We recommend that teachers share what they learn with each other. We participate in the production of open education resources. We design these resources so they can be easily adjusted to every context, regardless of the scarcity of resources, the teaching strategies teachers already have, and the nature of learning students are used to. These shared resources are a way for teachers to enhance their strategies without having to create resources from scratch.

We recommend that students be a source of learning for teachers. We have benefited from ways to better know our students as individuals: listening to their thoughts and fears, making them feel more welcomed, and above all, building upon their assets, talents and interests to address their needs. We have developed tools, online courses, and resources to do this for teachers who live in the same context of struggle as us. The tools aim to fill in the gaps we see in our communities, classrooms, and ourselves. These include knowledge of social and emotional learning, mental health and psychosocial support, asset-based pedagogies, differentiated instruction, and other aspects of holistic pedagogies. These tools have been piloted, modified, and translated into three languages and are available in online courses and in offline workshop and handbook formats.

We advocate for more training and support in our work as educators of displaced and refugee students. We are looking for increased opportunities to learn, to lead, and to share knowledge in communities of practice with our colleagues and with students in our classrooms. We are taking control of our own professional development, adapting our teaching practices to meet students’ needs, and cultivating student talents. We are documenting our work and sharing learnings with our colleagues. For some of us, the QHL project is the first and only professional learning experience which has offered us sustained mentoring on holistic learning in displacement contexts.

We hope that through our work, we can support teachers on how to find more resources, learn more, and feel confident in the work they do with their students.

We would love to hear from you if you would like to get involved (qhlproject@ceinternational1892.org).

Disclaimer: The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this publication belong solely to the author(s) and do not necessarily represent those of REACH or the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Hadizatou Amou Ali is a language instructor in Niamey/Niger. She is also a QHL project senior fellow and an Africa ELTA mentee.

Sara Kassab is an Educational Content Developer at QITABI 2 project by World Learning in Lebanon, and a project consultant at Childhood Education International. She is pursuing her master’s degree in science education at AUB.

Yanal Moussa has been an English Language teacher in Lebanon for almost 15 years and is also a QHL project Senior fellow. She has opened her own education center to support students’ SEL and academic learning.

Vianney Mpitabavuma is a languages teacher, a refugee, a senior fellow at QHL Project, and the coordinator of the Francophone Association in Kakuma Refugee Camp, Kenya.

Sarah Dryden-Peterson