Empowering Educators: Transforming Learning For Refugee and Host Community Learners in Poland
‘Fairy tales’ (in Polish and Ukrainian): Students reimagine and share folk stories from their countries in the project ‘Grandmother’s Tales.’
By Janhvi M. Kanoria and Aishwarya Shetty
4 April 2024
In 2022, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the sudden arrival of over 182,000 Ukrainian children brought challenges that Polish teachers and schools were not prepared for. Despite the initial welcoming environment, most Ukrainian children reported feelings of alienation, stress, and language barriers.
We work in the Innovations Directorate at Education Above All (EAA) and partnered with teachers in Poland to support their work. EAA is a Qatar-based global foundation working with over 16 million children and youth in more than 60 countries towards access to high-quality education.
We conducted a rapid needs assessment that included interviews with civil society organizations working on education in Poland, Ukrainian mothers, government representatives, and members of the Ukrainian diaspora to understand how they were thinking about their teaching of refugee students. From them, we learned:
There was a need to focus on the Polish host communities and Ukrainian refugees simultaneously, as children were struggling to learn together, let alone be friends.
Educators were not prepared to support the socio-emotional needs of their refugee students. They also struggled to customize learning for two groups of children amidst differences in learning levels, styles, and curriculum, and linguistic barriers.
Teachers were especially frustrated about not being able to communicate in Ukrainian with their new students and provide them the support they need.
Most Ukrainian children used the Ukrainian Ministry of Education’s online distance learning platform but were also enrolled in Polish schools for a sense of structure and normalcy. Teachers explained that this dual enrollment meant children were not really motivated to learn in the Polish schools.
We thought of addressing some of the challenges described to us by creating ready-to-use resources for teachers, parents, and children, inspired by the tremendous success and learnings from our Internet Free Education Resource Bank. It is an open, cost-free, technology-free, and low-resource-requiring collection of engaging and interdisciplinary project and play-based learning modules that 1 million children in over 10 countries have used.
We developed the Ukraine Emergence Response Package (UERP) - a collection of project-based learning resources designed for refugee and host community children to do together. Our work is rooted in the belief that project-based learning can be a powerful pedagogical tool to foster empathy, a stronger sense of identity, and an appreciation for diversity, while also bridging academic gaps. UERP was contextualized further and implemented by a local Polish NGO, Fundacja Instytut Edukacji Pozytywnej.
Each day began with a routine, for example, saying hello in different ways at the entrance of the classroom or a circle session featuring relaxation techniques and visualization exercises. Teachers were trained to facilitate these, and they described to us how their students loved these exercises!
Next, students are drawn into a project through a fun opening activity. In one project, ‘Grandmother’s Tales’, children learn about folk stories from each other’s countries and re-invent them together. Each group, which has both Ukrainian and Polish children together, begins the project by opening a 'Mystery box'. The educator prepares different props related to popular Polish and Ukrainian folk stories, and students try to guess what the story is about. Such activities are built into UERP throughout to stimulate engagement and motivation.
Over the course of a week, they learn about characters, settings, plots, sentence structures, writing skills, and adjectives through folk stories. Students explore similarities and differences and also adapt another country’s folk tale to their own country’s setting. In the process, they are encouraged to learn common words and phrases in each other’s languages. Every project is also interspersed with related stories, mindfulness activities, and fun games.
The final product for this project is a folk story that Ukrainian and Polish students create on their own by combining elements from both cultures. Student choice and creativity are at the center of project-based learning; they present their stories as skits, puppet theaters, and drawings. Every project concludes with celebration, reflection, and peer-to-peer feedback.
Though the medium of instruction in class was Polish, UERP was printed out for students to share, in both Ukrainian and Polish. As Agata, a public school teacher, shared: “The Ukrainian version of the program ensured that Ukrainian children were not just passive spectators, but active participants. They felt secure and valued, knowing that there was something available in their own language.”
There were several such UERP projects that were brought to life in classrooms by teachers in 100 Polish public schools involving over 6,000 students. They were also implemented in five ‘Adaptation Centers’ in the city of Warsaw, which were spaces set up by Fundacja Instytut Edukacji Pozytywnej where parents and children could get social-emotional support, learn Polish, get school supplies, or even live temporarily. The quantitative and qualitative assessments included in our extensive monitoring and evaluation revealed that UERP enabled intercultural understanding and relationship-building, as reported by 95% of students and teachers. It contributed to a 50% increase in academic learning and growth, observed through baseline and endline assessments, which were aligned with Polish curricular standards. Teachers also reported feeling confident in teaching both groups of children and students in one of the Adaptation Centers even petitioned to extend the program.
From this intervention, we would like to share two key insights on how teachers can be supported in their work with refugees.
Building Curricula That Enable Teachers to Adapt to The Needs of Their Students
Teachers valued that they could immediately use UERP in the classroom and yet it was flexible enough to be modified easily for different settings. For example, we observed that some teachers implemented UERP as stand-alone modules and others integrated it with their existing lessons.
Teachers highlighted how UERP allowed them to move forward with important academic conceptual learning they were responsible for while also equipping students with life skills and addressing emotional needs.
UERP could also be implemented with varying class sizes and across different age groups because of its level-based structure; there were three levels of content, and teachers were free to use the ones that worked best for their class. It accommodates different mediums of learning (written, verbal, artwork, games, etc.) and the diverse needs of learners (academic, socio-emotional, relationship-building, motivational, etc.). We also guided them on how to simplify or make activities more challenging effectively. Furthermore, having student workbooks in both Ukrainian and Polish broke down several language barriers among peers and between Polish teachers and Ukrainian students too.
Developing Trainings That Respond to What Teachers Say They Need
We developed trainings based on guiding principles informed by teachers' concerns and contexts:
Keep it Short and simple: The trainings considered teachers’ time constraints and were easy to understand, further validated by teacher feedback. Instead of information-heavy sessions, teachers experienced projects themselves and saw how they would ease their workload and not add to it.
Provide Essential background context: We provided important details about the Ukrainian education system and talked about key considerations of working with refugee children, focusing on how this may look different from their regular teaching practices and why.
Share Tangible Action Steps: Complex theories on refugee education were condensed to actionable and immediately applicable classroom practices to concretize the teachers’ takeaways from the sessions.
Emphasize Teacher Well-Being: We prioritized sharing strategies for teachers to protect their mental well-being. We discussed compassion fatigue extensively and provided space for teachers to have honest conversations about how they felt and support each other in and out of the training.
Leverage Local Knowledge: Training sessions were reviewed, adapted, and facilitated by experienced master trainers from Poland and Ukrainian educators. The training also created space for teachers to share their own concerns and best practices.
Disclaimer: The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this publication belong solely to the authors and do not necessarily represent those of REACH or the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
ABOUT THE AUTHORs
Janhvi M. Kanoria is the Director of Innovation at Education Above All, a global foundation reaching 16 million out-of-school children. Her passion lies in designing solutions that advance quality learning solutions for the world’s most marginalized. In her previous roles in the Ministry of Education and Qatar Foundation, she was responsible for conceiving multiple creative solutions including Teach for Qatar, a national literacy and numeracy program, an innovative future school and interdisciplinary impact models for the university ecosystem. She has contributed to global publications including for OECD, World Bank, UNESCO: Future of Education, and INEE amongst others. She is an active participant in international education consortia and in platforms including in the World Bank Evoke Program, on the MIT Solve Challenge Leadership Group, as a TedX speaker, a Salzburg Global Fellow, for the WISE Awards and HundrED-spotlight jury. She serves on the board for Mantra4Change, an Indian NGO serving 50 million learners. She received a M.Ed. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania. She is the mother of two spirited young girls and enjoys classical dance, music, reading and sport in her spare time.
Aishwarya Shetty is passionate about making high-quality education accessible to all. She leads IDD’s Refugee Response for Afghan and Ukrainian refugees (including creating UERP). She specializes in content development and instructional design. Her key interest areas include education in conflict and crisis settings, early childhood development, and building resilience in education. At EAA, Aishwarya also conceptualizes and develops innovations with experts to solve under-represented challenges in the global education landscape. She is a Teach For India Alumna and led the English Literacy Wing and the Personalized Learning Program as the Senior Curriculum Manager at LEAD School, to ensure high-quality education is effectively designed and scaled for 1 million students in rural India. Aishwarya holds a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science Engineering and a Master’s degree in International Education Development from the University of Pennsylvania.