Sustaining Education in the Palestinian West Bank; East Jerusalem and Gaza

• In Event: Capacity building by non-school actors in fragile and conflict-affected situations

Proposal

Deeply rooted in history and civilization, Palestine has witnessed the emergence of three heavenly religions. Such feature has enriched the peculiarity, the holiness, and the sanctity of that place. The essence of those religions is love, tolerance, faith, peace, and hope. Yet, that part of the world had experienced wars, conflicts and atrocities in almost every phase of history, particularly in the last seven decades.
The findings reported in this paper are part of two research studies on the role and responsibilities of the educational administrators as sustainers of education system in Palestine. The first part has focused on the role of District education superintendents. The second part has also focused on the role of school principals in maintaining education. Specifically, those two research studies have empirically investigated the types of strategies, roles, and practices employed by educational administrators to keep the education system up and running in one of the most unstable contexts in the 20th century up till now.
Both studies have taken place in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza in Palestine. Driven by an overwhelming curiosity, and “a passion for learning” (Cusick, 2005), I studied the education administrators’ roles, perceptions of their roles and leadership practices employed to maintain the education system adverse of the volatile environment. In the first research my focus was on discovering the nature of a superintendent’s role in that peculiar context, how different it is from traditional leadership roles in western education systems, what kind of leadership approach do education superintendents demonstrate, what assumptions, beliefs and world views underlie their approach, and how such role is constructed within a context characterized by chronic conflict during the previous seven decades.
Similarly, In the second research I focused on the role of school principal in sustaining education in such a complicated, peculiar context. It is one of the hot spots in the world c which has suffered from wars and conflicts since almost the start of the 20th. Century, nonetheless, school principals must have different non-traditional roles with multiple tasks and extremely challenging functions where issues of conflict and instability are part of everyday norms. Yet the education system in the in that part of the world has survived and schools have continued to provide education services
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from one generation to the next. How have those education administrators been able to succeed in managing the system, and negotiate complex roles with multi- faceted and incompatible expectations? Specifically, success here means keeping the system up and running, maintaining a student enrollment of 98, 75% in basic schools, grades 1-9, and 93% in secondary schools. Success also means maintaining the infrastructures of human and non-human resources including teachers, and school buildings.
I restate that these two research projects have explored the following major questions:
• What roles do educational administrators: school principals and superintendents play to sustain the education system in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza, and how do those administrators make sense of their roles?
• What strategies, leadership beliefs, practices, and approaches do those administrators use in managing and sustaining the education system in that conflict- ridden context?
In that place of the world an educational administrator is required to put on different hats, undertake nontraditional responsibilities, in addition to building capacity, dealing with various stakeholders, and most of all be accountable for students’ academic achievement (Leithwood, 1995; Cuban 1988, 1989; Glass, 2003; Kowalski, 1999; Bjork, 2005; Sirgiovanni, 1992, 1995). In short, an educational administrator whether, a school principal or a superintendent has a very demanding, complex role. Such a role is even more demanding in unstable contexts; therefore, such studies are necessitated due to a dearth of research on educational administrator’s leadership roles in conflict-torn countries. What is lacking is knowledge and understanding of how school principals, and superintendents perform their leadership roles in an environment, situated in a fragile, turbulent context, that is the Holy Land, particularly in East Jerusalem, Gaza and the West Bank. So, the purpose of the two studies was to answer the above-mentioned questions.

Author

• Sakeena Elayan, Education Adviser, Ramallah, Palestinian West Bank