Education in conflict settings: How trauma informed education can mitigate the impact of war and displacement

• In Event: Evidence-based decision making in education
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Learning, education, and schooling in conflict settings

Proposal

Effective adaptation in the face of adversities, otherwise known as resilience, has been the subject of study for decades. Results have elucidated a variety of factors and pathways that allow individuals to adapt and effectively function despite the most egregious of challenges (Masten & Coatsworth, 1998). When exposed to the realities of emergency contexts, access to “quality”(INEE, 2010) educational infrastructures both during and after immediate exposure can be a potent protective factor that enables students to cope with and move beyond inevitable psycho-educational consequences (Stermac, Clarke, & Brown, 2013; Cohen et al.; Nicolai & Triplehorn; Mireles). The strategic role of quality educational infrastructures as protective factors in the face of such adversities is due to three unique attributes: 1) access to education as an immediate humanitarian need during crisis response phases can restore much-needed continuity, stability, and structure to environments replete with chaos; 2) continuous engagement in quality education during crisis and recovery phases can significantly reduce onset of future conflict and involvement of the young within it (INEE; Save the Children, 2008); and 3) educational infrastructures provide familiar and nonthreatening contexts for the provision of psycho-educational resources that can address the mental health needs of students.
While the fields of trauma-informed education and education in emergency contexts are starting to burgeon, there remains a disconnect between the two. Previous work has addressed the need for creating trauma-informed classrooms to mitigate the impact of personal traumatic stress exposure such as domestic violence. On such example can be gleaned from the work of the Trauma and Learning Policy Initiative in advocating for and implementing trauma-informed classrooms. However, the sociopolitical context for which the school-wide strategies are designed often fall short in meeting the unique needs of children within emergency contexts. Similarly, while humanitarian organizations have placed education at the center of their relief efforts (UNHCR, 2015), interventions often lack a robust interdisciplinary grounding in educational, psychological, and mental health theoretical and practical frameworks. The sociopolitical idiosyncrasies of emergency contexts call for the development of interventions that have universally relevant grounding with the flexibility of adaptation based on social contexts. As such, we propose the blueprint for creating a trauma-informed psycho-educational environment inspired by marrying knowledge from the fields of education, psychology, and mental health.
This blueprint expands on three phases: 1) prevention/preparation, including teacher trainings, learning tools, interdisciplinary collaboration with mental health practitioners, and physical environment; 2) intervention, including academic interventions for learning (strategies for students with externalizing behaviors/manifestations, 
i.e. hyper vigilance and irritability vs. internalizing/discreet 
behaviors/manifestations, i.e. numbing and withdrawal), and non-academic interventions (behavior management and emotion regulation); and 3) evaluation of intervention.
At the heart of this blueprint is the idea that interventions are more effective when they benefit all students, an alternative to isolating students with the most extreme levels of distress and challenges for the provision of resources. This framework creates an environment that is beneficial to students impacted by the emergency context at varying levels while maintaining a special attunement to those most vulnerable.

Author

• Zainab Hosseini, Stanford Graduate School of Education