Measuring resilience’s outcomes in order to achieve them

• In Event: Keeping the Bar High: Achieving Quality Education in Conflict Contexts

Proposal

To contribute to children’s resilience and promote peace, ERSA developed a “Living Together” curriculum and a «Caring Classroom» approach. Both components are expected to have an impact on children’s resilience skills (such as empathy, self-respect, optimism, personal expression, imagination) and ability to live together (such as diversity valuation, the absence of prejudices, respect of gender equity, citizenship).

In addition to the “Living Together” curriculum and the «Caring Classroom» approach, ERSA supports the communities and schools in their efforts to make schools safer places through the construction of classrooms with separate latrines for boys and girls and community mobilization on school safety through safety assessments and security action plans. These inputs are intended to address the needs for high sense of insecurity both at school and on the way to school, revealed by the Rapid Education and Risk Assessment. Almost half of the surveyed communities reported that children are not safe at school, evoking the risk of attacks by armed groups, lack of school fences, poor infrastructure, poor sanitation, and food insecurity. Safety en route to school is also a concern due to road traffic accidents, war explosive remnants, forced enrollment in armed groups, and sexual abuse. Additional risk affecting schools include the increased social and ethnic tensions, corporal punishment, discrimination (ethnic, gender), etc.

To measure the impact of those conflict-sensitive inputs, ERSA designed a set of evaluation tools and protocols:
- To assess resilience and living together skills, ERSA designed its own child-friendly tool which is in a form of an illustrated story booklet. This tool is inspired from the “Empathy Response Task” developed by Ricard & Kamberk-Kilicci (1995) that measures child empathy, the Torrance test of creative thinking, and the “Doll test” of Kenneth Clark. It was first piloted then used to estimate the impact of ERSA’s inputs. ALP students and control children were surveyed before and after the ALP year. This quasi-experimental design enabled ERSA to estimate the average treatment effect (ATE) of gender and conflict sensitive inputs on resilience and living-together skills.
- To assess safety and well-being in PARIS centers, ERSA developed a safety and well-being framework inspired by the Quality Learning Environment developed by Save the Children. The ERSA framework uses the same four guiding principles defined by Save the Children: i) Emotional and psychological protection ii) Physical protection iii) Active learning process, child-centered teaching and learners’ engagement iv) Close collaboration between school and parents/community.

This evaluation’s efforts provided evidence on results and outcomes achieved and enabled the staff to draw recommendations to improve them.
 

Author

• Aude Vescovo, Education Development Center (EDC)